Kyrgyz singer Zere Asylbek receives death threats over music video Kyz, targeting gender discrimination

A 19-year-old singer in Kyrgyzstan has filed a complaint with police after receiving death threats over a music video she released targeting gender discrimination in the ex-Soviet republic. Zere Asylbek’s music video ‘Kyz’ became a sensation in the Central Asian country following its release last week but has angered conservatives who say it insults national values, focusing on the singer’s visible underwear. [caption id=“attachment_5300061” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Zere Asylbek in a still from Kyz. YouTube screengrab[/caption] Asylbek told Agence France-Presse that she had filed reports with police in the capital Bishkek after receiving numerous threats of physical violence including several death threats. One threat posted by an anonymous Facebook profile to a group on the social media platform threatened to kill her if the video was not deleted. Another user whose post Asylbek sent as a screenshot to Agence France-Presse wrote that they “would gladly join” the first commentator, and “rip your head off.” Kyz, which means girl in the Kyrgyz language had had more than 217,000 views on YouTube by 29 September and is Asylbek’s first released song. Asylbek told AFP on 28 September that the video’s main message was to “respect the person you really are” while also “respecting the choices, opinions and ways of life of others.” The video features Asylbek dressed in a suit jacket and skirt with a purple bra underneath, a woman wearing a hijab, a woman wearing a Kyrgzy-style headscarf and a woman with a partly shaved head, showing Kyrgyz society’s diversity. In the video Asylbek sings that “a time will come when when nobody will tell me: Don’t wear it, don’t do it.” She also calls on the other women featured in the clip to “join me, create our own freedom.” Asylbek told Agence France-Presse that she had expected her choice of different women representing different facets of society to be understood as provocative but was surprised at the online attention devoted to her purple bra. In a Facebook post her father Asylbek Zhoodonbekov voiced support, calling his daughter “a free-thinking daughter of a free Kyrgyzstan.” He said she had grown more politically conscious after a recent incident in which a man killed a young woman in a police station after attempting to abduct her for a forced marriage. The murder in May sparked protests in Kyrgyzstan, a poor, majority-Muslim country where thousands of women are kidnapped for marriage every year in a practice dating back to the country’s nomadic past while law enforcement is accused of ignoring the problem.