Stolen brides of Kazakhstan: The fightback

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0:40One lady was trying to stop a taxi in the street to take her home from work. And there was a man who liked her. They were colleagues. He saw her. Some of his friends had a car. And he invited her, oh, please sit in the car. And she didn't feel any threats from him. and she sat in the car, but then they didn't take her to the place where she wanted. And the guy just told her, oh, now I will marry you and I'm taking you to my house. She was forced to sit in the middle between two other men who were holding her so that she would not escape. When the car was standing at some traffic light, she opened the door, she ran out, she almost escaped, but then she was pulled back into the car.

1:27and then what happened next another driver he was just driving behind that car who saw that he realized that something was wrong and he started following that car and he was signaling telling them to stop he called the police he said that you know there is a woman in the car in front of me and I think the woman needs help police took over they drove fast and they stopped the car and they released her The thing is, no one was punished because that guy who kidnapped you, he actually said, no, no, it was just a joke. And because they didn't commit any violence, the police did not even, they actually had to close the case and that's it.

2:15Almaty, the biggest city in Kazakhstan, is a modern metropolis of skyscrapers, shops and busy highways. Yet in plain sight, just outside the city, a group of men got together to apparently kidnap a young woman in order to marry her to one of them. And the case didn't even come to court. But things might be starting to change. In September, Kazakhstan introduced a law making it a criminal offence to force a woman or girl into marriage, including through kidnapping her and making her marry her abductor. My name is Halida Azhigulova. I'm a barrister and a human rights lawyer. So this is a very progressive law.

2:57Human rights lawyers and human rights activists in Kazakhstan, they have been advocating and fighting for criminalization of this violation of human rights for more than 20 years. You know, according to some unofficial data, thousands of cases may take place in Kazakhstan a year. The problem is that without official punishment for forced marriages, we don't have any official statistics. Mostly it takes place in the southern region of the country, and mostly it takes place in villages and rural areas. Unfortunately, such practice takes place. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

3:38I'm Monika Whitlock in Kazakhstan with my colleague Rose Kudabaeva. we're meeting some of the thousands of Kazakh women who've been abducted. Here they call it stolen. We've been asking them, what happens if you're stolen? How come stealing's been allowed to flourish? Or what are those who oppose it up against? Rose's Kazakh, and it's her voice you'll hear in most of our conversations. Our journey began in the far south of this immense country, in a village close to the border with Uzbekistan.

4:27Everything on this table is made by me, baked, cooked. That's homemade, that's Kazakh cheese, so the very dried cheese. that's freshly baked bread. We have cows and we make butter from our own milk. So it's freshly made butter. Please, please eat. Clara is full of energy. She churns butter, grinds millet, bakes bread, ferments horse's milk and runs a small holding. She has a day job as a nurse and a side hustle baking pies for lunch at the village school. She's warm and confident. Her five sons are all champion wrestlers. The wall is hung with their medals. Life, she says, is good. But it wasn't always so.

5:19Clara arrived in the village as a girl almost 30 years ago.

5:28I came here for holidays to visit relatives because my mom comes from here. And someone looked at me, someone liked me, and he stole me. So when I came here, my relatives, close relatives, wives of my brothers, they told me, let's go and visit someone. So I went with them to someone's place, and that's it. That was the house of the guy who liked me. And then I just couldn't leave because I was sort of already stolen. I was 16.

6:04I knew nothing about him. and my future husband was 11 years older than me. Clara was a high-spirited schoolgirl, strong and fast. Her friends say she didn't let anyone push her around. But this time, she couldn't run away. The very fact of crossing the threshold of a stranger's home meant that she could now be claimed as a bride. To leave, she says, would have brought shame on her and her family.

6:40We were brought up as children to do what our parents told us. And all parents at that time, they said, if you're stolen, if you're crossed their threshold, you cannot come back.

7:09I cried at first. I was a child, 16 years old. And I said, I want to leave. But they laughed at me. They said, it's done. You will stay here. You will marry him. You cannot go back now. Because you crossed that threshold. You said, you crossed the threshold. Yes, I crossed the threshold. I crossed the threshold. I said, I didn't get a threshold. I said, I said, I'm not going to go back now. Yes, I crossed the threshold and they told me I cannot cross it back and then I stayed. What did your parents think about that?

