Both human dignity and human survival are lost in the Du’a Khalil story. This chapter explores people’s responses to the brutal killing of Du’a Khalil in 2007 in Northern Iraq. Du’a was killed in a public stoning. She was dragged to the market place in her home village Bashiqa where hundreds of men, including police officers, gathered to participate in her killing. Many stood by and watched, others filmed the slaying on their cell phones and some hurled the boulders that would finally crush the life from her young body (Mahmoud 2007). The scene depicts a brutality and disregard for human life that is indeed barbaric. A scene which leaves many viewers with the question: how can this violence happen in today’s world?

My interest here lies in examining the way in which the world – Kurds, Iraqis and others – constructs and evaluates this painful display of femininity, brutality, life and death. In my research I examined the texts of online reactions to this murder. I read through the many hundreds of responses posted on sites such as CNN and YouTube as well as the many thousands of signatures offered to the International Campaign Against Killing and Stoning of Women in Kurdistan.2 The online campaign is

52the primary source referred to in this paper. Signatures to this campaign are most often named rather than anonymous and they generally identify their affiliated organisations.3

The spectacle of Du’aas death provides a platform for expressions of not only deep sympathy and horror but also the stage for voicing systemic intolerance and violence in our world. Reactions to her story articulate deep national and ethnic shame, a plethora of dichotomised stereotypes (East/West, male/female, Islam/Christian, Islam/Ezidi,4 Kurd/Arab, innocence/guilt), and contain disturbing expressions of increasing religious and ethnic intolerance and hatred towards perceived others.5 Perhaps most paradoxical given the aggressive occupation in Iraq by US allied forces and security companies which have proliferated so much needless violence and fear, are reactions to this tragedy underpinned by a belief in cultural divisions between the civilised and the barbaric. It is the barbarism inherent within the public and fatal stoning of Du’a that occupies the forefront of international criticism regarding this sexualised

53brutality. It is barbarism that saturates every angle of this tragedy. And it is barbarism that evokes the uncanny repetition of barbaric violence within specific versions of civilised humanity.

While these reactions give voice to various seemingly conflicting perspectives, in some ways the polarised responses of horror, sadness and sympathy on the one hand and anger and hatred on the other meet in the vociferous condemnation of Du’aas killers. Moreover, many of these polarised identifications unite in the presumption of the right not simply to judge but also to execute the sentence upon those who committed this heinous crime.6 The Internet has become the stage for the mass performance of ruling that extends its verdict further than the village of Bashiqa to all of Iraq and the Middle East. As a spectator, the trauma of violence inherent in the witnessing of Du’aas death does not stop at the moment of her final breath but continues in the narratives of reaction. The violence itself extends beyond the geography of Bashiqa to all those geographies that connect. The violence emerges from the disparate voices across the world.7

What makes Du’aas murder central to this research is that the crime was captured on mobile phone video, expediently posted on the Internet and internationally covered on major television broadcasts and Internet sites. This was not planned coverage by established news teams, but rather, spontaneously captured by the very perpetrators at the scene. Furthermore, this is not the same as the everyday sectarian violence occurring in Iraq and depicted on regular news broadcasts. This is a violence directed not towards the enemy – not Sunni against Shiite or

54Ezidi against Muslim – but towards the self, the family. “Honour killing is a tragedy in which fathers and brothers kill their most beloved, their daughters and sisters” (Mojab 2002). It is an erstwhile secret violence that now through the conduit of Du’aas death has burst into every corner of the globe to disturb all of our civilised sensitivities. The dissemination of this spectacle is a chance contingent upon the historical, technological and regional circumstances that permit this.

Over a year later, one can still log on and watch Du’a as she dies. In witnessing that moment one can almost feel her final breath. Du’aas murder and dying moments are a public spectacle open to the whole world. In some ways it is possible for us to own, to possess, her death. This theatre of horror, this pornographic spectacle of brutality, is ours. Whether we like it or not this violence belongs to us all and as witnesses to this slaying we too are implicated in the consequences.

In his most recent book, Violence, Slavoj Zizek (2008) addresses the question of whether the spectator could continue to go on as usual after being witness to such a scene of brutality. He concludes:

Reading the postings from those who have watched Du’aas death gives support to Zizek’s observation. There is an overwhelming disavowal inherent within the comments of the witnesses and a general disbelief that this kind of killing can continue in the 21st century. There is open dismissal of the immediate and overwhelming Kurdish reproach of such an act8 and there is a subsequent disavowal of the humanity of Du’aas

55killers and by extension all Kurdish men, sometimes women too – all Ezidi, Arab, Muslim, indeed all Middle Eastern people.

