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`Honour killings' hide racist motives
By Amar Khoday
The Toronto Star
Mar. 8, 2005
It took merely five hours for a British Columbia jury last Friday to convict Rajinder Atwal for the brutal murder of his 17-year-old daughter, Amandeep. Driven by his inability to accept Amandeep's decision to pursue an interracial relationship, the incensed patriarch thrust his knife into his defenceless daughter four times.
The Atwals were a South Asian family who lived in Kitimat, B.C. Amandeep and her boyfriend Todd MacIsaac pursued a secret relationship for two years. At some point after learning that Amandeep intended to move away with MacIsaac, Rajinder Atwal put a lethal halt to their plans.
Amandeep's death can best be characterized as an "honour killing." In the context of such murders, victims, most often female, are slaughtered for having "dishonoured" their family, community and/or religious faith.
A "dishonourable" act can range from marrying an individual of one's own choice, seeking a divorce, or for being the victim of a rape.
Honour killings are, of course, anything but honourable. In Amandeep's case, she was slain for having the courage to pursue her own life choices in a larger South Asian community that sometimes doesn't encourage or allow individuals the right to exercise such choices so easily, or independently.
Rajinder Atwal's desire to prevent Amandeep from marrying outside her community is not an isolated phenomenon.
Although the murder itself was an extreme expression of an oppressive urge to control the marital choices of one's offspring, the desire to preserve ethnic purity is emblematic of many immigrant communities in North America and Europe and is certainly not exclusive to Asian communities.
Thankfully, most parents who oppose their children's marriage to "outsiders" do not resort to murder.
In some cases, interracial and/or interfaith relationships are embraced and accepted. Yet, in many others, news of such relationships is met with a cool reception.
Amandeep's murder was the manifestation of a racist and exclusionary worldview. This worldview perceives the marital and/or sexual intermingling of members of one's own community, particularly women, with members of another community, as an abomination.
Some would view this desire to marry within the confines of one's own ethnicity and/or religious community as a legitimate attempt to preserve a community's ethnic and cultural identity. Cultural preservation, however, can neither justify nor mask the racism that underwrote Amandeep's murder.
Had this case been about a white father killing his white daughter for pursuing a relationship with a South Asian, we, as a society, would waste little time denouncing the murder as a hate crime rooted in racial intolerance. We should do no less with Amandeep's murder.
Ethnic and religious communities must examine their own attitudes and racial biases toward others. After all, we live in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society where the potential for intermingling between individual community members is inevitable.
These developments should not be ignored. Ethnic communities do not live in bubbles but belong to a larger, dynamic society.
It is natural and expected that such interracial and/or interfaith intermingling will result occasionally in marriage.
Amandeep understood this well and she was murdered for it.
The question is, will there be more, and what are we prepared to do to stop it?
Amar Khoday is a licensed Massachusetts attorney and an articling student at a
Toronto law firm.
©
Toronto Star 2005
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