The murder trial that put Kazakhstan in the dock

The murder trial of Kuandyk Bishimbayev, a one-time government minister accused of killing his wife, is being closely watched. The case has sweeping implications for Kazakh society.

The murder trial of Kuandyk Bishimbayev, a former top-ranking minister in Kazakhstan accused of beating his wife to death, has played out as tawdry soap opera.

Hundreds of thousands tune in daily to watch live streams from the court in Astana.

Jurors have heard how Bishimbayev systematically abused Saltanat Nukenova until he finally went too far one November night. Surveillance video footage played to the court showed Bishimbayev on the fateful night as he throttled, punched, and kicked Nukenova. It is alleged he habitually carried on in this way, and that the couple’s friends and relatives were all aware of the fact.

When Bishimbayev realised that Nukenova had no pulse – something he claims was the result of her banging her head against a toilet seat in a drunken stupor – his first telephone call was to a trusted clairvoyant. The spiritualist assured Bishimbayev that Nukenova was merely sleeping.

In one hearing, as Bishimbayev pleaded with the court to believe his side of the story, Nukenova’s mother rose to her feet to interrupt with a fiery harangue.

“You killed her over a number of hours,” she shouted.

Hearings are still ongoing.

But beyond the courtroom, the trial and all the circumstances leading up to it are already producing consequences.

On Monday, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev approved changes to the law to harshen penalties for people found guilty of acting violently toward women and children. Inflicting bodily harm and battery are now a criminal offense, rather than just a violation of the administrative code. And semi-formal reconciliation efforts – a common method for keeping law enforcement out of the picture – will no longer be enough to free perpetrators from liability.

This package of criminal reforms had been years in the making, but the clamor around the Bishimbayev case put it very much at the top of the public agenda. It is not for nothing that the amendments were dubbed the “Saltanat law.”

The fact that the trial is being streamed live at all represents a monumental precedent for Kazakhstan, as even the most ardent critics of the country’s justice system have conceded.

“I cannot ever recall a criminal trial being made available for live viewing, shown on YouTube. This is all a marvellous precedent in my opinion,” lawyer Sergei Utkin, who has often acted for political opposition figures, said in an interview earlier this month. “This will help, first of all, to sate the interest of the public. And second, it will educate the public [about how a trial is conducted], as long as the trial complies with legal norms, that is.”

The public nature of this drama has inevitably attracted rare volumes of commentary from members of the public and influencers, from Kazakhstan and beyond.

In some instances, the opinions feel more self-serving than anything.

The niece of Uzbekistan’s first lady, Diora Usmanova, something of a minor celebrity in her country, which is bedevilled by its own domestic violence epidemic, penned an impassioned cri de coeur on her Instagram feed. She accompanied the post with multiple glossy images of herself in a sober but glamorous, flowing black dress.

Before Bishimbayev’s trial opened, one prominent journalist, Guljan Yergaliyeva, drew a welter of criticism by interviewing his lawyers – an act that her detractors interpreted as an attempt to rehabilitate the disgraced former minister. The author of one Telegram account alleged that Yergaliyeva was paid for doing the interview. Yergaliyeva, who has long posed as a political gadfly, reported her Telegram critic to the police and got him thrown into jail for two months on charges of slander.

As for the impact this sad saga will have on social attitudes to domestic violence, that is more complicated to gauge.

An opinion survey conducted in September showed that 89.4 percent of people queried supported the criminalisation of domestic violence. The more granular aspects of the poll evinced similarly encouraging data. Only 8.9 percent of respondents said they believed that domestic violence was a non-issue in Kazakhstan. Most of the sceptics were, perhaps unsurprisingly, men.

But the fact that Bishimbayev’s lawyers chose to request a trial by jury suggests they suspected that wider sentiments may not be as straightforwardly progressive as those numbers indicate.

“My whole TikTok feed, every video is about Saltanat: Snippets [from the courtroom live feed], rallies, flash mobs. This is the first time I have seen such unity. Basically, everyone is for her. But there are some commentators who say that ‘she is to blame,’” Aisana Ashim, a media manager at a number of Kazakh outlet, told the Kazkah edition of Forbes.

Victim-blaming is commonplace. So is judgement of women perceived to be insufficiently pliant and submissive to their husbands’ will.

A major media scandal erupted last month when the state broadcaster aired an interview with a woman who had endured two decades of physical torment at the hands of her spouse. One of the talk show presenters reacted by asking the woman if perhaps she had provoked the violence by failing to do her household chores properly. The talk show was cancelled shortly thereafter.

Things are clearly changing, and the taboo around discussing gender-based violence is fading. With its unflinching focus on domestic abuse, repressive family values and corruption, Kazakh horror film Dastur (Tradition), which was released in cinemas in December, did not look like an obvious blockbuster hit. And yet, within a week, the film had raked in about $2.2 million at the box office — a huge figure by Kazakh industry standards.

Policymakers often look like the main problem.

As Karlygash Kabatova, a researcher on gender issues at Paper Lab, an NGO, has argued, there is a problem in how the government yokes the question of domestic violence with that of promoting family values in general.

“I see the main tension in the fact that in our country the well-being of women is equated with the preservation of the family. These are, in fact, completely different things,” Kabatova said in 2022. 

The result of those rival impulses is legislation like that adopted in September, which made it in effect more difficult for couples with underage children to obtain a divorce. Proponents of the measure said it was designed to ease the burden of cases going through the civil courts.

The practical outcome, though, is that many more families will be locked into unhappy arrangements in which resentment festers.