Honor Murder: The Witness
Break or through. There's only that. Breaking has tried it, it did not work. Just did not go. Even though she sometimes thought it was time to catch a knife or cower in a hidden apartment, like dead. But Nourig Apfeld, 38, remained alive. She says there was something in her. "The belief in something strong, the core of my being. It was only spilled sometimes. "
"I said, what if he killed somebody, the police checked, I told everything"
So it happens that, after a long conversation at a kitchen table in an apartment in the big city where she lives, one almost thinks, what's the point, it can not be so unbearable, if possible to endure, such a life: Nourig Apfeld witnessed the "honor murder" at her younger sister, committed by the father and two cousins. She was silent for eight years until it broke out of her, two years ago she said in a spectacular process in Bonn. She had to go underground, out of fear of the family, without witness protection, which the police actually wanted to grant her. She lived hidden for three years. This could all be everyday? No. With all the courage and the will to survive. So who does that? Who survives that? As?
Nourig Apfeld from Bonn, the oldest daughter of Syrian-Kurdish immigrants, since 1979 in this country, is a small, beautiful woman with high cheekbones and very dark eyes that look a long and direct. Sometimes she uses sentences that sound a bit too complete. She says it quickly, in a fluttering voice, but definitely. She says, "It's good, I've made my peace with it, I'm even grateful ..." And because she never gets vulgar, she does not say: thankful for all the shit, she says "for the circumstances". You can react to circumstances; Shit means: Anger over a disgusting fate. "And rage," says Nourig Apfeld, "that's long gone."
She lives in public again. She shows her face, on the cover of the book * that she has just written, and the cameras, also of the ChroniquesDuVasteMonde photographer: present and without timidity. She wonders that she can do it "Another sign," she says, "that my fears are gone."
Her story is supposed to make a difference, so she makes it public. She wants to show the women that one can go, leave the collective. That one does not have to be silent, just because the family wants it that way. And she wants to show what false cultural tolerance can do. For if the Youth Welfare had interfered in her family, back in the late '80s, when her sister desperately tried to get her out, "then," says Nourig Apfeld, looking with her calm, persistent gaze, "Waffa would still be alive." But the clerks believed the lies of the father, his daughters were not beaten at home, and called the conflict ethnically and religiously conditioned. As if beatings for Allah were not a violation of children's rights.
Nourig Apfeld shows her face again - after years of dread
Nourig Apfeld's family story is read like a thriller, stunned, that such a life can really exist, in Bonn, around the corner. One reads how an initially immigrant immigrant family increasingly threatened - the father incited by radical men in his clan, the mother lonely, full of fear and shame and longing and finally lost in depressed violence.
The beatings of the mother mark Nourig's childhood; Cassettes that the relatives have discussed and send from the Syrian homeland are the sound of it. The mother hears her constantly: admonitions not to fail in the West to educate the children traditionally. The mother uses for it the fist, the flat hand, objects. She strikes when the daughters eat a pork sausage at a school festival. Fights Nourig on the day of her first period of shame, until she lies on the ground in front of her. Nourig takes refuge in the culture of the country in which she lives: she goes to high school, to the theater, reads Böll and Hesse. She wants to be German, her sister just wants to get out. Waffa steals money, stays away at night. She angry and radical, Nourig her counterweight.
She feels guilty about the decay of the family, she says, "I had been trained from an early age, I always felt that everyone in the family was not viable, I was the manager, I was responsible for all their problems."
After the mother's death in 1992, Kaan, as Nourig calls him in the book, takes over the regiment. A cousin who came from Syria two years earlier, ready for violence in the name of honor, that's how she describes him.Kaan stirs up the family against Waffa and gets the father to take her to a relatives family in Turkey and forcibly marry there; Waffa is just 14. She runs away from the relatives, returns two years later on her own and very pregnant to Bonn. Kaan calls her a shame. She gives her son a nursing home soon after birth and forbids the family from dealing with him. Soon she is hardly home anymore, lives in the women's home, with friends, in the street, she goes to the dogs, and the last time Nourig sees her in Bad Godesberg, on the sidewalk in front of a cinema. Even before she can address her, the sister runs away.
Waffa's death is the shortest chapter in Nourig Apfeld's book. She gives it to the record, tells the necessary: On August 29, 1993, the father wakes her at half past five in the morning, he says: Get up, I need your help. She follows him into the living room, Waffa sits slumped on the sofa, half slipped down, lifeless, she has a rope of sisal around her neck. Kaan stands with his brother behind the sofa and holds the rope, he puts it into the father's hand and asks him to give it to Nourig so that she pulls it. "It should serve as a deterrent that I do not become rebellious like Waffa," says Nourig. "They wanted to make me feel haptically: We'll do that to you even if you disobey. But I did not pull, I just picked it up, as remotely controlled. "
The men put the dead body in a cardboard box, drive him to a pit in the forest on the other side of the Rhine. When the father is back, she asks him: how could you do that? He says: There was no other way, luckily she slept.
