Since 2003, she has written a column three times a week from London for Turkey’s third largest newspaper and has covered British news for a TV network owned by the same Turkish multinational media company.
In August 2004, she stirred the pot with her book on “honor killings” that was published in Turkey. An English version was released in London in September. In her book, entitled Why Did They Kill, Onal wrote about 10 case studies where women were killed by their brothers or fathers.
“Last year you weren’t able to talk about this in Turkey. The government didn’t talk about it. It was just a normal thing, like going to a pub … .” If a woman in a village that was not very modern began wearing modern clothes, “the men in the village kill her because they think it brought dishonor to them.”
Until recently, the men got off lightly under a law that considered honor killings somewhat equivalent to murders done in self-defense. The men profiled in her book “all were convinced they protected the honor of their families.” In most cases, if the men were arrested and convicted they often got only a month in prison. And society “considered it normal, thought it was the daughters’ fault.”
“But the law is changing and these honor killings are trying to be stopped — they’re not seen as normal any more,” Onal said.
As of mid-June, 64 women had died this year in Turkey in honor killings, including 16 in Istanbul. She said this is a fraction of what it was for the same period before the law was changed.
Onal has been a controversial journalist most of her life. She was on the hit list of both the revolutionary left and the Islamic radicals. Her early kudos came from reports on prison abuse of children, but she went on to cover the first Gulf War, the war in Bosnia and the evolving political situation of the Kurds. She rattled the Turkish government by many reports about corruption and in the mid-1990s officials put her on a black list, which effectively barred her from employment in any media controlled by the government. That “embargo” against her was lifted right before she got the Courage Award but she was still seen as almost unemployable.
When she returned with the international award in hand, however, the country’s first Islamic network, Channel 7, hired her to anchor a new political show, partly to draw upon her rich mix of sources across the political spectrum, but also to back her vision of a groundbreaking program aiming to show that “Muslims and non-Muslims, in a modern society, could get along.”
She invited Jews and Armenians to share a podium with Turks. It broke the isolation of all three groups and began to be emulated by other channels. The show, called Minefield, was 45 minutes in prime time, five times a week. She did it nonstop for two years, until the summer of 1997.
She took time off to care for her daughter, who lost a leg and an arm in a train accident, and, in 2000, moved with her to London to seek better medical care.
After moving to London, Onal became foreign correspondent for Channel 7. When their political party won control of the government and the network became less independent, she joined the private Turkish media group, Karamehmet. She writes a column for the newspaper Aksam and covers British news for its Show TV channel.
And she began to report on a myriad of issues involving Muslims: “terrorism issues, conflicts between Muslims and Christians and oppressed Muslim women.”
She sees it as a conflict that cuts many ways.
On one hand, she criticizes the U.S. invasion of Iraq, even if it got rid of a tyrant. She protests the U.S. abuse of prisoners and suspected terrorists. She also criticizes Palestinian terrorists.
She said that “modern society should take steps to stop Muslims from blaming everything wrong on Western countries” and should “start to face themselves and the problems with their own society.”
That’s a hard sell when the U.S. presence in Iraq is so inflammatory, she said. Once the United Nations assumes more of a role there, she hopes the debate on reforms can begin anew.
“If leaders start telling their own people what is wrong with their society, maybe people will believe them,” she said, adding that this message is rejected when it comes from Western countries.
Onal said that the Courage Award came at a critical crossroads in her life and influenced her next steps, professionally and personally.
It meant a lot to find “that there actually were other people who were doing what they thought was right,” she said. She also realized that she was not alone.
She was surprised to learn “that in the United States, there are people who are rich and who live comfortably, who don’t need to do anything about poor people, but who actually do care about them. That affected me. The rich don’t have any contact with the poor in Turkey,” she said.
Onal took those insights back to Turkey and used them to shape her groundbreaking Channel 7 show, which challenged the racial isolation of Turks from minorities.
The Courage Award also opened her eyes to see that “the suffering and sadness of people does not have a nationality but is a common thing around the world.”
Today, with her daughter educated and, at 25, ready to take a job, Onal is preparing to move back to Turkey. She will keep her column and hopes to keep one foot in television.
Her current challenge, she said, is looking intensively at two major issues: disabled people and “women and their role in the world today, especially Muslim women ... . Because if women in society start to improve themselves, the countries will be improved. And religion will be reformed.”