7:54My parents couldn't do anything because it's a tradition. When the young girl crosses a threshold, it's done, she cannot go back home. my mother was very cross she was against it usually when young men's family when they steal a girl afterwards they send two elders to ask forgiveness and these two people they arrived to my parents place and my mom told them you took my baby she's a child she was at school she needs to study. But then my mum's relatives, they've told her it'll be a great shame, just agree. And after some time, my mum, she had to agree. The man's family paid a bride price, one cow and 30 ,000 kazakhtenge.

8:48That's about$120, a good amount in the hungry 1990s. Clara's parents used it to buy clothes and bedding for her They said, he's from a good family, neither blind nor lame and he seems to be sound And with those words, they left her Clara thanks God that her new family treated her well and she grew, eventually, into happiness She was, she says, very lucky

9:19Dinara was a student when she was stolen while out walking in 2019 She's in her mid-twenties now with two wriggling toddlers and a baby, all girls. If you don't mind, could you tell us how come you were stolen? What happened to you?

9:42They stole me in my own village. I was 19, almost 20. And I was going to the shop, and after the shop I was going to my relative. So I've noticed the car going around without plate, without any numbers. On the way to my relative, I realized that this car was following me. It was the place where there were no houses and no one was around, nobody. So that was the place where they snatched me. I never saw this man before. They forced me into the car and just took me away from the street. Her kidnapper and his friends drove her to his home, where his whole family was ready waiting. They were complete strangers to Dinara.

10:43First of all, they told me to change my clothes, all of it. They gave me robes with leggings and the headscarf, and underwear, and for some time I was refusing to change my clothes. But then at the end I did it, I changed my clothes. But then my relatives arrived, my brothers with their wives. Then elderly people came and elderly people from both sides met. And they forced me to sign the paper that I arrived there with my own will. The white headscarf is a symbol of possession by the man and his wider family. The headscarf means she was a married woman. She felt pressure not only from his side, but also from her own side.

11:31And after this additional pressure from the elders, she just realised she couldn't go home. It must have been a just terrible shock.

11:46I was crying, I was in shock, I was terrified. I still have this trauma inside of me. But at the end, I've decided to stay because of this shame. And I lived with this man for five years. I had three daughters. but at the end he just told me, go away, get away. He just said, get out. Dinara had nowhere to go. She ended up with her three little girls in one of the few women's refuges, which is where we met. It's a community of women and children funded by local well-wishers. On the day we visited, someone had just dropped off a sack of pears and one of potatoes as a gift. About half the women living here were stolen, most when they were very young.

12:42Under the new law, the minimum penalty for bride kidnapping is two years in prison, with a maximum of ten. But who actually is the kidnapper? We're not just talking about the actions of a lone individual man, are we? We're talking about a whole community of relationships. Forced marriage, it includes punishment for any person, including the parents and relatives of a girl, of a woman, who force her to get married. Lawyer Khalida Ashegolova. And also forced marriage includes the family of a kidnapper. They are forcing her to agree to this kidnapping, to agree to her fate, to agree to marry her kidnapper.

13:26And in my view, they're equally responsible. They're equally liable, criminally liable. because they act not as a family but as a gang, as a criminal gang, and they all should be punished, in my view. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive. But even though I've got questions, join me, Maren's upset web, every week for my show Maren Talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists and experts about how markets really work.

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14:24I was stolen when I was 17. This is Kubala's story.

14:41Because I was working as a secretary in local administration, I had to deal with all sorts of papers, like taxes, home ownership, lots and lots of different papers. They told me that I need to take some papers somewhere I went to this house and as soon as I crossed the threshold, the relatives of the man who wanted to steal me, they put their headscarf on my head and the grandmother of this man, she was lying down on the threshold telling me, don't step over me, don't leave. Because for Kazakhs it's like a very shameful thing to step over someone, and I couldn't step over her. So, Rose, why didn't Gopala just step over the grandmother and walk out of the house?

15:36It's absolute taboo. You cannot do it because you can bring really bad luck on yourself. She's scared. She's scared of the shame. She's scared of her own relative's reaction.

15:59For the whole day, for 24 hours, I was trying to resist. I told them, no, I won't agree, I won't marry him. And for the whole day, they were pressing me, his relatives, mostly women. And after a day, I agreed because of all this pressure. They cover your head first with a headscarf. And when they open your face, that's it. You are virtually married. They just send someone to my parents' house and told them, we stole your daughter. And my parents couldn't do anything. How did they react?

