Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
This is an old story published here for archival reasons. End notes are in the original article and are in Russian
[KavkazUzel] In a number of republics of the North Caucasus, so-called "honor killings" are widespread. Why they are called that, what are the roots of this phenomenon, which republics are subject to it - is described in the information of the "Caucasian Knot".
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PRACTICE AND TERM
The victims of "honor killings" in the Caucasus are women whose behavior was considered a disgrace to the family by their relatives. These murders are committed by relatives themselves, most often a father or brother. The term "honor killings", although common, is not entirely accurate, as it glorifies the killers, points out human rights activist Svetlana Anokhina, editor-in-chief of Daptar.ru , a women's rights website in Dagestan. (1) .
"It is terrible that such a thing as honor killing still exists in the brains of our fellow tribesmen. In fact, it makes the killer or rapist invulnerable. That is, the killer says that he committed an honor killing in order to win over the sympathy of people who might otherwise condemn him," the journalist says.
Svetlana Anokhina is sure that the term "honour killing" should be abandoned, which sounds like socially approved. “It is necessary to remove the positive connotations that justify such a murder, elevating it to the level of sacred murder, consecrated by tradition,” the human rights activist believes. (2)
HONOR KILLINGS
Honor killing is the murder of a family member committed by relatives who are convinced that the family member has caused dishonor. Disgrace, in this context, usually refers to sexual acts forbidden in a given culture: adultery, premarital sex, rape, homosexual relationships. But the reason can also be “taking rubbish out of the hut,” for example, a wife’s complaint about her husband who beats her and/or children, and even just “inappropriate behavior”, when she “sat down wrong, got up wrong, dressed wrong, looked in the wrong place and said the wrong thing.” (3)
In the opinion of residents of the North Caucasus interviewed by the Justice Initiative project, “honour” killing is a practice of rehabilitating the dignity of a family/clan by killing a person who has cast a stain on it. It is either a "punishment for violating traditional norms" or an act of purification that washes away shame, guilt, a stain of dishonor, or as an edification in order to prevent cases of "disobedience" in the future 4 .
Publicity pushes for murder: dependence on public opinion, condemnation, discussion, appeal to "ambitions". It is assumed that committing murder washes away shame. However, on the other hand, such a murder itself becomes a public confession of shame and sin by the same family/clan. (5)
THE ROOTS OF THE PHENOMENON
The traditional (patriarchal) Caucasian society still provides for collective responsibility, in every way resisting the autonomy of the individual. Each person is connected by close ties with his family, teip, village, and with his people and the republic as a whole. Women are even more vulnerable, since her whole life is maximally subordinated to men 6 .
At the same time, experts find it difficult to substantiate the source of the phenomenon of "honour killing". On the one hand, such murders existed historically, however, adats associated with the punishment for adultery, depravity, treason, immoral behavior, varying in severity, rarely led to murders. (7)
Thus, in Dagestan, the adats of the Tekhnutsal naibdom, the Andi naibdom and a number of others provided for a fine, while the adats of the Gumbet. naibdom (8) and others allowed for more severe punishment, up to murder (9)
Adat researchers in the Chechen Republic noted that there are almost no facts of fixing such a punishment in distant historical sources. In most cases, the perpetrator was forced to marry or the girl was given in marriage to an old man or a physically or mentally handicapped man. Payments, fines, compensations, expulsion from the village were widespread.
Attempts to link such killings with Islam are also untenable. First, honor killings do not appear in the traditions (hadith) about the Prophet, nor in the Qur'an. (10)
Secondly, the punishment (for example, for adultery) in accordance with Islam is passed by a judge, a Sharia court (the death penalty is provided for cheating a married woman on her husband and a married man on his wife 11 ). Moreover, the cultural roots of such killings can be traced not only in Asia, where it is practiced by Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, (12) but also in the countries of the Near and Middle East, Europe, South and North America, (13) where Christians or Yezidis also commit this. (14)
A July 2008 study by a group of Turkish scholars from Dicle University on honor killings in Southeast Anatolia found that the practice was not associated with backwardness. Of those surveyed, 60 percent are either high school or university graduates or at least literate. (15)
Therefore, the most logical is a complex of reasons associated with feelings of loss of control over social changes and the destruction of identity. In this case, the appeal to a peculiar, self-willed and distorted interpretation of traditions, religion, adats becomes a disguise (internal explanation).
CHECHNYA
At the end of November 2008, the bodies of seven young girls with traces of gunshot wounds were found in two districts of the Chechen Republic. Nurdi Nuzhiev, the Commissioner for Human Rights in Chechnya, then ambiguously stated : “Unfortunately, we have such women who have begun to forget about the code of conduct for mountain women. In relation to such women, their relatives - men, who consider themselves offended, sometimes commit lynching.
