On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed on her way to a
bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof by several shots to the head and upper body, fired
at point-blank range. The investigation revealed that months before, she
reported one of her brothers to the police for threatening her. Now three of her
five brothers are on trial for murder. According to the prosecutor, the oldest
of them (25) acquired the weapon, the middle brother (24) lured his sister to
the scene of the crime and the youngest (18) shot her. The trial began on Sept.
21. Ayhan Surucu, the youngest brother, had confessed to the murder and claimed
that he had done it without any help. According to Seyran Ates, a lawyer of
Turkish descent, it is generally the youngest who are chosen by the family
council to carry out such murders – or to claim responsibility for them. German
juvenile law sets a maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment for murder, and
the offender has the prospect of being released after serving two-thirds of the
sentence.
Hatun Surucu grew up in Berlin as the daughter of Turkish Kurds. When she
finished eighth grade, her parents took her out of school. Shortly after that
she was taken to Turkey and married to a cousin. Later she separated from her
husband and returned to Berlin, pregnant. At age 17 she gave birth to a son,
Can. She moved into a women’s shelter and completed the work for her
middle-school certificate. By 2004 she had finished a vocational-training
program to become an electrician. The young mother who had escaped her family’s
constraints began to enjoy herself. She put on makeup, wore her hair unbound,
went dancing and adorned herself with rings, necklaces and bracelets. Then, just
days before she was to receive her journeyman’s diploma, her life was cut
short.
Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu’s capital crime was
that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German. In a statement to
the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted that she had stopped wearing her
head scarf, that she refused to go back to her family and that she had declared
her intent to “seek out her own circle of friends.” It’s still unclear whether
anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family
who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal practice
cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry
forcing the same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author
who has interviewed dozens of women on this topic, explained, “The mothers are
looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same
hardship and suffering.” By disobeying them, the daughter calls into question
her mother’s life – her silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage.
Meanwhile, the two elder brothers have papered their cell with pictures of their
dead sister.
here is a new wall rising in the city of Berlin. To cross this wall
you have to go to the city’s central and northern districts – to Kreuzberg,
Neukölln and Wedding – and you will find yourself in a world unknown to the
majority of Berliners. Until recently, most Berliners held to the illusion that
living together with some 300,000 Muslim immigrants and children of immigrants
was basically working. Take Neukölln. The district is proud of the fact that it
houses citizens of 165 nations. Some 40 percent of these, by far the largest
group, are Turks and Kurds; the second-largest group consists of Arabs. Racially
motivated attacks occur regularly in Brandenburg, the former East German state
that surrounds Berlin, where foreigners are few (about 2 percent). But such
attacks hardly ever happen in Neukölln. As Stefanie Vogelsang, a councilwoman
from Neukölln, put it to me, residents talk about “our Turks” in an unmistakably
friendly way, although they are less friendly when it comes to Arabs, who
arrived decades after the Turks and often illegally.
But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to change in the aftermath of Sept.
11, 2001. Parallel to the declarations of “unconditional solidarity” with
Americans by the German majority, rallies of another sort were taking place in
Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Bottle rockets were set off from building courtyards: a
poor man’s fireworks, sporadic, sparse and joyful; two rockets here, three
rockets there. Still, altogether, hundreds of rockets were shooting skyward in
celebration of the attack, just as most Berliners were searching for words to
express their horror. For many German residents in Neukölln and Kreuzberg,
Vogelsang recalled not long ago, that was the first time they stopped to wonder
who their neighbors really were.
When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel Muslim
world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female authors,
three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to practicing law is
the author of “The Great Journey Into the Fire”; Necla Kelek (“The Foreign
Bride”); and Serap Cileli (“We’re Your Daughters, Not Your Honor”). About the
same age, all three grew up in Germany; they speak German better than many
Germans and are educated and successful. But they each had to risk much for
their freedom; two of them narrowly escaped Hatun Surucu’s fate. Necla Kelek was
threatened by her father with a hatchet when she refused to greet him in a
respectful manner when he came home. Seyran Ates was lucky to survive a shooting
attack on the women’s shelter that she founded in Kreuzberg. And Serap Cileli,
when she was 13 years old, tried to kill herself to escape her first forced
marriage; later she was taken to Turkey and married against her will, then she
returned to Germany with two children from this marriage and took refuge in a
women’s shelter to escape her father’s violence. Taking off from their own
experiences, the three women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women
in that model Western democracy known as Germany.
Reading their books brought to mind a forgotten scene from seven years ago.
Every time my daughter, who was 14 at the time, invited her schoolmates for a
sleepover, the Muslim fathers would be standing at the door at 10 p.m. to pick
up their daughters. My wife, an immigrant herself, was indignant. I didn’t like
these fathers’ dismissive, almost threatening posture, either, but I was a long
way from protesting. Nor did I worry much when my daughter told me that one or
another girl in her class was not taking biology or physical education and no
longer going on field trips.
