Kurds living in Norway, where cultural defence has more purchase than in Sweden, tended to be unhappy with the trial of Rahmi Sahindal, seeing it as a serious failure of the Swedish legal system not to have raised in court the concepts of namus and sharif. To have done so, the argument runs, would have protected the Kurdish ethnic minority. It would have ushered difference into the courtroom, challenging the universality and neutrality of Swedish law. It would also probably have reduced Rahmi’s sentence. The cultural defence is based on a type of utopian fantasy or wish: that the worldview of the minority community, against the drift of the dominant society all around it, take precedence in law. But if the cultural defence works, or is intended to work, in the interests of minority communities, it can also backfire, to the detriment of the defendant and his world. Rahmi’s lawyer made his decision not to raise the issue partly on the basis that to introduce ‘honour’ would have given his client a motive (even though he at first pleaded guilty). But it is also the case that a plea based on culture can be experienced by the minority on whose behalf it is mounted as a humiliation, by seeming to endorse a hostile view of the group as irredeemably, not to say violently, different. When Judge Denison reduced Abdullah Yones’s sentence from the recommended 20 years to 14 on the grounds of ‘irreconcilable cultural differences’, it was hardly a neutral decision. ‘The risk,’ Wikan writes, ‘is that a whole culture or community is branded as having a tradition of “honour” that can lead to murder.’ It is only a short step from here to branding the whole community a bunch of criminals. For the same reason, Fadime’s sisters and mother worried that too much emphasis on the family’s rejection of her Swedish boyfriend (in fact he was Swedish-Iranian) would confirm the impression that Kurds were hostile to Swedes. They were right to be worried. The family was the subject of a media witch-hunt which spilled over to the whole Kurdish community in Sweden. ‘Kurdish Woman Murdered’ was the broadsheet headline after Fadime’s death. The headline ‘Swedish Woman Murdered’ – which was not going to happen – would have turned the problem into one implicating all Swedes. lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/jacqueline-rose/a-piece-of-white-silk
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:08:44 +0000