Yesterday, I attended one of the events of the campaign of combating violence against women launched by the United Nations Organization in Romania. I had written about the campaign at its inception, but it was only yesterday that I got to see two movies of the campaign. They were both part of a wider UN campaign titled “Women in the Frontline”, with Annie Lennox as front cover. The first of the films I saw explored one of the many forms of violence against women, namely human trafficking. Viewers were confronted with the bleak realities of Nepal, were thousands of women are smuggled overborder in Indian brothels, by their brothers, fathers or husbands, sold and turned into prostitutes, ostracized in their home communities, and all these happening sometimes to girls as young as 10 years of age. With incredible levels of poverty and virtually no way of feeding their children, women are simply trapped in a society that has found very few solutions to breaking the poverty cycle.
However, for me as an European the second film showed yesterday – portraying the situation of women in Turkey – was the one that really had me going. Apparently, in South-Eastern Turkey women are still brutally killed by their closesest male relatives in the name of honour. Dressed in black, they are taken in remote places of the village, shot at or simply stoned to death by their fathers and brothers. Because of European Union pressures, Turkey has modified its penal code and increased sentences for crimes of honour to life imprisonment (until 2001, evoking the family’s honour was a circumstance that could reduce one’s conviction in front of the court). However, 40% of men in rural areas are still supporting honour killings, which indicates that legislative measures were not supplemented in any way by cultural and educational changes. I’ve always spoken not necessarily against Turkey’s accession in the European Union (I am not against enlargement per se), but I’ve always warned that Turkey still has unsettled issues that will remain unsettled for a long time. However, I was simply baffled by yesterday’s movie. Really now, how can the Turkish government pretend Turkey is a modern, 21st century Westernized country? And by this, please don’t understand less terrible phenomena occur in Western Europe…
How can Turkey pretend is modern because the cultural “backwards” behavior of their minority groups KURDISH!(because the movie doesn’t emphasise the fact that those areas where this acts are still happening -Batman, Diarbakir, Urfa, Mardin, etc are populated by at least 90-95% hurdish.
Well how did Romania managed to be a modern country even if inside of Roma people communities arranged marriage of young children (12-13 years old) are still happening?
WE did it…they do it…
In fact we know and we should confess that this doesn’t reflect the whole country and population.
I tend to agree with you… As I said towards the end of my entry, atrocious violences occur everywhere in the world, including in so-called Westernized countries. However, you have to admit this is not the only case of human rights violations that occurs in Turkey (let’s just consider their track record in front of the ECHR on property torts and other similar issues). As for Romania and Roma communities, from what I read about this situation and from some talks I’ve had with Roma people, it seems these situations occur in really isolated communities and that the custom is more complex than portrayed by the media. Which is not to say it is not a terribly negative phenomenon…