In a violent process of racialised othering, there are several calls for the extermination of all Ezidis, Muslims and Arabs, charges of devil-worshipping and Kurds are constructed as primitive, prehistoric, monkeys, dogs, rats, animals; the very humanity of the villagers is brought into question. This disavowal of the humanity of the Other functions to put a distance between the civilised viewer and the barbaric Other that allows the viewer to refuse to fully assume the consequences of the knowledge that this type of brutality is indeed human. The distance placed between the viewer and the scene is more than merely geographical. The distance created is epistemological, moral and religious; the distance is human. I know but don’t want to know. I saw these humans killing this young woman with stones but I don’t want to believe that they are humans. They are humans but they are not a part of civilised humanity. This action is not of the civilised world, it belongs to the barbaric Other; it is inhumane – not human. There is a consequent disavowal of the violence within the self in these expressions; the civilised subject must disavow all memory of internally repressed barbarism in order to maintain a civil self-image diametrically opposed to the barbaric. Du’a thus becomes the threshold between the civilised and barbaric worlds and her feminine body functions as the buffer zone that constitutes the divisions between them.

In his analysis of today’s liberal tolerance towards Others, Zizek makes the observation that this tolerance comes hand in hand with the demand that the Other keeps his distance. “My duty to be tolerant towards the Other effectively means that I should not get too close to him, intrude on his space. In other words, I should respect his intolerance of 56my over-proximity” (2008, p. 35). According to this point of view, we can tolerate the Other only when a safe distance between the self and the Other is maintained: a distance that permits the tolerance of difference on the one hand and avoidance of an encounter on the other. The public broadcasting of Du’aas killing transgressed this safety zone between the civilised self and the barbaric Other. Her murder and the brutal Other emerged as too close, at a dangerous proximity to the self. In the civilised encounter with such a barbaric act of cruelty, the viewing subject comes face-to-face with such violence and from the words of many viewers it is apparent that this encounter itself evokes a traumatic and pathological response:

How can sense be made of these statements? What right or reason is there to respond to the barbaric with violence, to murderers with execution? How many people should be killed, how many killers should be killed? How is it possible to reconcile absolute disgust and repulsion at such an act of violence with the desire to find a humane solution? Will the pathologisation of an entire culture, be that ethnic, religious, gendered or geographical, provide a solution to the humanitarian quest to bring about justice and equality for women – to ensure the basic human right to live without fear? When reading through the many comments such as those above it is evident that we must rethink our responses to violence evoked through moral outrage. As Zizek advises, if we are to think critically about violence “we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lures of this directly visible ‘subjective violence’ performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (2008, p. 1). Responses of moral outrage at subjective, clearly visible violence

58are not only unsuccessful in addressing violence in its less visible forms or in recognising the conditions through which this may emerge, but moral outrage also serves to obfuscate the violence within our response – within our civilised selves. From the responses it is evident that these reactions of outrage do not function outside the discourse of violent barbarism to which they seek to separate. Indeed these responses reveal an inherent participation within this same system of violence.11

The spectacle of Du’aas murder provides an opportunity to think about violence in a serious way that demands we look beneath the surface of what Zizek calls ‘subjective violence’. The violent racism voiced within so many of the online narratives of outrage reveals a pathological condition brought to light through the encounter with Du’a. Within this encounter the civilised subject is presented with the opportunity of analysis and analysis reveals that the outrage to the barbaric act itself rests upon a repressed barbarism that exists deep within the civilised self. Violence within the civilised subject resurfaces in the struggle to respond to the traumatic event and this struggle brings to the surface a range of persistent racist and deadly attitudes towards the Middle East.

The underlying barbarism within these condemning responses to the barbaric may well be viewed as mere emotive reactions to such horror, to the trauma of being a spectator to such an unthinkable act. However, it is possible that these comments reflect more insidious problems than this. For one, reading these texts reveals that indeed there is a flip side

59to civility, there is an underbelly to our claims of progressive humanity. Perhaps this is the stage in human progress that Norbert Elias discusses in his theorising of de-civilisation, in which he refers to evidence of regress, such as war, in our civilising process (1994, p. 106).

However, it is more useful to think of this encounter with the barbaric in terms of Freud’s (1919) uncanny return of the repressed. It is the repressed barbarism – this underbelly of brutality – that confronts us when we come face-to-face with images such as this. The barbarism repressed by the demands to represent civilised humanity is not something that the subject has overcome through progressive cultural values that produce repulsion to such acts. Neither is this a stage in a civilising process wherein the civilised subject is suffering a temporary reversion in the long civilising process. Rather, it is more accurate to view these violent responses to barbarism as something hidden in the struggle to represent an image of civil subjectivity. The barbarism is that which is repressed within the civilised subject but simultaneously that which constantly threatens to reappear and incite trauma in the subject.

Freud stipulates that when confronted with the appearance of the uncanny, the subject is thrown into hysterical illness wherein the subject recites the same incoherent language connected to previous uncanny encounters. In the online signatures to the International Campaign Against Killing and Stoning of Women in Kurdistan, there is an undeniable repetition of certain words used to describe the feelings of anger, disgust, sadness and shame of the viewer: savage, vicious, brutal, heinous, monsters, cowards, uneducated, barbaric, inhumane, pathetic, prehistoric, medieval, madness, primitive, demonic, abhorrent, cold-blooded, obscene, stone aged, premeditated, slaughter, horrendous, deranged, sadistic, grotesque, unlawful, unfathomable, unpardonable, unspeakable, unforgivable, unthinkable, shame.