For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past was
the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our highly
questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from occasional
newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim girls in
Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a trace. Even those
reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in our upscale district of
Charlottenburg.
But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like me
didn’t care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They describe
an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal corporal
punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for which there is
only one word: slavery.
Seyran Ates estimates that perhaps half of young Turkish women living in
Germany are forced into marriage every year. In the wake of these forced
marriages often come violence and rape; the bride has no choice but to fulfill
the duties of the marriage arranged by her parents and her in-laws. One
side-effect of forced marriage is the psychological violation of the men
involved. Although they are the presumed beneficiaries of this custom, men are
likewise forbidden to marry whom they want. A groom who chooses his own wife
faces threats, too. In such cases, according to Seyran Ates and Serap Cileli,
the groom as well as the bride must go underground to escape the families’
revenge.
Heavily veiled women wearing long coats even in summer are becoming an
increasingly familiar sight in German Muslim neighborhoods. According to Necla
Kelek’s research, they are mostly under-age girls who have been bought – often
for a handsome payment – in the Turkish heartland villages of Anatolia by
mothers whose sons in Germany are ready to marry. The girls are then flown to
Germany, and “with every new imported bride,” Kelek says, “the parallel society
grows.” Meanwhile, Ates summarizes, “Turkish men who wish to marry and live by
Shariah can do so with far less impediment in Berlin than in Istanbul.”
Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the
Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There
have been 49 known “honor crimes,” most involving female victims, during the
past nine years – 16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the
“miscellaneous” column along with other family tragedies and given a five-line
treatment. Indeed, it’s possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never would
have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news that stirred up the
press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was killed, at the Thomas
Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly declared their approval of
the murder. Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a fellow pupil
because her clothing was “not in keeping with the religious regulations.” Volker
Steffens, the school’s director, decided to make the matter public in a letter
to students, parents and teachers. More than anything else, it was the students’
open praise of the murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of
Berlin and soon of all Germany.
During 50 years of continuing immigration, the Germans, most of the time
under conservative governments, deluded themselves that Germany was not a
country of immigrants. Suddenly, the obvious could no longer be denied. Alarmed
by the honor killings, Germans began to investigate the parallel society: a
society proud of its isolation; purist and traditional yet, in its own terms,
creative, forward-looking and often contemptuous of the German host society. The
recent riots in France have increased the sense of alarm. German politicians and
experts lined up in the news media to point out why such riots are unlikely in
Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart or Hamburg. They claimed that young Muslims in Germany
(although up to 50 percent of them are unemployed) had full access to the German
welfare state and were not isolated in high-rise projects as in the suburbs of
Paris. True, there were some cars set on fire in Berlin, but such incidents were
interpreted as purely imitation crimes, nothing to be taken seriously. Yet in
all these official declarations you sensed an undertone of panic. Germans’
confidence that their nation can continue as it had been – integrating
immigrants without an integration policy, remaining true to the traditional
German identity, preserving the reassuring post-1945 chronology of advancing
modernism – is on the line. It turns out that in the heart of German cities a
society is growing up that turns modernity on its head.
How could this happen? The Turkish writer Aras Oren, who has been living in
Berlin for 40 years, once told me about one of his first plane trips from
Istanbul to Berlin. He was sitting next to a farmer from Anatolia, who had
evidently never been in an airplane before. The man had no idea what to make of
the seat belt, the overhead warning lights, the tray table – nor did he
understand his neighbors’ explanations. When Oren saw him sitting there, in his
sandals, with his cap on his head and his prayer beads between his thick
fingers, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that his fellow countryman
was enclosed in an invisible time capsule he wasn’t going to leave even after he
landed in Germany. It made no difference whether the man was traveling to
Istanbul or to Berlin. This farmer had never seen a city; he was living in the
18th or 19th century and would carry the customs and rites of his homeland with
him to his living room in Berlin. And he would cling to them doggedly if the
Western democracy where he was living and working did not make a determined
effort to acquaint him with its rules and laws. For decades, Oren has been
preaching that it has never been so much a question of multicultural sensitivity
as of turning peasants into city dwellers.
After 1945, Germany, in the process of reconstruction, needed great numbers
of workers and initiated recruitment campaigns in the poor countries of Europe
and on the Mediterranean rim: in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia and
Morocco. The arrival of the 100,000th immigrant worker, in the 1950’s, was cause
for celebration; the exhausted man climbed out of a train at a German station
and was immediately handed a check. But from the beginning, the invitation came
with a certain reservation on the part of the host and the proviso, often
repeated, that Germany was not really a country of immigrants, not a melting
pot. It was no accident that the foreign workers were called gastarbeiter, guest
workers. Guests are expected to leave after a while.
