Choosing Death by Fire Over Marriage

Dec. 11 -- It was a scene right out of Romeo and Juliet, but with a modern, very ugly twist.

On a Friday afternoon in November 1995, while Sufian Miah was circling a four-story building in the eastern Bangladeshi city of Sylhet, he finally caught sight of his girlfriend for the first time in more than four weeks.

It had been a traumatic month for the British-born son of Bangladeshi immigrant parents. His girlfriend, Shipa, had been whisked out of Britain just three days before her 18th birthday to be married off to her cousin in Bangladesh, a country she had left when she was barely a year old.

The abduction came as a complete surprise to Miah, a London-based community youth activist who had been dating Shipa for several years.

Shipa's family had earlier accepted a marriage proposal put forth in the "correct way" by Miah's family, and the young Briton was unaware that her parents had no intention of actually allowing their daughter to marry a man of her choice.

On the morning of Oct. 12, 1995, Shipa was whisked to a cousin's place near Heathrow Airport, then flown to Bangladesh. She was not informed about her family's plans for her future until just a few hours before boarding the plane.

While the idea of a forced marriage may seem medieval, it is still common practice in many parts of the world. And many of these unwilling brides see death as the only way out.

‘My Family Was Selling Me …’

In the western Afghan city of Herat, there have been reports of an alarming rise in the number of women dousing themselves with fuel and setting themselves on fire in order to avoid unwanted marriages.

In July, Herat TV interviewed a 19-year-old Afghan woman called Shakiba from a hospital bed. She told reporters she burned herself because her family had sold her to a 28-year-old man for $10,000 as a second wife.

"My family was selling me and I didn't know what else to do," a severely burned Shakiba told a television reporter at the Herat Public Hospital.

In the absence of any state or nongovernmental services that she was aware of, Shakiba decided her only recourse was to commit suicide by an age-old method — she chose an incendiary death over the prospect of living with her new husband's first wife.

Shakiba's ghastly experience created a stir, with Herat governor and controversial Afghan warlord Ismail Khan even making a highly publicized visit to the hospital.

But the attention came too late. Weeks after she was transferred to a hospital in neighboring Iran for better medical treatment, Shakiba succumbed to her burns, joining an untold number of Afghan women whose options seem to include a range of ways to die, but not, apparently, to live.

Hard to Document

Estimates of self-immolations in Afghanistan are hard to come by, especially in the largely lawless northern and southern regions.