The most common repetitions of language used to respond to Du’a are the words barbaric and civilised.12 These opposing terms are couched

60within assumptions of an obvious ethnic and geographical distinction between the East and West where the West is aligned with civility and the East with barbarism. These voices of condemnation are alarming. Not because they condemn Du’aas murder, but rather, because so many of these civilised testimonies of condemnation contain an inherent barbarism that is alarming – a barbarism that one observes when looking into the faces of the frenzied crowd participating at the scene of Du’aas death. Expressions of barbarism are both foreign and familiar to the civilised subject. The barbarism within the so-called civilised response demands that we give critical analysis to the imagined and arbitrary divisions between civil/barbaric and East/West. This violent response to brutality brings into question the innocence of the judge in this situation.

The repetitive hysterical babble within this uncanny encounter is evident in the incoherent narratives that extend verdict for the crime of Du’aas murder throughout the Middle East. The hysteria is further evident in the calls to rid the planet of these scumbags, the calls that refuse to acknowledge that people in Iraq may abhor such brutality or that people in Iraq may also be civilised subjects. Moreover, within the hysteric’s response, the brutality of her murder serves to justify the presence of US allied forces in Iraq and the Anfal campaigns under the Saddam regime. At one extreme of this violence, the hysteria extends to calls for nuclear eradication of whole populations of humans and at the other to hang the murderers and rescue the women. The Ezidi of Bashiqa provides the civilised hysteric with the evidence for religious condemnation and racist disavowal. Time after time the online respondent evokes similarly incoherent language when referring to the civil goodness of Western geography where women of Iraq could find a haven and the good intentions of the civilised world, while simultaneously repressing any memory or testimony to the contrary. Repeatedly, the goodness of the civil subject is elevated through further pathologisation of the Iraqi culture.

This performance of outrage – of locating the imaginary civilised world on the high ground of morality – rests upon the condemning subject’s 61desire to legitimate and maintain its civilised self-image. Freud makes the point that the uncanny return of that which ought to remain hidden is connected to the recurrence of the repressed memories of that part of the subject. The uncanny “is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (1919, p. 394). The uncanny return of that which has been estranged thus evokes fear and neurosis in the subject. In the civilised encounter with the barbaric, the subject is thrown into a fear that they too may disintegrate into barbarism. If the barbarism repressed within the civilised self reappears in the encounter that transgresses safe distance then does this uncanny reappearance not call into question the civilised subject itself? This uncanny encounter with violence reconstitutes civil/barbaric divisions and reveals a barbaric and racist pathology at the heart of many of those that claim the civilised moral space. The screening of Du’aas brutal killing exposed civilisation’s weakness, the repression of barbarism and the underlying and persistent fear that ‘we’ – the civilised world – too could fall into the chaos of barbarism. Violent responses to Du’aas murder may indeed bespeak this pathology of fear at the heart of the viewer. While elevating the goodness of civility, barbaric responses surface as confronting these narratives. The uncanny return of the barbaric within the self disrupts the fetishist disavowal of the repressed and reveals that a pathological condition motivates the moral response.

It is inaccurate to suggest that these online comments represent social opinion in its totality. Certainly, in regard to language of expression, there is a notable difference between the comments posted on CNN and YouTube websites and those signatures in support of the International Campaign Against Killing and Stoning of Women in Kurdistan. However, given that the signatures to the campaign are mostly authored, alongside the ontology of foreign occupation within Iraq at present and the persistent campaigns purporting to alter the political and social structure of some Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq, it is evident that little value is held towards existing forms of civil governance or civil society. These voices parallel an inherent disavowal in general for the civility that has long been a part of countries such as Iraq. Often accredited as the birthplace of civilisation, perceptions of Iraqi society 62are at present not positive. The brutal slayings of Du’a and many young women like her in the name of honour further perpetuate such negative impressions and unhelpful stereotypes. These killings must stop if we are to have a world that respects the human rights of all people; and all governments of the world, as well as corporations and individuals, must recognise the interconnectedness of the humanity of all people. Unthinkable and barbaric violations against women such as that suffered by Du’a continue every day throughout our world. Although it seems reasonable to argue that there is indeed no honour in honour killings, that this is indeed a barbaric act, it is more difficult to explicate our civilised responses to this brutality.

How then is it possible to respond to such a violation of humanity in a way that does not participate in this system of violence? What does it mean to respond from the position of civility? If this barbarism is a part of our humanity then given the same accident of birth, given the same life, would we not also participate in this killing? Is it possible for us to recognise that while there is an obvious barbaric underbelly to civility, the opposite might also be the case? That underneath the barbaric there may lie civility and that this civility might present opportunities to encourage equal respect for women and their rights to live without fear of being killed for being women.