Blatchford: At the heart of Shafia trial, the very notion of what is a girl

Sahar Shafia, left, Zainab, top, and Geeti

KINGSTON, Ont. — It was, as the shy prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis said outside the lovely old Frontenac County courthouse, “a good day for Canadian justice.”

And so it was: Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Mohammad Yahya and Hamed Mohammad Shafia, respectively the Afghan parents and brother of three teenage girls and the woman they loved like a mother, had just been convicted of four counts each of first-degree murder moments earlier.

“This verdict sends a very clear message about our Canadian values and the core principles in a free and democratic society that all Canadians enjoy, and even visitors to Canada enjoy,” Laarhuis said.

The “visitors” reference was a kind and graceful nod to Rona Amir Mohammad, Shafia’s unacknowledged other wife.

Unlike the rest of the sprawling clan, she was brought to Canada as a domestic servant and was on a visitor’s visa, its renewal held over her head like a axe ready to fall by her co-wife Yahya and Shafia.

The three, still crying foul as they were led away to begin serving automatic life sentences for murder, are guilty of wiping out nearly half their family.

“It is difficult to conceive of a more heinous, more despicable and more honourless crime,” Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger said Sunday after the jury foreman had read aloud the verdicts.

Looking directly at Shafia, 58, Yahya, 42, and their oldest son Hamed as they stood before him in the prisoners’ box for the last time, the judge concluded with a stinging denunciation.

“The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameless murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your twisted notion of honour, a notion of honour that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honour that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”

By using the words “honourless” and “shameless”, Maranger was tossing back at Shafia some of the very epithets he used so often when speaking about his dead daughters.

The mass honour slaying of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti — respectively 19, 17 and 13 — and 52-year-old Mohammad, Shafia’s other, and sadly barren, wife, ranks among the worst in the sordid history of honour crimes.

It was an electric finale for a case that got international attention for the horrific “honour” motive which drove the crime and for a great, rollicking trial which featured shocking wiretapped evidence, galling testimony and even a bomb threat.

At its very heart, as prosecutors argued, were not only the three lost teens and Mohammad, but also the very notion of what is a girl.

As Shafia once howled to Yahya, in what they imagined was the privacy of their minivan just days after their household had been almost halved: “Every night I used to think of myself as a cuckold. Every day I used to go and gather (her) from the arms of boys.”

If the question was downright creepy — why on Earth would any father ever feel like a cuckold? — the answer was far worse: Because, of course, that father believed he was the one who had absolute control of his daughters’ sexuality.

As prosecutor Laurie Lacelle told the jurors in her closing address — and here she was talking about the family’s desperate efforts to get Zainab back home after she had run away to a shelter just two months before her death — the family was frantic because “she might be with unapproved males. She might be having sex.”

This was one of the most egregious disconnects of the trial, the difference between the overwhelming evidence that this was a family absolutely obsessed with honour and female chastity and what the Shafias said about it in court.

Both Yahya and Shafia flatly denied ever even hearing about honour killing and said, besides, one could never reclaim it that way anyway, heaven’s no.

As Yahya put it, “This (honour killing) is something I never heard” until “they put this name on our case, which is really shameful for us.”

Yet honour crimes, a phenomenon spreading across the planet and on the rise just about everywhere, have happened and been publicized in every place this family has ever lived, from their native Afghanistan to Australia and Dubai and, of course, Canada.

Where once such crimes were largely confined to the Middle East and South Asia, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women now gets reports of such crimes from more than 20 countries.

Recent research by the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, which just last month published figures from British police forces obtained through freedom of information requests, showed almost 3,000 honour attacks were recorded by police in the United Kingdom in 2010.

And Pakistan, where the Shafias fled in 1992 and lived for four years, is to honour killing what Las Vegas is to gambling or Mecca to Islam — the holiest shrine.

Every year, between 300 and 1,000 girls and women in Pakistan are punished, usually but not exclusively by their fathers and brothers, for real or perceived crimes against family honour. Just last month, Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission reported that in the first nine months of 2011, 675 women and girls were killed in honour slayings.

These crimes always involve real or imagined breaches of female sexual integrity, and the offences range from being seen with unknown males, being too independent, being raped (which brings shame to the tribe), asking for divorce, dressing provocatively — or even rumours of any of the above.

And in the last two years, 2006 and 2007, that the Shafia clan lived in Dubai before coming to Canada, a local paper, the Gulf News, reported at least two cases of honour crimes, one where two brothers beat up and locked away their 35-year-old sister for staying with a man.

In fact, the day after the jurors retired, Montreal’s La Presse ran a front-page interview columnist Michele Ouimet had with one of Yahya’s sisters, Soraya, in Kabul.

Soraya was “scandalized” by the pictures the reporter showed them, shot of Zainab and Sahar in ordinarily skimpy skirts or bathing and with male friends and boyfriends. She and her husband both cheerfully told Ouimet they believe in killing for honour.

Her husband Habibullah said simply, if his daughters (the couple has seven, plus two boys) dishonoured him, “I would put them in a bag and eliminate them so no one would ever find their traces in Afghanistan.”

But Yahya and Shafia never heard of such killings before?

Their testimony on this point was transparently self-serving and nakedly dishonest: They were lying through their teeth.

But then lying is like breathing to this family.

If it’s a fair generalisation that some Afghans have learned to say whatever they think their listener wants to hear, if it’s true that there is what’s called “permissible lying” in Islam (it’s called al-Taqiyya, and means the concealing or disguising of one’s beliefs, feelings or opinions to save oneself from injury), none of it quite explains the Shafias.

Neither typical Afghans nor typical Muslims, and certainly not devout, they simply have their own unusual if not unique pathology.

The jurors heard how theirs was a house divided: Boys were good, trusted, given freedom; youngsters, even girls so long as they weren’t yet menstruating and thus prone to temptation, were good; pubescent girls and older, not so much.

This may explain Yahya’s copious tears when speaking of her youngest, the little girl who was just eight when all this unfolded: Eight is such a good, safe, innocent, age for a girl.

But for this wee girl, who burst into tears at the funeral and wailed Geeti’s name aloud, the others who survived the family holocaust were the boy, who testified for his father at trial, and the middle sister.

The boy was caught on a wiretap the night before his parents were arrested and after he and his two siblings had been apprehended by child welfare officials. It is evident from what he said on the tapes that at the least, he was playing ball with the story spun by his parents and Hamed — and perhaps even that he knew of the murder plan at minimum after it had been carried out.

A permanent publication ban protects their all names.

By the evidence, with their big brother Hamed, the middle siblings kept a close eye on their more daring sisters.

Hamed once miraculously arrived at the house minutes after Zainab, their parents gone to Dubai, had sneaked her boyfriend in: The suggestion was he’d been following her. The son who testified at trial reportedly encountered Sahar with her boyfriend at a restaurant near their school.

At the very sight of him, the couple sprang apart and he even kissed another girl to deflect suspicion.

Sahar and Geeti once told Nathalie Laramee, their school VP, they were “afraid in the house” and that “we know our behaviour at school is reported back at the home”. They appeared to be referring to both middle sibs, who went to the same school.

And consider what Zainab wrote to Ammar Wahid, the young man she briefly married in the incident which sparked the familial conflagration, in an email before they even met for the first time, she laid out the rules: He was not to approach or acknowledge her publicly; she would come to his locker if she could, and if he saw her brother Hamed anywhere, he should “act like complete stranger”.

In this world, there was no such thing as dating. A girl who liked a boy had to marry him (thus Zainab’s desire to get married was as much about escape as anything else) and only if he was suitable — preferably Afghan, Muslim and from a good family.

The parents’ wealth appears to have shielded them, not from official scrutiny, but from sanction.

Three times the girls’ school, where teachers were alarmed either by Sahar’s profound sadness or Geeti’s increasing wildness, called one or another of Quebec’s child-welfare agencies, the last time in June, just weeks before the family set out on their ostensible vacation.

Each time, the sisters either backed off their original allegations, usually in their parents’ presence (their father could silence them with a glare), or the parents and other children so vigorously denied them, that the files were closed — though in at least one instance, the worker deemed the allegations “founded” or true.

This combination of a perceived need for cultural sensitivity, a family which was so well-off and presentable, and kids so frightened out of their skins they recanted, defeated the child-welfare complaint system.

