Murder in the Name of Honor by Rana Husseini Page A

investigate or discuss the issue properly. ‘When it comes to issues like this, deputies revert back to being individuals, instead of going back to their constituency to ask people what they think. They only go back to their constituency at election time.’
    Both Abu Odeh and Dr Tarawneh agreed that the royal family was sincere in its quest for change on this issue. Abu Odeh told me, ‘Although the Jordanian monarchy are not traditionalists personally, they are politically because their powerbase is made up of traditionalists. The problem is their powerbase. It pulls them back and they don’t want to provoke it,’ Abu Odeh said.
    At the second hearing, held on 26 January 2000, the debate was over all too quickly. The only deputy who spoke out in favour of referring the article to the Legal Committee for examination was Zarqa MP Bassam Haddadin.
    Several deputies said the entire Lower House had already voted once with a sweeping majority to reject the proposal, and that they were not prepared to discuss it again. Sure enough, they voted against the draft amendment again before sending it to the Upper House. It was clear that nothing was going to change any time soon. We had been defeated. Despite this, I felt that our work had proven to be a major success, thanks to the hard work of our committee and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Together, we made the debate on so-called honour crimes public and ongoing in Jordan and the subject still regularly filled newspaper columns – expressing both support and opposition.
    Very much on the side opposed to reform was
Arab Al-Yawm
columnist Muwafaq Mahaddin, who wrote twice, in November2000 and January 2001, criticizing financial support provided by the UK’s Foreign Ministry to a local NGO called Sisterhood is Global Institute (SIGI), which was headed at the time by the lawyer Asma Khader.
    In the first of these columns, written in November 2000, Mahaddin wrote that his readers ‘would be surprised to know that women in Britain are in more need of this financial support than women in Jordan. It would be good if the Jordanian Embassy in London would offer support to women in the UK as well.’ Many Jordanian columnists were incensed and wrote several opinion pieces criticizing the UK’s interference.
    During the first few months of 2000 the debate on Article 340 and so-called honour crimes dominated internet chat rooms. I read the comments criticizing and supporting me without comment until I saw that people were starting to blame me for tarnishing Jordan’s image and for ‘threatening Jordan’s tourist industry’.
    I couldn’t let that one pass and so I wrote:
    I think every country in the world has its own problems. For example, the crime rate in the USA is one of the highest in the world. But you still see people exerting the utmost efforts to go and live or invest there and, if I am not mistaken, I think that the USA has one of the highest numbers of tourists visiting each year … I would like to assure you all that I would never do anything to harm my beloved country …
    My work and the committee’s work is not ‘self-serving’ as some have described it; we are trying to serve and keep women safe.

CHAPTER 7
The Royal March for Justice
    Two days after the battle for Article 340 had been ‘lost’, Prince Ali took the extraordinary step of speaking out against the decision. Using an internet chat room, he made an extraordinary appeal for people to take part in a public march to Parliament in protest at the deputies’ decision to vote against the amendments:
    As a Muslim, a Hashemite and a Jordanian citizen, I was dismayed to learn that honour killings are still condoned by some of our countrymen. My father the late King Hussein was resolute in his stance against these crimes and my brother King Abdullah and I remain just as determined to end honour killings in Jordan. We support the