The first Muslim immigrants came without their families. They slaved away
repairing streets or working below ground, generally slept in men-only
dormitories and for the most part had the same expectations for themselves as
their employers had for them: they would work for a few years, send as much of
their earnings home as possible and then, if all went well, drive back to their
villages in a used Mercedes with enough capital to buy a house.
Naturally, things did not work out as expected. The Swiss author Max Frisch
recognized the contradiction early on: “Workers were called,” he wrote, “and
human beings came.” These were people who wanted their families to join them,
people who after a long, hard working life wanted to spend their remaining years
in Germany, people who wished to provide their children with an education and a
better future in that country. Germany did not give guest workers passports or
the vote, but it did repay them by incorporating them into the social system and
giving them the opportunity for social advancement. A result was the rise of a
Muslim middle class – relatively broad in comparison with those in France or in
England – contributing around 39 billion euros annually to the gross national
product and billions to the national pension funds. But as the German economic
miracle came to an end, the most important condition of this precarious idyll
changed. Although active recruitment was stopped as early as 1973, more and more
Turks and Kurds moved to Germany, in accord with a ruling on reuniting families.
And these parents, wives, husbands and children took their traditional lifestyle
onto the German streets. Whereas during the first years of immigration, Turkish
women wore Western clothing, they now appeared in long flowery skirts,
hand-knitted jackets and tightly bound head scarves. The plastic trunks in which
they had brought sacks full of dry beans, bulgur wheat and chickpeas
metamorphosed into Turkish grocery stands. And with the food and the family
members, traditional celebrations in the Muslim districts gradually became more
and more like those back home as well. In the back rooms of the vegetable stands
and halal butchers, prayer rooms sprang up, and in time these rooms became
mosques. The German-Turkish author Necla Kelek sums it up this way in “The
Foreign Bride”: “The guest workers turned into Turks, and the Turks turned into
Muslims.”
Growing unemployment in Germany (now 4.8 million people, roughly 12 percent
of the work force) hit the Muslim immigrants doubly hard – especially the youth,
who frequently drop out of school before obtaining a diploma. “Seventy percent
of the newcomers,” according to Otto Schily, a former minister of the interior,
referring to the period since 2002, “land on welfare the day of their arrival.”
Whole enclaves sprang up consisting of extended families living on the dole.
Necla Kelek asked a group of “import brides” who had been living in Germany
for years how they had actually prepared for their future in Germany. Their
answer: incredulous laughter. Prepare? How and for what? “But how can you stand
living here?” Necla Kelek went on. “You don’t have anything to do with this
country, you despise its culture and the way people live here.” But we have
everything we need here, was the answer; we don’t need the Germans.
Those with no work and no future were looked after by the mosques, which
increasingly became the most important place of communication. Inside their
apartments, women resumed their traditional ways – apart from the “unclean” who
ate pork, drank beer and let their daughters go unchallenged to parties and
discos. Amid the German refrigerators, televisions and mobile phones, a rural
culture was celebrating its resurrection, where Turkish was spoken, where people
ate, prayed, fasted and celebrated according to custom, and where the
surrounding local culture of unbelievers and the unclean was looked down upon.
The riddle of the time capsule brought up by Aras Oren came to an unexpected
solution. Some hundred thousand Muslim immigrants were able to take up, in
Germany, the life of their ancestors in Anatolia. Indeed, maybe life in Anatolia
was meanwhile more modern and secular than in the Muslim districts of Berlin.
Many sociologists attribute the growth of a Muslim parallel society to
the discouraging social circumstances of the third Muslim generation of
immigrants – high unemployment, high dropout or failure rates in public schools.
But this explanation is incomplete, to say the least. It turns out that the
Muslim middle class has long been following the same trend. Rental agencies that
procure and prepare rooms for traditional Turkish weddings and circumcisions are
among the most booming businesses in Kreuzberg and Neukölln.
Cem Ozdemir, a German deputy (of Turkish origin) to the European Parliament,
tells two different stories concerning ritual circumcision. He himself grew up
in the south of Germany; his own circumcision three decades ago was an absolute
nightmare. It took place in a gymnasium, where six boys between 4 and 9 years
old lay stretched out in six beds, and was performed by the local Turkish
doctor, who took his instruments out of the tool case he’d brought along and
started cutting away. He made a wrong cut on Ozdemir and sewed up the wound
after the local anesthetic had worn off. To drown the child’s deafening cries, a
Turkish band started up with traditional music, and relatives danced in honor of
the circumcised.
