In a survey conducted in 2016 and funded by the UN, a fifth of Kyrgyz women reported that their marriage had begun with an abduction, known as “ala-kachuu”, or “grab and run”
: People around Kyrgyzstan paid tribute to Burulai. There is evidence that bride kidnapping has become more common in Kyrgyzstan. Marsbek Bodoshev stabbed Burulai in a police station. Her father regrets not taking Marsbek’s threats against his daughter seriously
From what I could piece together, over the course of three months in the summer of 2017, Burulai and Marsbek occasionally went to the cinema or out for a meal. The relationship ended around the time Burulai began her second year of medical college, when she started dating a young man she met at the sewing workshop. She didn’t tell her friends about him at first, either.
By the time Burulai’s family heard what had happened, she was halfway to Marsbek’s native village, hundreds of kilometres from Bishkek. Burulai’s father knew Marsbek’s older brother Zholdoshbek from his days as a driver. He called to demand the return of his daughter, but Zholdoshbek instead suggested meeting.
Arranged marriages were the norm for Turkic tribes that roamed the Silk Road. As elsewhere, families chose their children’s spouses for economic and political reasons – love was a lucky accident. In the early 20th century, when the Soviet Union absorbed Kyrgyzstan and its neighbours, women were given the right to vote, divorce, terminate a pregnancy and, at least on paper, to choose a spouse. Consensual civic unions became the only legally recognised form of marriage.
Nurlan told me that he had spent almost a decade searching for a bride who could tend the livestock, cope with the rough, remote conditions and care for his ailing grandfather. Boldukan lived on the next dirt-road over from his, but he didn’t consider courting her, largely because she wasMost kidnappings begin with a woman being shoved into a car – you can see grainy videos of such abductions on YouTube – and so it was with Boldukan.
Among the dozens of abductees I spoke to, the woman whose circumstances differed most from Boldukan’s, at least superficially, was Zarima Koichumanova. Zarima worked at an organisation aiding rural women and young people, and her mother had spent the past decade helping women found small businesses and participate in local politics.
Aidin’s mother berated Zarima for not performing her wifely duties. When that didn’t work, she asked Zarima’s parents to intervene. Her father had initially felt powerless to defy his own fatherbut now asked his wife to find out what was happening.
Burulai’s father, who still castigates himself for ignoring Marsbek’s threats, told me he’d been buoyed during the trial by a lawyer’s suggestion that his daughter’s name, the “turning moon”, might signify a turning point in the country’s attitude towards bride abduction. He lost faith after the policemen were let off so easily.
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