Later, Ramzan Kadyrov spoke more specifically: "According to our customs, if a woman leads a dissolute life, if she sleeps with a man, then both of them are killed.” (16) However, later at an expanded meeting of the government and heads of district and city administrations, Kadyrov said that “The actions of the killers, whoever they may be, cannot be justified by any traditions. Moreover, there are no such traditions either in the customs of the people or in Islam."
And in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda in the same year, the head of Chechnya reasoned : “A woman should know her place [...] A woman should give us love [...] A woman should be property. And a man is an owner [...] It happens: a brother killed his sister, a husband killed his wife [...] As a president, I cannot allow them to kill. So don't wear shorts."
The report of the Civic Assistance Committee and Memorial HRC in 2014 noted that in recent years, men have been cracking down on their relatives even for very slight deviations from the “norms of behavior of a Chechen girl.”
In July 2017, a report on LGBT persecution in the North Caucasus cited three stories of persecution of queer women, but noted that information about extrajudicial executions of 17 queer women from Chechnya had already been known to human rights activists before.
On December 6, 2018, the Justice Initiative published the report Killed by Gossip. Honor killings of women in the North Caucasus, which tells about the fate of women, the reasons for such killings and the factors in the preservation of this custom. There are no so-called "honor killings" in Chechnya, since there are no immoral women in the republic, - Alvi Karimov, the press secretary of the head of Chechnya, said in his turn, commenting on the report.
INGUSHETIA
At the same time, the adviser to the head of Ingushetia, Artem Perekhrist, argued that the results of the investigation of the “Legal Initiative” had no basis, since “There are no cavemen in the North Caucasus, including Ingushetia. [...] Here, hospitable people who will show their way of life and traditions will tell you that the regions of the North Caucasus are, first of all, part of a secular state that does not accept violations of human rights.” (18)
It is unlikely that he did not know about the sensational honor killing in 2010, when 24-year-old Tarkhan Ozdoev killed his cousin and her two daughters because he did not like that his relatives walk the streets with open faces, smile and communicate freely with fellow villagers. (19) By a court verdict, Ozdoev was sentenced to 12 years in prison, to be served in a strict regime correctional colony.
And a few months before Perechrist's rebuke, the court sentenced a resident of Ingushetia to eight years in prison, finding him guilty of the murder of his 31-year-old daughter. The fact that it was an "honour killing" was reported at the time by a police source.
Marem Aliyeva disappeared without a trace in September 2015. In December 2015, a murder case was initiated against unidentified persons (Part 1, Article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). In September 2017, the European Court of Human Rights communicated a complaint about the ineffective investigation into Aliyeva's disappearance filed by her sister Elizaveta Aliyeva. On September 25, 2019, it became known that the ECHR combined the complaint of Elizaveta Aliyeva about her abduction with the complaint about the murder of her sister.
On February 7, 2020, Isa Altemirov, suspected of extorting money from women under the threat of distributing a defamatory video, died during arrest by jumping from the fifth floor. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Ingushetia, a 36-year-old resident of Ekazhevo, a 23-year-old native of a neighboring republic and a 33-year-old resident of Magas were in the apartment at that moment. The footage was posted online. The woman caught in the frame was killed the next day . Her brother confessed to the murder. According to the man, the sister dishonored the honor of the family.
DAGESTAN
On January 17, 2020, the Makhachkala garrison military court sentenced a resident of Dagestan to 9.5 years in a strict regime colony for the murder of his half-sister . The court found that he had fatally stabbed her when he was at a relative's house. The convict himself stated that the girl did not obey him, went to Makhachkala and did not want to get married.
In general, experts in Dagestan note that honor killings in Dagestan are rare, but not exceptional . At the same time, it is impossible to assess its scale and dynamics due to the lack of statistics. And there is no exact statistics of such murders, since such crimes are not recorded or are generally hidden.
TABOO
The Justice Initiative study identified 33 cases of honor killings between 2012 and 2017. 22 cases were found in Dagestan, two in Ingushetia and nine in Chechnya. In total, 39 people were killed during this time, of which 36 were women and three were men. In three cases, the victims were two - a man and a woman; in one case, three women were killed and in another case, two. It is noted that the actual number of such murders is much higher than documented in the study. Analyzing the materials of interviews with respondents and experts, the authors conclude that the topic of “honour” killings is extremely taboo and closed to wide discussion. (20)
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