HONOR KILLING

 

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,555667,00.html

Honor Killing Victim Wanted to Live Like other German Girls

By SPIEGEL Staff

At age 16, all Morsal Obeidi wanted was to live the way other girls in Germany do. She paid dearly: Obeidi's oldest brother stabbed her 20 times. Her murder has sparked a renewed debate in Germany about the failure of many immigrant families to integrate into Western society.

Morsal is buried one week after her death. In the morning, the women wash the body, cleansing it of its earthly sins, in keeping with tradition.

The teenage girl's thin body is covered with stab wounds, evidence of the knife that was plunged into her torso. The women wrap the body in linen and lay it into a coffin made of a light-colored wood.

PHOTO GALLERY: HONOR KILLING IN GERMANY

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At noon, six men lift the coffin to their shoulders and begin walking, leading a procession of 200 men and women dressed in black. Ghulam-Mohammed Obeidi, the father, who came from Afghanistan, lost his 2nd daughter and now, more than likely, his son in a single night -- is at the center of the group. They walk along a path that leads to the new Muslim section at the back of a cemetery in Hamburg's Öjendorf neighborhood, to where a group of construction workers stand leaning against an excavating machine. The women stop as the men carry the coffin to the grave, which is lined with boards, a rectangular hole in the ground with pale sand piled up around its edges.

 

This is where the story ends, with the body of a stabbed girl being brought to her grave. Her name was Morsal Obeidi, and she was 16. Born in Afghanistan, she died a few days ago, in a parking lot in Hamburg.

In the years between her birth and her death, Morsal Obeidi tried to lead western style life like other girls in her school led. Perhaps she was trying to do precisely what politicians and social workers are constantly encouraging immigrants to do: to become integrated.

A Life in Two Worlds

But her parents and her family -- especially Ahmad, her brother -- were an obstacle to integration. In the end, Morsal Obeidi was torn apart by the need to live a life in two worlds, and by the daily struggle to be the kind of person she wanted to be.

Morsal met with Mohammed, her cousin (not her fianc챕/boy friend, because she did not have one), on the evening of May 15, Thursday. They were sitting in a McDonald's restaurant. Morsal had only been back in the city for a few months, after a prolonged visit with relatives in Afghanistan. It was spring in Hamburg. As they ate, Mohammed thought about the plan that he was keeping a secret from Morsal. It seemed harmless enough. Mohammed said later that Ahmad, Morsal's brother, had asked him to bring his sister to the Berliner Tor train station. "He said to me: 'I want you to meet Morsal today. Then walk to the Berliner Tor with her. But don't tell her anything. I just want to talk to her."

It seemed harmless enough.

Morsal and Mohammed arrived at the suburban railway station shortly after 11 p.m. They walked around the corner to a small parking lot next to an apartment building, where they sat down to smoke a cigarette. At 11:20 night, Ahmad suddenly appeared out of the darkness. Morsal recognized him -- and froze. Ahmad approached his sister and then, without saying a word, began stabbing her. He stabbed her a few times. "I think he must've taken something first. Drugs. Or maybe he got drunk. I tried to stop him, but he pushed me away," says Mohammed.

Ahmad Obeidi, 23, is a strong, athletic young man. Morsal tried to run away, but she stumbled and fell. Ahmad stood over her and continued to stab her, five times, ten times, still silent as he swung his right arm up and down over his sister's body. He seemed intoxicated. The police counted 20 stab wounds, inflicted with such force that Ahmad would later wear a bandage on his right forearm.

Morsal screamed, waking up the residents of the apartment building. Passersby called the police. Ahmad fled to a nearby subway station, and Mohammed followed him. The two cousins boarded a train, where they sat silently across from each other, a killer and his accomplice.

Morsal died.

Mohammed spent a short time wandering through the night before going to a police station, where he was interrogated for six hours. It was Ahmad, he said, who had killed her.

At approximately noon on May 16, roughly 12 hours after the killing, police officers stood at the door of Ahmad Obeidi's apartment. He allowed them to take him into custody without resisting, and he confessed to the crime. To the officers, it seemed that Ahmad, the murderer of his own sister, had been waiting for them.

In the days following the crime, it was frequently referred to as an "honor killing." A murder for the sake of honor? Is this even possible? Doesn't a man who cold-bloodedly kills his own sister, a girl seven years his junior, little more than a child, in fact lose all honor?