Nobody asks for Waffa. Not even the younger siblings, then ten and seven years old. All in the family are silent. It's as if Waffa never existed. The authorities say the father, the daughter had emigrated. If Nourig is asked for help, she avoids it. She moves to her German friend Felix, after an official engagement the father agrees. She does not say anything to him about the murder. It stays that way. For eight years. She says: "I did not consciously live with a lie.
It was simply inconceivable to me that my sister had to give her life. It was a trauma, a life like a cheese-bell. "
She works against remembering, sometimes 15 hours a day. She works in the nursing home, in the intensive care unit, in a gynecological clinic, in the theater, she starts her medical studies and does everything at the same time. The work displaces the pictures of the dead sister. She knows what happened, but she does not see it. "The memories came only when I was calm, with infinite grief and guilt, not to have helped her."
"Honor killings" happen in a culture in which shame within the own Islamic community is more important than constitutional laws. There is no individual conscience that outweighs this shame. "We are above the ego, the values of the clan over human rights," says Nourig.
That's the way to understand this honor killing and also Nourig's decision for that word, though it transfigures the deed because "honor" sounds like something to respect. Nourig says: "Legally it is murder, there is no cultural discretion. But when we talk about murder, we overlook the archaic structures that make it possible"At the time, those thoughts did not exist, and the idea of going to the police to report a crime, a murder, did not come to her for a moment. It would have meant delivering her father. Kaan, she was sure, would force him to take all the blame to get away herself.
The father also suffered in the years after the murder; If she asked him how he could kill Waffa, he always said he had no choice.
Nourig begins a psychotherapy, once she is to build her inner house made of wooden posts and stones, she builds a fortress without entrance and exit and sits down in the middle. In 2001, after 15 months with the therapist, she finally manages to tell about the murder. She is shocked. "After that, I did not get an appointment with her, she was afraid of being drawn in." She finds a new therapist. He tells him, as the second person ever, the truth. He understands that she is traumatized and treats her for free. He helps her to break away from the family, the first time she dares to think: It's not my fault. She finally tells Felix about it, now her husband.
Maybe everything could have stayed that way. Waffa buried, the memory in the work-up, the realization that it can not be changed, Waffa's death not like her own helplessness. Nourig wants to become a doctor. Lives with Felix, he is stunned by the murder and her long silence, but wants to support her.
Forward. But it does not work. The story wants to light.
It just gets her. When she is not in control. June 2004, eleven years after the murder.A neighbor of her father is the trigger, she tells Nourig, Kaan tyrannize the house, he berate her single parent. Nourig's anger heats up again, she agrees to accompany the woman to the police, she hopes Kaan will be under surveillance in the aftermath, an Islamist in the post-9/11 world. But the officials say they need more clues to do something about him. Since it slips out. "I asked, what if he killed a human? They have checked. And I told what happened. It was more than enough. "
"It may be that there is still a desire for revenge, I should be afraid, but I have no"
The moment turns everything upside down for Nourig. "I knew I was risking my life because Kaan would hate me, and I lose my freedom if I go to the cops for protection."
She says: catches the police. Not catches of crime. The police are now a more powerful opponent for them. Nourig can hide from Kaan, not from justice. Therein lies the real ambivalence of their story: the question of how high the price may be, which a witness pays for the constitutional condemnation of a so-called honor-crime.
She receives summonses from the homicide, the prosecutor's office. She refuses to say that she finds her father sufficiently punished with all his life. The idea that he comes as a murderer in prison, she is unbearable. During this time, their marriage dissolves. Nourig moves out, she does not want to endanger her husband.
The family keeps Waffa dead
The police offer her to go to the witness protection program after a statement: new identity, moving abroad, on-site support, no financial losses. But witness protection also means annihilating their biography, saying goodbye to all friends, studying. She would lead a glassy life, the police would have access to their account information, mail, mobile phone. "I've struggled for so long to understand who I am beyond the family, and then I should be given a new identity, a new self, I did not know if my soul ever joined in."
Nourig says no. Refuses the judicial interrogation it needs for an indictment. The police continue to drill. 2005, 2006. Nourig has panic attacks and heart problems, hardly sleeps anymore. Do not study anymore. Announces her apartment in May 2006, stores the things. She thinks the walls of an apartment can not be a protection anyway, they could not protect her sister either. Violence happens at home. She is almost relieved that everything is gone, just a suitcase, a stack of photos in an envelope in her Filofax, from friends, the three cats still with Felix. She lives from Hartz IV, goes abroad temporarily, jobs in a shelter, comes back, lives with acquaintances, strangers, in rooms, chambers, without a name at the door.
The police continue on their own, until she puts Nourig in acute danger by two covert investigators in early 2007: One blackmailed the father anonymously, claiming he knew about the murder of Waffa; Because only Nourig can be the source, Kaan threatens in an intercepted phone call that one must "slaughter" her. A second V-man pretends to be Nourig's new fiancé and tells the father that the police have contacted her about Wafer's disappearance. Did he know about the murder of his sister? Yes, says the father and tells everything. Even where the body was buried. The police do not find her.
