Commemorating a stoning in Europe
Twenty years ago, Ghofrane Haddaoui was cruelly murdered in Marseille.
Stoning to death: an archaic punishment only in Iran and Afghanistan? It is the year 2004: a 23-year-old woman is beaten and pelted with stones in the middle of Europe, in France, so that she dies in agony. How could this happen? A search for clues.
Nobody knows exactly when Ghofrane Haddaoui died It must have happened on the night of October 17 or 18, 2004. And it was a lonely, slow and agonizing death. The autopsy revealed 31 stone blows on Ghofrane's skull. According to the coroner, her agony lasted between 18 and 24 hours. How much time passed before she was found is unknown. What is certain: On October 19, 2004, her body was discovered in a vacant lot near the Grand Littoral shopping mall in Marseille. Her face had been completely disfigured by the stone blows and her hands crushed. It must have been a horrific sight.
A month later, 2,000 people took to the streets in silence in the center of Marseille on the International Day against Violence against Women. The silent march was called by Ghofrane’s family and the women's organization “Ni putes ni soumises” (Neither whores nor subjugated). The name refers to the fact that in the banlieues, the suburbs of large French cities where many Muslim immigrants live, young women are given a choice by their social environment, their family and especially by young men: rither they bow to the traditional gender role, which means behaving “demurely” and wearing headscarves - or they are considered “fair game”
Law of the suburbs
The worst case scenario for rebellious girls is the so-called “tournante” - gang rape. Samira Bellil, the daughter of Algerian immigrants, was the first to describe this phenomenon in her book To Hell and Back. She herself was the victim of three gang rapes before she found the courage to tell her story after undergoing psychotherapeutic treatment. She wrote under her real name and the book cover shows her face. Her parents, who saw her presence as a disgrace afterwards, banished her from their home. Bellil then worked as a social worker and was also the patron of the women’s organization “Ni putes ni soumises” until she died of stomach cancer on September 4, 2004, also twenty years ago. She was 31 years old.
The founder of “Ni putes ni soumises” is the Algerian-born women's rights activist Fadela Amara. I interviewed her in Paris at the time and reviewed her book of the same title, in English Breaking the Silence. The British “Sight & Sound” published my review in English; unlike the German original, this text can still be found online here. The catalyst for the foundation was the murder of another young French Algerian woman on October 4, 2002. On this day, 17-year-old Sohanne Benziane, the daughter of Kabyle immigrants, was doused with petrol and burned alive in the cellar of a suburban district near Paris.
According to media sources, Ghofrane Haddaoui, who was murdered two years later, was born in Tunis in 1980 or 1981. She was completing an internship as a sales assistant in a boutique. And was about to get married. Ultimately, it was thanks to Ghofrane's mother, Monia Haddaoui, that the perpetrators were convicted. In her book Ils ont lapidé Ghofrane (They stoned Ghofrane), she writes: “How was it possible for a girl to be stoned to death in France, the country of human rights? Despite the trauma, despite the pain, my grief turned into a struggle from the moment I visited the morgue. Now was not the time to cry, now was the time to understand. To do this, I had to look for information on the street, in the immediate vicinity of my daughter's tormentors. Then I prepared myself: I got dressed, put on my make-up and went into battle.”
With the help of relatives, the former bar owner and divorced mother of six investigated among the young people in the surrounding neighborhoods to find her daughter's murderers. Her strategy paid off: two murder suspects were arrested. The main perpetrator, a 17-year-old also from Tunisia, stated that he had felt “rejected” by Ghofrane, who was six years older than him. “Furious with rage” and under the influence of alcohol and cannabis, he therefore threw or hit large stones at her head for ‘about ten minutes’.
At the time
In retrospect, what the French newspaper Liberation reported about the two defendants in the run-up to the trial reads like many perpetrator biographies that people in Europe could read or hear in this or a similar way in the twenty years that have passed since then, and not only in France:
T., who was born in Marseille to a father described as violent and a disabled mother, was expelled from school in October 2004 for indiscipline.
He was accused of serious theft, but had no convictions on his criminal record. After the murder, he had inserted his text message card into Ghofrane Haddaoui's cell phone to make calls. When the police seized it, they easily tracked him down.
T. said that Ghofrane, whom he had known for six months and with whom he had already been flirting, had followed him that evening from the center of Marseille to his quarter Plan-d'Aou, but had changed his mind on the way and refused him. He then bragged about the deed and the rumors spread throughout his neighborhood.
However, Ghofrane's mother was convinced that her daughter had not been murdered by a lone perpetrator, but as part of a group. With the help of her relatives, she found out that T. had been accompanied by two other minors on the evening of the crime. One of them was the then 16-year-old F.. The police also found him without any problems: he was in prison for an armed robbery he had committed after the murder.
F., who had dropped out of school in the sixth grade, had already been convicted ten times, including prison sentences for grand theft and serious violence; the juvenile court system was aware of a total of 28 criminal offenses. Born out of wedlock, he was raised by a legionnaire stepfather, placed in a home and later in a foster family and looked after by a juvenile court judge from the age of eight. F. initially denied any involvement in the crime, but then admitted to having been present at the murder - without, however, having taken part in it.
A third person, A., who was 17 years old at the time and known to the police for common thefts, is said to have been informed about the murder afterwards - but had not reported it. He told the police that T. and F. had first beaten up Ghofrane before T. hit and pelted her with large stones. A. had to stand trial for not reporting a crime, but was already at large again at the time.
The other two, T. and F., were each sentenced to 23 years in prison by the Bouches-du-Rhône juvenile court in April 2007. The maximum sentence of thirty years had been demanded in camera, and for the main offender additional preventive detention.
And today?
If they have to serve their entire sentence, they will be released in 2030. But perhaps they have been released early and are already at large again? Have they ever shown remorse while in prison? Perhaps even asked Ghofrane's mother for forgiveness? I would have liked to know the answers to these questions and give them to you here. Unfortunately, I have received no response to my inquiries to women's activists in Germany and France. Nor have I found anything on the internet. Anyone reading this who knows more or has heard or read something: please let me know. I would be happy to add it here, link it.
The German feminist magazine Emma, one of the few media outlets that reported on the stoning at the time, wrote: “Now the Franco-Tunisian woman has been transported to her homeland in a shroud - but her uncles refused to bury the murdered woman in the traditional way. They did not want to bury a “dirty” body, they said. They had heard from journalists that Ghofrane was a “well-known girl” in the neighborhood. At half past ten at night, her mother and siblings buried the body alone in Tunisian soil.” In English it reads: R. I. P.. Rest in Peace.
This text was first published in German on my website and translated by me.
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