A Criminal for Whom Germany Was Foreign

Her father Ghulam-Mohammed Obeidi was the first to come to Germany. He arrived in 1992, when Helmut Kohl was still chancellor. The father was barely 30 years old, a good-looking young man who had been trained as a pilot in the Soviet Union. He had flown the legendary MiG-21 jet fighter, an aircraft capable of traveling at twice the speed of sound. Obeidi flew combat missions against the religious mujahedeen, and he was a member of the Communist Party, which soon fell from power when the Soviets withdrew and the mujahedeein took Kabul. Obeidi fled to Hamburg, where there was already a sizeable Afghan community. It seemed a good place for a new beginning, a place where he would not be alone.

An Afghan Enclave in Europe

Today, Hamburg is home to about 20,000 people of Afghan heritage, more than any other European city. Close to 7,000 have German passports. Before the murder of Morsal, Hamburg's Afghan community was relatively loose-knit and was rarely perceived as an ethnic group, partly because these immigrants had been so deeply divided at home that there was little left to unite them as a community abroad.

When the communists came into power in 1978, the supporters of the king were the first to leave Afghanistan. In 1989, the communists fled the victorious mujahedeen. After the Taliban was ousted in 1996, many of its supporters also went abroad. In other words, each group was fleeing from the next group that would follow it into exile.

Once they had arrived in Germany, the groups found that they had little in common. Old enemies were now neighbors, living together in the same city. To make life together more tolerable, these disparate immigrants focused on the one thing that could surmount all ideological differences: the family.

The family became their safe haven, and it was to be defended at all costs. The family, in this new, foreign world, could not be allowed to disintegrate.

 

This emphasis on the family created great pressure to conform, to obey the rules -- and it sealed the fate of Morsal Obeidi. Her father brought his family to Germany in 1994, when Ahmad was 10 and Morsal was only three. He could no longer work as a pilot in his adopted homeland. An Afghan elite soldier was not in high demand in Germany, and so he learned to drive a bus. He never learned enough German to truly fit in. Everyone here seemed to be overtaking him, even his own daughter.

Morsal attended the Ernst-Henning-Strasse Schule, an elementary and junior high school in Hamburg's Bergedorf neighborhood with students from 18 different countries. In the same neighborhood, near a pedestrian zone, she would often get together with friends after school. It was not a very attractive place to meet but, being in a different neighborhood, it offered Morsal and her friends an opportunity to get away from their families. There they could hang out, smoke, listen to music and occasionally drink alcohol. Morsal liked hip-hop music and Afghan pop. She was 16 and not unattractive to the boys.

There are many files about Morsal Obeidi, filled with the sparse comments of the many Hamburg agencies with which she came into contact over the years: the youth welfare agency, the school authority, the police. The files describe Morsal as a relatively poor student. In January 2007, the principal of her school, Dorit Ehler, informed her that she would not be able to complete the requirements to graduate from the vocational-track high school she was attending. Ehler informed the parents that she planned to keep Morsal back a grade, but that perhaps something could be worked out. The parents, however, had made up their minds long before, and they withdrew their daughter from the school.

Morsal, unlike her older sister, was obstinate. She was 14 when she began to resist her parents' authority. She was tired of being complacent, of living according to the old Afghan rules, which seemed irrelevant to her life in Hamburg. She argued with her parents about her appearance and her behavior, her uncovered hair, her makeup, her tight jeans and about smoking and drinking. They argued about her friends and acquaintances. For former fighter pilot Ghulam-Mohammed Obeidi, the family's reputation was at stake. It was the only thing he had left to lose.

In early March 2007, the family sent Morsal to stay with relatives in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. They wanted her to study the Koran and familiarize herself with prayer, and to shed everything that was German about her, the many bad influences and her supposedly dishonorable life. The parents, who had told their daughter that the trip was to be a vacation, soon returned to Germany. But Morsal was kept behind for nine months -- to be reeducated.

In Afghanistan she lived with her cousin, Yussuf Obeidi, a stately man in his mid-fifties. She attended a Koran school, filling her notebook with surahs, which she wrote down onomatopoeically using German letters. "Morsal was here because she wanted to be here," the cousin claims.

But by then it was too late for Morsal Obeidi.

It was the night she encountered Ahmad on the small parking lot across the street from the train tracks -- a fatal night for two siblings who no longer knew exactly where they belonged.

Traces of Morsal's blood remained behind on the concrete in front of the building's garage. Three days later, all that remained were a few dark spots, as black as motor oil.

 

JOCHEN-MARTIN GUTSCH, PER HINRICHS, SUSANNE KOELBL, GUNTHER LATSCH, SVEN RÖBEL, ANDREAS ULRICH

 

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan