• In my note about Edwards Magazine, I forgot to include tudor_rose with london_calling as an editor. My apologies.


• Just as a note, could I ask my commenters to try to avoid personal attacks, for the sake of polite, friendly, and engaging discourse? Yes, if I myself slip feel entirely free to come down upon me.

On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed on her way to a bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof by several shots to the head and upper body, fired at point-blank range. The investigation revealed that months before, she reported one of her brothers to the police for threatening her. Now three of her five brothers are on trial for murder. According to the prosecutor, the oldest of them (25) acquired the weapon, the middle brother (24) lured his sister to the scene of the crime and the youngest (18) shot her. The trial began on Sept. 21. Ayhan Surucu, the youngest brother, had confessed to the murder and claimed that he had done it without any help. According to Seyran Ates, a lawyer of Turkish descent, it is generally the youngest who are chosen by the family council to carry out such murders - or to claim responsibility for them. German juvenile law sets a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment for murder, and the offender has the prospect of being released after serving two-thirds of the sentence.

Hatun Surucu grew up in Berlin as the daughter of Turkish Kurds. When she finished eighth grade, her parents took her out of school. Shortly after that she was taken to Turkey and married to a cousin. Later she separated from her husband and returned to Berlin, pregnant. At age 17 she gave birth to a son, Can. She moved into a women's shelter and completed the work for her middle-school certificate. By 2004 she had finished a vocational-training program to become an electrician. The young mother who had escaped her family's constraints began to enjoy herself. She put on makeup, wore her hair unbound, went dancing and adorned herself with rings, necklaces and bracelets. Then, just days before she was to receive her journeyman's diploma, her life was cut short.

Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu's capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German. In a statement to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted that she had stopped wearing her head scarf, that she refused to go back to her family and that she had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle of friends." It's still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women on this topic, explained, "The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering." By disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother's life - her silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage. Meanwhile, the two elder brothers have papered their cell with pictures of their dead sister.

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The witness said she was 16 at the time of the Dujail incident. She broke down and cried several times during her testimony, strongly suggesting that she had been raped although she did not say so outright.

When the judge later asked her about the “assault,” she said “I was beaten up and tortured by electrical shocks.”

However, she repeated that she had been ordered to undress.

“I begged them, but they hit with their pistols,” she said. “They made me put my legs up. There were five or more and they treated me like a banquet. Is that what happens to the virtuous woman that Saddam speaks about?”

The judge then advised her to stick to the facts.

She said she was thrown into a room with red walls and ceiling in an intelligence department building and that prisoners were given only bread and water to eat.

“I could not even eat because of the torture,” she said.

She said prisoners were later moved to Abu Ghraib prison where the torture continued.

Will the instruction result in a collapse of priestly vocations? Only if you believe vocations depend upon the three percent of the male population that identifies itself as gay or is afflicted with strong or exclusive same-sex attraction. The instruction will, I expect, make the priesthood more attractive to those who are in the other 97 percent of men and who discern a call to the priesthood, which includes the admittedly difficult discipline of chaste celibacy.