Consider what Montreal Police Detective Laurie-Ann Lefebvre, who with a partner investigated the 911 call some of the children had a stranger make on their behalf the day Zainab ran away, had to say about Sahar.

Det. Lefebvre was a child-abuse investigator. She interviewed the children, and one of Sahar’s chief complaints was a lack of freedom.

Prosecutor Lacelle asked her, “How did Sahar appear?” and Det. Lefebvre replied, “Well, I was surprised. She said she had no freedom, but she was well-dressed, wore jewelry, had nice makeup. She did not seem depressed.”

And the detective told Sahar that: “I said, ‘no freedom?’. I said, ‘You’re well-dressed, have nice makeup.’”

Let that be a lesson for Canadian police, women’s rights activists, social workers and the like: The oppression of girls and women wears different faces, and some of them are beautiful, not battered, and some of them are beautifully made up. Birds in gilded cages are still in cages.

It was the very sort of societal prejudice which ended up leaving the girls even more vulnerable and protecting the Shafia parents and Hamed. If the trio felt entitled and safe to do what they wanted, who could blame them?

Virtually every time Shafia and Yahya encountered Canadian authorities, they bamboozled them.

The family arrived in Canada under Quebec’s “immigrant investor” program — investors put up a chunk of cash interest-free in exchange for permanent residency — and three months later, no questions asked, brought in the other wife, Mohammad, as a domestic servant on a visitor’s visa.

The parents were called in by school officials a number of times, but Yahya would weep, Shafia would rail furiously, and no action would be taken.

When the school called in child welfare, the same thing would happen: Denials, rage and tears from these affluent parents worked in this country. All their experience with institutional Canada gave them no reason to imagine that a small-city police force wouldn’t be similarly stymied.

It explains the collective arrogance they brought to their crime; they simply imagined they would get away with it.

That it was not a brilliant plan — nor well-executed — actually became part of their defence. Who, Shafia’s lawyer thundered in his closing address, would ever pick such a weird place to commit a murder, take such a chance?

But the truth is, criminality and stupidity are hardly mutually exclusive; rather, the opposite.

It is a delicious irony that it was in some part Shafia’s cheapness — he may be rich but he always kept a wary eye on the pennies — which first raised police suspicions and undermined the family’s original story.

All three — mother, father and Hamed — first claimed that the last they saw of any of the four dead women was shortly after they all got to the Kingston East Motel, when Zainab allegedly came looking for the keys to the Nissan, and then purportedly took the others out for the fatal spin.

But when father and son were checking in, and manager Robert Miller asked how many people there would be in each room, their answers got his attention.

“Six,” said Shafia, clearly not wanting to pay extra for the quartet who would never make it to the motel and would soon be dead in the water.

Hamed then said something to him in Dari, they had a bit of a chat, and Hamed then said, “Nine.” Miller, who of course would remember this forever, suggested they settle on a number.

They did: The receipts, signed by Hamed, show there would be three people per room.

Then there was the matter of the Nissan itself: Shafia, unwilling to see fine cars like the Lexus SUV or the Montana minivan wasted on four females, picked up the used Nissan for $5,000 the very day before the family left Montreal for Niagara Falls.

No one will ever know for sure how the three girls and Mohammad drowned — was it in the turning basin at the locks, as police believe (they even checked the drains)? Were they administered a drug which incapacitated them then so quickly disappeared from their bodies toxicological tests couldn’t find it?

What is in no doubt is that all four of them, in the long weeks and months before their deaths, knew they were in danger, that they were afraid, and that their pleas for help were misunderstood or minimized.

At autopsy, Sahar was found to be the only one of the four who didn’t have areas of fresh bruising to the top of her head.

Because of that, right or wrong, I’ve always imagined, in the prosecution theory of how the four were killed, that she was the last to be taken out of the car and drowned. I fear that by the time her killers came for her, she knew very well what was happening: The girl who wanted to be a doctor when she grew up realized she was not going to grow up.

On that June night in a lovely place in one of the freest and luckiest nations in the world, at the hands of those who should have most loved and protected her, she was killed because, well, she was a girl.