ANKARA, 1 March 2004 — Turkey’s Muslim preachers must speak out in favor of women’s rights and condemn so-called honor killings, a government minister was quoted as saying yesterday.
“Honor killings” involve the murder of women by male relatives to defend what is regarded as family honor. They are not uncommon in Turkey’s conservative, impoverished southeast.
State Minister Mehmet Aydin made his appeal after Turkish newspapers reported the fatal shooting of a woman on Friday by her two brothers as she lay in a hospital bed in Istanbul recovering from an earlier assassination attempt.
The papers said Guldunya Toren, 22, who came from the town of Bitlis in southeast Turkey, had been killed after giving birth to a child outside wedlock a few months ago. The Vatan daily said she had been raped by her cousin.
“In the coming weeks, I think sermons will be read in the mosques on the rights of women,” the Anatolian state news agency quoted Aydin as saying.
“Our people and our laws already define the killing of people for traditional reasons (honor killings) as ‘murder’... Taking the life of another, and indeed suicide, are deemed a sin in our religion and are forbidden,” he said.
“It is not people but laws which punish the guilty,” said Aydin, who is a professor of the philosophy of religion.
In overwhelmingly Muslim but secular Turkey, a department of state writes the sermons which are read out in the mosques every Friday. Aydin, who is not responsible for the sermons, said he would urge the Religious Affairs Department to act.
The European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, and human rights groups have long urged Ankara to do much more to stamp out “honor killings” and improve its rights record.
Turkey recently revised a planned new penal code after the EU and rights groups said it failed to punish such killings in the same way as other forms of homicide.
Reports quoted a women’s organization, Ka-Mer, as saying there were currently 25 other women hiding from male relatives in Turkey after receiving death threats. Ka-Mer said women could face death simply for failing to cover their heads.