Nourig flees again. Drive to the airport, buy the next best ticket. Madrid. She checks in, boarding in three hours. She goes to the bathroom, has a pocket knife, which the security officials have overlooked, tries to cut, but she only creates a small wound.
She does not fly. Stands, can be heard. The father and cousin are in custody, the second suspicious cousin Germany has long since left. The police take Nourig to an apartment in Augsburg, a single cold room, linoleum. Her real name is at the door, and there is no talk of a new identity. She feels cheated. She is terribly scared. "Augsburg was the low point," she says. "I was like stepping away, I just always thought, how should I exist, what should I tell people who I am." After three weeks she writes farewell letters.
Someone from her family asks Felix for a recent photo of her. Finally, she says as the main witness in front of the Bonn district court, by video, masked with wig and sunglasses. She wants to help her father with the statementwho still takes all the blame, but in vain. Kaan is acquitted in April 2008 for lack of evidence; the father, meanwhile 66, gets eight years imprisonment for manslaughter. The body of the sister is never found.
At times, Nourig gets personal protection, but mostly she hides on her own. Almost an entire year goes by like this.Often she does not know where to stay in the evening, but it always works, something is found, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for two or three months. Sometimes in a small village behind the dike, sometimes in a shared flat. She reads a lot. Psychology textbooks. She often talks to her therapist on the phone. She realizes something is changing. "My therapist has always asked the same questions: 'What can you do yourself, what is your job, what is behind it, ask yourself that?' So, "she says," I have been cured. "
Nourig Apfeld with ChroniquesDuVasteMonde editor Meike Dinklage. Where she lives and studies at the moment remains secret - so it is safer for her
It was Weiberfastnacht, She remembers that in early 2009, it was in the same place, Bad Godesberg, in front of the cinema where she had last seen her sister. She drove the car along the road, and suddenly she had to cry. She came by X times, but this time the tears came easily. She cried and realized, the fear goes away, she dissolves. She says, "Otherwise I can not explain it." If there is no more protection, then all that remains is to be courageous. She has rented an apartment again, under her name, but without a sign on the door. She divorced, but Felix is still a good friend. She studies psychology. She then wants to work for authorities and offices and advise on integration issues.
Is there something for such a thing? "Not yet, but you could set that up." She wrote a letter to her father a few weeks ago. "I never had the feeling that it would be right to get in touch with me, now." Will he answer? "He's not ready yet, I think, if he lets me, I'd visit him too, clarify where we're standing, and I'll send him my book."
How does she see him today? "My father was for me the murder who sacrificed himself for us, then, who went through life broken." I believe you reap what you sow. "He has: his total personal misfortune. The act is not to be excused. But I'm already at peace with him. "
The verdict: imprisonment for the father
Kaan is still there, lives in Bonn, possibly lurking, near her old home, and educates Nourig's three youngest half-siblings. Is she afraid of him? "The move to the public will have consequences, maybe I'll have to live with personal protection again, it may be that Kaan still has a desire for revenge, but I also call on people from the Muslim community who are very archaic feel their honor attacked. I should be scared, but I have none."One sits there, at the kitchen table, with this story, the broken has come together, and over the holes and cracks lies new earth, that the paths are again accessible, the inner paths.
She turned 38 in May. She is a bull. She's rented a former strip club at her corner, with hot tubs and red lights. She stood at the door and greeted everyone, all friends, friends of friends, it was an open invitation, it should get around that she is celebrating. The motto was: Nourig's third life.
"Honor killings" - more and more are displayed
Every year in Germany nearly a dozen cases of family killings become public, in which honor plays a role. The true numbers are probably much higher: Honor crimes are often disguised as accidents or suicides, or committed after kidnappings abroad. Worldwide, the UN estimates, about 5000 "honor killings" happen every year, every fifth of them in Turkey. More and more of these cases are becoming known: In the past three years, the figures displayed in Germany have increased tenfold. +++ Headlines made the process by Hatun Sürücü, 23, she was shot in Berlin in 2005 on the street. Her brother got nine years and three months, two more brothers were acquitted. In 2007, the Federal Court of Justice overturned the acquittals. The arrest warrant has been issued, but the brothers are now living in Turkey. +++ For the murder of the 16-year-old German-Afghan Morsal her brother got a life sentence for insidious murder. He had killed her in May 2008 out of anger over her western lifestyle in a parking lot in Hamburg with 23 knife wounds. +++ Kurdin Gülsüm S., 20, was murdered near Kleve in March 2009 for having had an abortion. Her father Yusuf S. got life-long, as an accomplice Gülsüms triplets brother and his friend were sentenced to long prison terms. +++ On June 24, 2009, Mehmet Ö. in Schweinfurt his 15-year-old daughter Büsra with 68 knife wounds. He also received life imprisonment.
