Kyrgyzstan's Femicide Trend Continues Amid Social And Political Indifference

BISHKEK -- Speaking through tears, Salkynai Kurmanova says she knows why her murdered daughter, Rahima, never visits her in her dreams.

It was Kurmanova who reconciled Rahima with her estranged and persistently violent husband after he came to their family home this year to beg for forgiveness during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The same night Rahima returned to her husband, she was brutally murdered, receiving 27 stab wounds in the presence of her 3-year-old child.

"I realize now how infantile my reasoning was. I would tell her, 'He is also someone's son.... You are still young.... It's better to have a husband than to be without one," Kurmanova recalled.

In response, she said, Rahima asked her: "Why are we like this? We suffer because of our kindness and compassion. Why do you do this?"

"When I remember how she was tortured and killed, my heart breaks. Sometimes, I can't sleep until dawn. When a court hearing is coming up, I become anxious and can't sit still," the grieving mother said.

The case covering Rahima's murder is one of at least three shocking femicide cases currently being heard in Kyrgyz courts, with RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service able to speak earlier this month to the relatives of two of the three victims.

But there are no signs that the cases are shocking either officials or society into change.

Since 2010, according to research commissioned by the Open Society Foundation, more than 1,100 Kyrgyz women have been killed, with men the murderers in 80 percent of the cases and the victims knowing their killer in about 75 percent of the cases.

These statistics do not account for female suicides, which experts say are often underpinned by regular physical abuse.

"Public indifference and the ineffectiveness of relevant state bodies are the main causes of femicide," Gulnara Ibraeva, a sociologist, told RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service.

"We call this femicide because it is happening en masse."

'I Was Proud Of Her Pure Heart'

For Roza Zhekshenova, the mother of Aizhan Alykulova, the grief and shock of losing her daughter this February is compounded by the extreme violence of her death, a typical feature of femicide.

She remembers her as a "brave and charming" child who "loved her grandmother very much."

"When she was in the ninth grade she and her friends used money earned from picking fruit to buy yogurt for an orphanage. I was so proud of her pure heart," Zhekshenova recalled.

That passion for volunteering continued into her adult life. Alykulova, who worked abroad in Belgium, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and Turkey and spoke several languages fluently, would have turned 40 on August 12.

Instead, Zhekshenova spent that date mourning her daughter after she ended up dead less than a month after a man that she met at a New Year's celebration and began dating moved into her apartment.

"There are strangulation marks. There are three holes in the back of her head. Eight of her ribs were broken. One broken rib pierced her lungs and [another rib] ruptured her kidney. She had a brain hemorrhage. My daughter wore glasses, and the frames were embedded into her eyes. There was no part of her face without bruising," Zhekshenova said, weeping over photo albums containing memories of happier times.

"When I remember how my daughter suffered and died I don't want to live for another minute."

In the vast majority of cases, women who die from violence do so after suffering routine physical abuse. But when it comes to nonfatal cases of violence, "less than 30 percent reach court [and] perhaps only 1 percent result in full punishment," according to the law said Ibraeva.

Data cited by the UN indicates that three-quarters of murders involving women occur in the victim's home.

But while this makes it a more dangerous location statistically than the streets of Kyrgyz cities and villages, that doesn't mean Kyrgyz women enjoy security outside the home.

Police Negligence Unpunished, Protections Absent

Abductions of women, often for the purpose of marriage, are more common in Kyrgyzstan than in any other country in the Central Asian region.

This is reflected by the country placing 95th out of 177 in last year's Women Peace and Security Index (WPSI), lower than anywhere else in its immediate neighborhood, with Uzbekistan placing 94th.

Cases of so-called bride kidnapping, sometimes incorrectly conflated with pre-Soviet nomadic traditions, inevitably attract a greater media spotlight than deaths from domestic violence.

One such case that spurred civil society demonstrations in Bishkek in 2021 involved the brutal murder of 20-year-old Burulai Turdaaly-kyzy.

Turdaaly-kyzy was killed by a 29-year-old man who had already kidnapped her in the past after police inexplicably failed to separate the suspect and the victim at a police station after apprehending them.

Another shocking case concerned 27-year-old Aizada Kanatbekova, who was found strangled following a daytime abduction by a group of men, one of whom was fixated on the idea of marrying her.

In its report on Kanatbekova's case in 2021, Human Rights Watch cited reports that police in the capital city of Bishkek had failed to execute a police search for Kanatbekova and her captors, while "Kanatbekova's mother said police had laughed off her plea for help after the abduction and told her she'd soon be dancing at her daughter's wedding."

Public pressure to see the police punished for neglect in that case led to Bishkek's then-police chief being dismissed.

But according to HRW's follow-up report this month, there were reports even years ago that Bakyt Matmusaev had continued to work in powerful, albeit lower profile police posts after his dismissal.

In May, a district-level court in Bishkek ruled to acquit Matmusaev of neglect charges brought against him by Kanatbekova's family -- a verdict upheld by a city-level court earlier this month.

After a woman in southern Kyrgyzstan was killed in a domestic violence incident in January, the powerful chief of the State Committee for National Security (UKMK), Kamchibek Tashiev, said women suffering abuse could also appeal to local branches of the UKMK, but offered few details on the process.

"We must protect our mothers, wives, and daughters, and we are also obliged to help them," Tashiev said. "When there is a mother there is a family and a homeland."