Closing Ranks

There are always people who will tell the truth. Just as there will always be those who find it more congenial to their sense of sticking together, no matter the cost, to deny the truth. Many people have an inborn sense of justice, others have allowed theirs to wither, because it has become more convenient to deny the unpalatable.

It's striking how variant the testimony was from various witnesses for the defence, as opposed to those testifying for the Crown in the now-infamous Shafia case. Most of the witnesses for the defence, primarily family members, including a younger brother of the accused son, Hamed Shafia, spoke of their normal family life, a good and indulgent father who could not possibly harm his own.

It isn't every day, after all, that a mother, a father, and their eldest son stand accused of murder. All the more horrific when the murdered just happen to be a co-wife of the second wife, and three daughters of the husband and wife, sisters of the son. Is it the least bit credible that three family members would conspire to murder four others of their family?

The very thought is inconceivable. And the denials of the accused simply validated that even they subscribe to the quaint notion that it is. It presents as a social defence against the unthinkable.

Because there is such a visceral natural prohibition against such an assault on the senses within society, that people cannot find it in themselves to believe that parents would murder their children, let alone a sibling plan with the parents to take away their lives of his own. If such an event were to be planned, the murderers could take to the bank the certainty that no one would believe them guilty of such a horrible plot.

And that might have been the case if it were not for the fact that they had, in the past, by the opinions expressed and the things that they did, conveyed to the eyes and ears of many close to them that they did indeed contemplate such unbelievably ghoulish acts. That, and circumstantial evidence, along with wire-tapped admissions of what they were capable of, along with a cultural heritage of what is termed "honour killing".

Mohammad Shafia made it quite clear that he was a traditional Afghan paterfamilias. And he conveyed this in unmistakable terms to relatives, assuming their support without question, and by speaking to his family members in secretly taped conversations, referring to his daughters with unmitigated disgust, repeating in so many words that no punishment could be too severe for them to deliver the restoration of honour back to the Shafia name.

"There is nothing honourable, about violence against anyone, especially against innocent women. Honour killing is unacceptable in [the] Afghanistan constitution and its justice system", claims a statement of distance and distaste from a diplomatic source; an official spokesman from the Afghan Embassy in Ottawa. This, despite covert, and sometimes officially-sanctioned oppression of Afghan women, occasionally resulting in death by sentence.

An uncle of Tooba Yahya, the mother of the murdered girls, who lives as they did in Montreal had some interesting testimony about a conversation with Mohammad Shafia relating to his 19-year-old daughter Zainab. "She is dirty. She is a curse to me. If I was there, I would have killed her", Shafia said to Latif Hyderi.

And for that indiscretion, that decision on the part of Mr. Hyderi to tell the court, the judge and the jury, what he had been told by one of the accused in the murder trial, Mr. Hyderi has been threatened. "We used to receive calls from people, threatening over the phone", said Mr. Hyderi's son, Reza. One of his cousins warned him not to "create problems for yourself and for others."

"My parents, they're very, very good people, and this is their world. They cannot communicate either in English or in French. They've grown up in Afghan society. It's everything to them. And suddenly you snatch everything from them... It's a punishment for the fact that my Dad went to testify against Mr. Shafia."

He's not alone. A brother of Yahya, having travelled from Sweden to testify in Ottawa, spoke of another conversation when Shafia had talked about planning a family trip to Sweden to kill Zainab. "He told me that we will put her in water and drown her", he testified. Interviewed later from Sweden, Fazil Javad said "They are crazy people. How can a father kill his children? I don't understand. I am always thinking about it... I cannot sleep."

And he too has been ostracized for speaking at the trial, for betraying family solidarity, for helping to convince the judge and the jury that guilt did indeed reside within the capabilities of a family whose head of household's word was law and those who dared resist his dictates could anticipate that they would suffer for it.

A sister of the murdered first wife of Mohammad Shafia who lives in France had written to police when she discovered the deaths had occurred. News items had referred to her sister as a cousin, when she was actually the first wife in a polygamous marriage, common enough in Afghanistan but unacceptable in Canada. She reported to police that her sister and Zainab had been the recipients of death threats.

And the murder charges were launched two weeks later. Diba Masoomi, Ms. Mohammad's sister, began receiving frightening and threatening telephone calls, telling her to withdraw her complaint. She travelled from France to Kingston Ontario to testify at the preliminary enquiry and at the trial. Her brother, concerned for her welfare, is nervous: "Every time she had to travel, I would accompany her.

"I didn't want to lose a second sister."