Price of Freedom, in Blood

When Fadime Sahindal told police her life had been threatened, they gave her an alarm system. When she approached politicians for help, they told her to make peace with her parents.

And when she appealed in television interviews for aid in escaping a death sentence imposed by her father after she refused an arranged marriage, she provoked sympathy among Swedes--whose more liberal outlook she shared--but little willingness to get involved in a family matter.

Now that she’s dead, shot in the head by her father, the 26-year-old victim of an “honor killing” is drawing attention to the cultural double standards she battled during the last four years of her life.

Neither the first nor likely the last immigrant daughter to shame her hidebound clan simply by acting Swedish, Sahindal has become a martyr among women who came to this liberal country from patriarchal cultures. Her death was a warning to officials that they ignore at great peril the dangers of not integrating immigrant communities.

Although Sahindal’s father, Rahmi, came to Sweden from Turkey 20 years ago, he still was guided more by pressure from his Kurdish clansmen than by the rule of law or love for his daughter. When Fadime braved a visit to her mother and sister Jan. 21 in the clan stronghold in Uppsala, about 40 miles north of Stockholm, her father got wind of it.

Police say Rahmi, who is in jail awaiting trial, told them he felt he had no choice but to make good on his vow to kill her.

No comprehensive statistics exist to show the extent of such honor killings here and elsewhere in Scandinavia, where whole communities of Kurds and other Muslim groups have found refuge. But although such slayings are believed to be infrequent, Sahindal’s death has exposed the region’s failure to integrate immigrants, with their often fundamentally different values, into these societies. Having long looked the other way when religious and cultural clashes came to public attention, Swedes are pondering what more they could and should have done.

“The message this should send to Swedish people, especially the Social Democrats who have been in power for 40 years, is that the system isn’t working,” said Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, a former government advisor on integration affairs whose Kurdish family came to Sweden from eastern Turkey when she was 7.

She accuses authorities of arrogance in their view that certain rights and freedoms accorded Nordic residents, such as gender equality and protection from forced marriage, are not necessarily applicable to immigrants.

“Fadime’s brother told police that honor killing is part of our culture. But most Kurds don’t believe that,” said the 33-year-old activist, wife, mother and recording industry executive. “There is a package you buy when you come to Sweden, and that should include respect for the law.”

Immigrants have been coming to Sweden in increasing numbers in the last decade to fill a persistent labor shortage. They also take advantage of the country’s liberal asylum policy, which grants refuge from the conflicts occurring in many of the immigrants’ homelands.

But institutional flaws--such as the two years on average that it takes to get a decision on asylum requests--encourage those waiting for permanent refuge to band together in bleak housing projects in what amounts to self-imposed segregation while awaiting the right to citizenship and work.

At least 15% of Sweden’s 9 million residents are non-Nordic and heavily concentrated in volatile ghettos of Somalis, Kurds, Bosnians and dozens of other ethnic groups. Scandinavia’s liberal values curry little favor in many of those quarters.

“There are places just outside of Stockholm where the entire population is foreign. These people aren’t living in Sweden at all,” said Keya Izol, head of the Federation of Kurdish Assns. in Sweden, referring to towns and suburbs such as Botkyrka, a 30-minute drive from central Stockholm.

Generation Gap

“It is a mistake to have too many people from the same town or village or clan together,” Izol added. “It is the habit of exiles to want to protect their way of life, and in such places they hear no Swedish, they see no Swedish television and they have no jobs that bring them in contact with Swedish people.”

A 1995 reform of laws on refugees and immigration has worsened the situation, Izol said, by focusing training and jobs on the younger generation, causing strains within families as well as between immigrants and Swedes.

“We have been too slow to integrate the older generation and too fast in integrating the younger ones,” former Danish Justice Minister Erling Olsen said of the Scandinavian countries, which are all experiencing social pressures amid recent immigration.

“We in Denmark have tended to ignore incidents in the immigrant communities that contradict our own understanding of human rights, but we have a responsibility to ensure our values are respected,” he added. Some arranged marriages between young immigrant women and men in their homelands are tantamount to illegal visa sales, he said, as the grooms are then eligible for family reunification, immigrant aid and a speedier path to Danish citizenship.

National Outcry

Nalin Pekgul, a Social Democratic legislator of Kurdish origin in Sweden, shares the revulsion over Sahindal’s killing but cautions against interpreting an act of criminal extremism as typical of fundamentalist immigrants.

“Sweden has done a better job than most countries with integration, which is why this case has caused such strong reaction,” Pekgul said. Other governments simply avert their eyes when immigrant girls and women are shipped home, where they face possible death, she said.

“People ask if the Swedish government could have prevented this killing. I say no, but the Kurds in Uppsala could have prevented it,” Pekgul said, blaming backwardness and illiteracy for creating an atmosphere in which patriarchs are held in disgrace when their wives or daughters embrace Swedish culture.

As a figure of respect in Sweden’s 40,000-strong Kurdish community, Pekgul tried to intervene on Sahindal’s behalf. The young woman had given interviews to Swedish media about the death threats from her father and brother, Masud, a level of defiance that Pekgul feared was only enhancing the danger.

