Alarm at "Honour Killings" in Eastern Afghan Province

The conviction of three men for murdering a woman in the Kunar province of eastern Afghanistan is the exception rather the rule, officials acknowledge.

A man called Ehsanullah from Kunar’s Manogai district beheaded his sister-in-law Maryam. With two accomplices, he was found guilty of premeditated murder by a state court in Kunar, after he was brought back from Kabul, to where he fled after the killing.

Ehsanullah pleaded guilty, saying his sister-in-law had made sexual advances to him.

He was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to a term in a juvenile detention centre after the appeals court heard evidence that he was under 18 at the time and hence a minor under Afghan law, even though his ID papers claimed he was 22.

The other two defendants similarly had their death sentences commuted and were given 16-year prison terms.

Kunar has seen several similar murder trials where the victim was a woman in recent years. But local government officials acknowledge that many more cases are never brought to the authorities’ attention, since tradition demands that “honour crimes” are settled away from the prying eyes of the state.

The provincial department of women’s affairs is alarmed at the rising number of unreported killings, saying that in the Afghan year ending March 2013, it was made aware of a record number of cases.

Department head Nasima Shafiq Sadat told IWPR that since March, she is aware of three murders of women and at least ten other assaults.

Sadat says the problem is most serious in remote mountain areas where people do not go to the authorities.

Women in Kunar say there are no channels for reporting physical threats to government agencies. Areas of Afghanistan like this have seen little of the international assistance intended to prevent violence against women, as most of it only gets as far as the main urban centres.

Zabihullah Ghazi is an IWPR-trained radio reporter in Paktia.