16:47My father, he said, I want my daughter to be happy. That's my only wish. And they said, don't worry, she will be happy. And how was life for you then? You were married. You must have been in shock.

17:14After two days, my husband started to give me instructions what to do and what not to do. orders. I couldn't do anything without his agreement. Can I go to the toilet? Can I do this? Can I do that? And one of the first things he told me, don't communicate with the neighbours. Gopala's life became one of isolation and abject drudgery, cooking and cleaning for the man and his parents. The man, she says, turned out to be extremely violent and his parents turned a blind I. Of her 10 pregnancies, Gobala lost three after terrible assaults. Halida, you are a lawyer. From your point of view, is there a direct link between bride stealing and domestic violence?

18:04Absolutely, there is a direct link. In such families, her husband, he treated her as some thing which he decided to steal, because usually we steal things. And fortunately, in this unequal So marriage, there is quite a high occurrence of domestic violence. But it's lack of agency from day one, isn't it? Absolutely, because a woman in this marriage doesn't have any agency, yeah.

18:39On the 20th year of my marriage, one day I woke up, I prayed, and then I had to put the rubbish into the rubbish bin, which was across the road. So just a few steps out of the house and then back immediately. And he started to shout, where have you been? And he started to beat me up, telling why you did go out without my permission. And usually when he beat you up, he used whatever he had around. It could be a plastic bottle full of water. It could be axe. Gorbola's children found their mother lying helpless when they got back from school. and they managed to call an ambulance. The doctors said that she was lucky to be alive.

19:33Gulbala spent four months in hospital undergoing reconstructive internal surgery. The man and his family are still at large. Meanwhile, in parts of the Caucasus, you have the same sorts of phenomenon, don't you? Chechnya is a problem. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, and Kyrgyzstan. That was a very huge problem in their country. Many girls, they suffered, and there were many cases of suicide or even murder of a bride during kidnapping. There were two very, very grave incidents. When girls were kidnapped, the girls resisted. They were fighting with their kidnappers. In one case, the girl was killed, murdered.

20:18In another case, the girl was kidnapped and raped, and then eventually she was also murdered by her kidnapper. Of course there was an outcry in society and people started demanding changes and so on. And I think that this is a tragedy that sometimes our members of parliament or the government, they don't pay sufficient attention to prevent such incidents, but they take actions only after a woman or a girl died. You'll sometimes hear that bride stealing has its roots in the Kazakhs nomadic past. Kazakh horsemen, the story goes, or Chechen horsemen or kirggers, simply made off with a girl they fancied.

20:59And in my view, aggressors who understand that the laws are not on their side, they start, you know, invoking customs and traditions, trying to justify their right to commit violence, even romanticizing it. And actually, in nomadic society, we never had bright kidnapping. Kazakh girls, they were raised as warriors. Why? Because we always had to be on the move. We never had fortified cities that could protect us from enemies. And that's why girls and boys, they were equally taught how to ride a horse, how to gallop, how to use arms and how to fight. A Kazakh girl, she would not let anyone kidnap her.

21:42Khalida's own great-grandmother was a nomad. So my great-grandmother, Maria, was born in 1881. she was the leader of the settlement where they lived she was also acting as a judge and whenever someone says that oh women should be shy or they should listen to their husbands and do whatever they want I always remember the example of my great grandmother it gives me also strength to do my work nowadays and the story was told me by my grandmother and I'm very happy to be this proud, you know, successor of my family. Gulbala left hospital very frail. She never went back to her husband's house and now lives in the women's refuge with her five youngest children.

22:33She works part-time as a cleaner in the local dentists and dreams to train as a nurse one day. Instead of the headscarf and long clothes she used to wear, today she's in a tracksuit with a pink baseball cap. I have a store called Cretinink, so I bought it from that. Gulbala says that she bought this old sewing machine at the local market.

23:01I do lots of sewing, but I mend children's clothes.

23:22I don't waste my time. Every three minutes I have, I make quilts and I teach my daughters how to cut the fabrics, how to use different sewing techniques so they know how to make things. And how do you teach your daughters to protect themselves?

23:55I have three daughters and I teach them how to behave, how to be in the society, how to deal with people, and how to know the difference between good and bad. I smile when I talk to my children. I try to be cheerful because I want my children to smile. And with these smiles, I fight my fears.

24:30I want to show my children that I'm strong.