Jasmin, an 18-year-old Turkish-German woman, ran away from her home and parents to avoid an arranged marriage with a man from Turkey. Posted on 12/18/2004 6:24:15 PM PST by Destro
A Runaway Personifies Germany's 'Multi-Kulti' Debate
Jasmin, an 18-year-old Turkish-German woman, ran away from her home and parents to avoid an arranged marriage with a man from Turkey.
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: December 19, 2004
BERLIN, Dec. 16 - It would not seem, meeting her for the first time, that the young woman with a diamond nose stud and red cardigan was much different from any other teenager in Germany. But she has her own, difficult story.
She is 18 years old, living in a shelter whose address cannot be disclosed, having, in a cinematic episode, escaped from her Turkish-born parents. The reason, she said, was that they were threatening to kill her unless she agreed to marry a man from Turkey whom she had never met.
"I had a German passport, and that made me very valuable," the young woman, who has adopted the name Jasmin, explained, sitting over coffee at a cafe in Berlin, not far from the shelter where she has lived for the last few months. It is run by Papatya, a government-supported private social welfare organization. She said that her would-be betrothed in Turkey was wealthy and therefore able to pay a big price for a bride by which he could gain a German passport and German residency.
"For my parents," she said, "it was a great opportunity." She added: "I'm not going to get married to somebody that I don't know just because of my parents. I never even saw a picture."
The issue of ethnic Turkish Germans being forced to marry against their will is part of a heated debate in Germany and across Europe. A central question in the debate is whether European countries, with their Christian majorities and democratic traditions, can absorb large populations with very different and, in European eyes, retrograde customs?
Women like Jasmin are prime evidence for people in Germany who argue that the influx of Muslims is a threat to the country's social cohesion, and that stronger measures are needed to stop practices like forced marriages.
They are part of a broader current of opinion in this country, jolted into action by the recent murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. This view repudiates "multi-kulti," as multiculturalism is called here, the notion that Germany needs to become culturally more diverse.
This antagonism formed the main theme of a recent congress of Germany's main conservative parties, which issued a platform called "In Germany's Interest: Encouraging Integration, Fighting Islamism." It called for unspecified sanctions against foreigners who refused to accept Germany's democratic values, and recommended new restrictions on immigration.
But there are many other people who argue that cases like Jasmin's are unusual, and, because they are sensational, can be used for political purposes, to darken the image of the Turkish community. In reality, they say, the Turks are changing and adapting to German ways more or less the way other immigrant groups have in other countries.
"Integration takes a long time," said Barbara Joh, the former commissioner for foreign affairs in Berlin, who once protected Muslim girls against what most Germans would regard as unfair practices. "The Muslims themselves are in a confrontation, and we have to help them," she said. "But we are not doing that if we are drawing the line between the Muslims and ourselves, rather than between the fanatics and the nonfanatics."
There is no doubt, she says, that a portion of the Turkish immigration in Germany clings to the rural traditions and values that are more common in the eastern parts of Turkey, where most of the immigrants came from. Even so, she argues, cases like Jasmin's are the exception.
"We probably have about 30 to 40 cases now in Berlin," she said, referring to cases like Jasmin's, of young women being physically protected from their families after escaping from an arranged marriage. But 3,000 Turkish babies a year are born in Berlin, so 30 to 40 runaway girls is a small part of the population.
But Jasmin and the German social workers who care for her believe that oppression and control of ethnic Turkish girls are widespread, perhaps even dominant, in Turkish society in Germany. Only the women who run away get into the shelters created for them, they say, but most young women accept the arrangements made for them by their families, unhappily perhaps but without open protest.
In the Muslim neighborhood where she grew up in the southwestern city of Stuttgart, Jasmin said she was the only girl who ran away, but with only one exception, every other girl she knew was pushed by her parents into an arranged marriage.
Meanwhile, she said, almost all the Turkish men in Germany marry women brought here for that purpose from Turkey, rather than marrying a woman born in Germany.