More recently – in other words, some 30 years later – Ozdemir took part in
another, more modern type of circumcision, this time as a godfather. The parents
had the operation performed by a doctor in a hospital. There was no ritual, and
the patient went home the same day. Some days later, when the boy was fully
recovered, the parents gave a party that, as Ozdemir explains, “really was for
the circumcised, and not for the relatives.” All the participants, the boy
included, enjoyed themselves.
For Ozdemir, the difference in these two stories showed that Muslim
immigrants can hold onto their rituals by transforming and modernizing them. But
there is a third story unfolding today in the rented halls of Kreuzberg and
Neukölln, a story that emphasizes separateness and a communal rejection of
compromise. The technical standard of the circumcision might be of the highest
order, but it will have to happen in the presence of family and friends. The
father of the circumcised might carry a German passport and run a successful
company; but he will also worry about how his son’s circumcision is judged by
his friends and neighbors.
his conservative, fearful trend is likely to guide the next
generation. For more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella
organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has struggled in
the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local schools. In
2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several thousand Muslim
elementary-school students have been taught by teachers hired by the Islamic
Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City officials aren’t in a position
to control Islamic religious instruction. Often the teaching does not correspond
to the lesson plan that was submitted in German. Citing the linguistic
deficiencies of the students, instructors frequently hold lessons in Turkish or
Arabic, often behind closed doors.
Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of girls
that come to school in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and school
offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming and sports as
well as class outings.
There are no reliable figures showing how many Muslims living in Germany
regularly attend a mosque; the estimates vary between 40 and 50 percent.
Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the majority of the mosques in
Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were, and that they continue to
address the needs of integration. But the radical religious communities are
gaining ground. She points to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance, whose home
page – until a recent revision – praised the attacks of Sept. 11, designated
women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and lesbians as animals.
“And that kind of thing,” she says, fuming, “is still defended by the left in
the name of religious freedom.”
This is the least expected provocation of the three author rebels: a frontal
assault on the relativism of the majority society. In fact, they are fighting on
two fronts – against Islamist oppression of women and its proponents, and
against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. “Before I can
get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to work my way through these
mountains of German guilt,” Seyran Ates complains.
It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The three
authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in
Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked behind the
closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts.
German immigration policies (and liberal multiculturalism) are only one side
of the problem. The other side is the active refusal of many in the Muslim
community to integrate. It is an illusion to believe that a German – or French
or Dutch – passport and full rights of citizenship are enough to make all
Muslims loyal citizens. “The attacks in London,” Seyran Ates says, “were in the
eyes of many Muslims a successful slap in the face to the Western community. The
next perpetrators will be children of the third and fourth immigrant generation,
who – under the eyes of well-meaning politicians – will be brought up from birth
to hate Western society.” It’s only a question of time, Ates says, before Berlin
experiences attacks like those in London and Madrid. When we spoke, the riots in
France had not yet happened.
It is encouraging that some Muslim residents of Germany are forcefully
calling on Germans to defend our democratic achievements against Muslim
traditionalists and fanatics who incite hatred of democracy under the banner of
respect for cultural difference. “What I am asking of the Germans,” Necla Kelek
says, “is nothing more and nothing less than equal treatment. I’m entitled to
the same rights as any German woman.”
Merely citing “lessons from the German past,” as Germans tend to do, does not
guarantee that these lessons are correct. It is a perversion when, out of
respect for the “otherness” of a different culture, Germans stand aside and
accept the fact that Muslim women in Germany are being subjected to an archaic
code of honor that flouts the fundamental human rights to dignity and individual
freedom. This has nothing to do with Germany or the “guiding German culture”
that German conservatives want to put through; it has simply to do with
humanity, with the protection of basic human and civil rights for all citizens
of all ethnic backgrounds.
Politicians and religious scholars of all faiths are right in pointing out
that there are many varieties of Islam, that Islamism and Islam should not be
confused, that there is no line in the Koran that would justify murder. But the
assertion that radical Islamic fundamentalism and Islam have nothing to do with
each other is like asserting that there was no link between Stalinism and
Communism. The fact is that disregard for women’s rights – especially the right
to sexual self-determination – is an integral component of almost all Islamic
societies, including those in the West. Unless this issue is solved, with a
corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the West, there will never be a
successful acculturation. Islam needs something like an Enlightenment; and only
by sticking hard to their own Enlightenment, with its separation of religion and
state, can the Western democracies persuade their Muslim residents that human
rights are universally valid. Perhaps this would lead to the reforms necessary
for integration to succeed. “We Western Muslim women,” Seyran Ates says, “will
set off the reform of traditional Islam, because we are its
victims.”
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Women
Political Rights
Child
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Source: https://service.spiegel.de/
Via Network of East-West Women
In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have
been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, The shots came from Hatin’s crime, it appears, was the desire The crime might be easier to digest if it had been ___________________________________________________________________________________
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