New York Times © (10/18/97)
RADFORD, England -- She has had to move 19 times over the last five years. She steps outside her suburban home only after checking the street for strange cars and rehearsing the nearby footpath escapes. Once back inside, she shoves heavy furniture under the front door handle and places a knife within quick reach.
The British-born daughter of Pakistani immigrants, she is under death threat from her own father and brother. They have vowed to find her and murder her because she left home rather than give up her studies at 16 and accept an arranged marriage with a man they chose from a Pakistani village.
She is now 25 and calls herself Zena, not her real name. The Englishman she married is 35 and goes by the fictitious name of Jack. They tell their tale of love, flight, five years on the run and continuing fear for their lives in the same broad-voweled Yorkshire accents.
Cases like hers are becoming alarmingly common in this part of northern England, which has attracted a high number of immigrants from rural mountain regions of Pakistan that rigidly observe ancient social customs. Their experiences stand out against a broader portrait of Britain as a country where nonwhite people and ethnic dress and customs are increasingly commonplace and uncontested.
The women are in their teens and twenties, British by birth and upbringing, who want the freedom that their friends and classmates have to continue their schooling, hold jobs and marry partners of their own choosing.
But these simple wishes are in direct conflict with their fathers' notions of women's roles, filial discipline and clan honor, notions so strong that families have commissioned searches by bounty hunters, kidnappings and forced one-way trips to Pakistan.
In extreme cases, the families have punished their daughters by beating them, throwing acid in their faces and burning them to death.
"Up until a few years ago when coroners began getting suspicious, we had a number of 'suicides,' where Asian girls who left home were said to have set themselves on fire," said Philip Balmforth, the Bradford area community officer of the West Yorkshire Police. "The families would all tell the same story -- 'She had been sad, she was so depressed, we should have taken her to see a doctor."'
Balmforth showed a visitor part of a 1992 television documentary recording a meeting between Tahar Mahmood, a bounty hunter from nearby Huddersfield, and the husband and father of a young woman he had been paid to find.
"They are so disgraceful, these women," Mahmood says on the film. The husband, an arranged partner from Pakistan, outlines the mission, saying: "We'll get her all right. We'll scar her, throw acid on her face, we'll pour petrol on her and set her alight."
Among the many women who have sought Balmforth's help was Tasleem Begum, a 20-year-old supermarket worker in Bradford who refused the Pakistani partner her family had selected. She was killed by her brother-in-law, Shabir Hussain, who drove his car onto the sidewalk in a residential neighborhood and ran her over.
He escaped to Pakistan the same day on a flight from Manchester but returned to Britain a month later, was arrested and a year ago was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
That is the only case that has led to a conviction, and according to Balmforth, a retired inspector on the West Yorkshire force, the police are usually unable even to bring a prosecution.
The women who are being pursued cannot identify who is coming after them until it is too late, families will never admit to hiring bounty hunters, and the women who are forcibly taken to Pakistan, even if they are English-born, fall out of British jurisdiction once they are back in their parents' native land.
Balmforth said that he had 742 cases of Asian woman from the area who had left home and sought protection from their own families and that the number was increasing each year. "I have girls in hiding across the country because the murders most certainly happen," he said.
Piled up in his office were bags and suitcases with belongings for some of the young women he has placed in hostels run by sympathetic Asian women across northern England and Scotland.
Balmforth said it was policy to help the women find safe lodging somewhere untraceable and not to let the families know where they were. Those families that do get in touch with him are angry with this arrangement but in time, he said, many realize he is the only conduit to a daughter and they will ask him to take belongings and messages to her.
He will arrange meetings and conversations only if the daughter is willing and if he can make sure that no one follows her from the meeting place back to her hostel.
"I effectively take ownership of Asian women over 16 who are reported missing," he said. "When I get a call, I go and look for the girls. The whole problem rests on a clash of cultures."
Ishtiaq Ahmed, the director of the Racial Equality Council in Bradford, where 10 percent of the 457,000 residents are of Pakistani background, said the clash often became abruptly apparent at age 16.
"A girl's getting very good grades, and the school tells her she is qualified to go on to university, she imagines a life with a job and a career and she sees her friends going on that way, and suddenly her family says, 'No, you can't do that,"' he said. "For the family it is a matter of honor, and the stigma is very great if the girl objects."
Ahmed, who came to Britain from Rawalpindi 30 years ago at the age of 10, said: "Often she doesn't want to leave, but she feels her own point of view is so totally dismissed, so she leaves. Sometimes the girls are flown off to Pakistan, on all kinds of pretexts. And in some cases the consequences are very brutal."
Ahmed said the problem was particularly acute with first-generation immigrants, the men like Zena's father who came in the 1950s to work in the mills and foundries that once dotted the region. Today the buildings that once housed these heavy industries are mostly empty, and Pakistani immigrants are more commonly found in the restaurant business, driving taxis or owning and managing small shops.
"They are very fixed in their ways," he said of these older men. "The second generation, the bridging generation, they will be more understanding."
Zena and her husband have written a book called "Zena and Jack" at the suggestion of John McCarthy, a British journalist who was a hostage in Beirut, Lebanon, for four years. They had sent him a letter praising his book on his captivity and telling him of their plight.
In an interview in London,
the couple said that while money from the book had brought them the first
earned income of their married life and had them off welfare for the past
year, they did not expect their predicament to ease.
they have been given new names and
papers by the government, and they stay away from the northern counties
where the bounty hunters operate. But she is dark and his face is ruddy,
and they consequently have to move about separately in public for fear
of being spotted and reported to the network.
When Zena called home in the months after her departure to see if her family would end the search and remove its death threat, she said, her father said: "You died for me the day you left. You can't hide from us forever, and when we catch you, you are both dead." Her brother then took the phone and said he would make it his "mission" to find them, kill them "slowly" and bring them home in body bags.
"I'd give anything to have my father tell me he loves me," the young woman said, trying a weak smile. "But there are no two ways about it. If they find us, they will definitely kill us."