The lawmaker negotiated a compromise in 1998 by which Sahindal agreed to stay away from Uppsala and her father promised not to stalk her outside their hometown while she was living in seclusion near Stockholm.

In recent years, Sahindal had been pursuing a sociology degree and become an outspoken advocate of the opportunities Nordic immigration presented for women from fundamentalist backgrounds.

She braved the fatal visit to her mother and sister to say farewell ahead of her departure for Kenya, where she was to spend this year writing her master’s thesis. Her sister is mentally disabled and suffered Sahindal’s long absence in sadness and confusion, say friends trying to explain what might appear a reckless action. Attractive and Westernized in her dress and demeanor, Sahindal apparently was spotted upon arrival in Uppsala by someone in her father’s entourage.

Pekgul said Sahindal underestimated the danger of clan mentality.

“People who come to such a level of despair that they can kill must feel cornered in this society,” said Annick Sjogren, a sociologist directing an integration program in Botkyrka, where more than 80% of the 30,000 residents are immigrants and refugees.

“They aren’t used to women being equal to men or nakedness being taken as natural instead of sexual or the idea that you can choose your own partner. They get scared and become defensive and much more fundamentalist than they would be at home.”

Sjogren and Aina Bigestans, her colleague at the Multicultural Development Center, defend the notion of honoring cultural practices, including arranged marriage, more strongly than is popular in the wake of Sahindal’s killing.

Recalling a recent conversation with an Indian friend, Bigestans said she was compelled to agree that a marriage arranged by caring parents with an offspring’s best interests in mind might be seen as more “rational” than partnerships forged in the delirium of young love.

Women’s advocacy groups concede that there are profound contradictions in the way Swedes, and Scandinavians in general, balance tolerance of ethnic traditions with a commitment to human rights.

“Fadime was a role model for young women in this society. She was beautiful and intelligent and brave and spoke perfect Swedish,” said Angela Beausang, chairwoman of the National Organization of Battered Women’s Shelters in Sweden. “But now she stands as a scary example. The message from her killing is that this could happen to you too.”

But Beausang believes Sahindal’s death has forced Swedes of all backgrounds to examine their behavior and values and discuss what kind of multicultural society they should be working toward.

If any good is to come of the slaying, Beausang said, laws and practices that reflect a double standard must be changed to prevent such honor killings.

Law Bows to Tradition

Swedish law allows girls from immigrant families to marry as young as 15, while marriage for Swedish citizens is permitted only at 18 or older. That de facto bow to immigrant cultural practice is expected to be legislated out of existence as momentum gathers in a national campaign to prevent forced marriage.

Sahindal was not the first case of honor killing to come to national attention. Three years ago, during a visit with family members to her Kurdish homeland in Iraq, 19-year-old Pela Atroshi was shot in the head by her uncle on the orders of her father and brother for having refused to marry a cousin. A few months earlier, here in Sweden, she had been scalded with boiling water and denounced by her clan.

The uncle received a one-year sentence in Iraq for an action that was viewed there with greater acceptance. Atroshi’s sister, now in hiding, gave testimony to Swedish prosecutors, which led to the three men’s conviction and sentencing to terms upward of 15 years when they returned last year to Sweden, said an activist familiar with her case.

Sara Mohammad, a 34-year-old Iraqi Kurd who changed her name after immigrating here eight years ago to avoid creating problems for her family back home, estimates that there are 30 to 40 young women in Sweden hiding from male relatives who have vowed to kill them.

Clash of Values

Mohammad, an outspoken activist and founder of Never Forget Pela, a movement to empower Muslim women, accuses Swedes of misguided liberalism in their tolerance of immigrant behavior that would be considered repressive among Nordic peoples.

“The Swedish government is to blame because they respect the culture and religion of immigrants but not the people themselves or their basic human rights,” Mohammad said. “This isn’t about religious freedoms in Sweden, but about religious values clashing with women’s and children’s rights. It’s not about Swedish culture, but about human values and norms.”

Mohammad’s group, to be renamed Never Forget Pela and Fadime, plans a memorial gathering Friday on International Women’s Day to raise awareness about the dangers facing immigrant women.

She has sent a list of demands for legislative change to Mona Sahlin, the government official in charge of integration policy. They include support for raising the minimum age for marriage to 18 for all women, advisory sessions for new arrivals on the vast differences in gender relations they will encounter and must respect, prohibition of head scarves or veils for girls under 16, and equal opportunity in all aspects of education. (Parents from conservative religious backgrounds currently can opt to remove their children from sex education classes, swimming and other coeducational sports, and field trips.)

While her compatriots across the ethnic spectrum lament her death and the social ills it exposes, Sahindal had the last word in her familial clash of cultures. Aware of the risks she faced, she told friends she wanted to be buried in the graveyard of Uppsala’s Lutheran cathedral--alongside her Swedish boyfriend, Patrik Lindesjo, who was killed in a car crash in June 1998. Six young female friends carried her coffin.