"The attitude of families is that a girl from Turkey will be innocent and pure and will just stay at home and have babies," Jasmin said. "Turkish girls who grew up in Turkey don't know German laws, so they don't know how to protect themselves, even if things go badly."
Jasmin said she had had a poor relationship with her parents from the beginning, especially with her father, whom she described as a heavy drinker who beat her often.
Her parents did not want her to go to school, she said, but she went anyway, and eventually found an internship to prepare her for a career. She did not want to disclose the nature of that internship, because she worried that it would help her parents to find her in Berlin, where she has found a new internship in the same field.
There was no possibility of interviewing Jasmin's parents, from whose point of view an arranged marriage might simply have been the carrying on of Turkish tradition.
Whatever the reason, shortly before she turned 18, Jasmin said, her parents found a wealthy Turkish man whom they wanted her to marry. She refused. There were big arguments. One day, her parents showed up at the place where she was doing her internship, threatening to kill her if she did not leave with them.
That led to the scene that Jasmin said she thought one saw only in movies. She told her supervisor that she would have to quit, but when she explained why, the supervisor refused to let her go. "You're not going to quit your training," she recalled her supervisor as saying. "We're going to help you with this."
For five days, Jasmin said, she stayed in an upper floor of her workplace. Her parents went there every day and stayed until late at night demanding to see their daughter, who stayed out of sight. Asked why she did not call the police and ask for protection, Jasmin said she did not trust the police and was worried that they would simply turn her over to her family.
Finally, one night while her parents waited outside the front door, Jasmin was driven off the premises from an underground garage, and eventually her co-workers arranged for somebody to drive her to Berlin.
There she contacted the shelter, which has helped more than 1,000 girls like Jasmin since 1986. Jasmin has been living at the shelter ever since, though she plans soon to move to an apartment with another young woman in a similar situation.
How does she feel about being separated from her family?
"I miss my brother and sister," she said, both of whom are younger than she. "But I don't miss anybody else." Will her sister, who will turn 18 in a couple of years, also be forced to run away from home?
"If she's brave enough, she may go my way," Jasmin said. "Otherwise she won't."
Nice bureaucratic double-talk meaning that they aren't going to help this poor girl. Shameful.
You can't go home again, girl. I wouldn't try. Good luck to her.
If she goes home she is a dead girl - "honor killing" demands she dies at the hands of her father.
I have recently moved back from Sweden (hurray!!!!) and went to a school for immigrants there (long story) and there were lots of drama stories like this one among the gals I knew. These muslim girls want to adapt to western life much more than the men do, imo, becuase they see that in the western world, they are allowed rights and freedoms they had not been allowed in their home countries. Unfortunately, in Sweden, at least (and it looks like Germany as well) even if a girl wants to get away from what her parents have planned, she is not really backed well by the new country's government. I knew two girls who were to be married to strangers picked by their folks, and a girl who was being beaten by her husband, and told by the authorities in a shelter that there wasn't anything they could do to protect her.
I, personally, feel for these girls very much. I am glad the one in the story had the nerve to escape, and I wish her well.
Yep. I betcha Dad's sharpening the family knife even now. That girl shouldn't even stay in Germany, IMHO.
The father of this girl even now is telling her brother, his son that she has dishnored her family and telling his son how he should kill is own sister to regain the family honor. If she gets a meeting with her brother it might be that he is carrying the butcher knife in his pocket.
You don't want me to even begin telling you all that is wrong in Europe!!!
However, a gal that I knew quite well, I can't say that we were quite "friends" as the immigrnats I went to school with couldn't really fathom being friends with an American, but I did go to school with her daily for eighteen months, was the one who was running from the husband who was beating her. Very sad situation; she went to a women's shelter, and was visited by a man she didn't know who told her there was no escape, and she would be hunted down and killed whther she moved to another city or not. The wokers at the shelter told her there was no protection, and she went back to her husband.
I've been back since July, ad wonder if she is still living, poor thing.
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