Tips for Turkmenistan-watchers short on time:
To reduce the number of hours spent trawling through Turkmenistan: The Golden Century website, the repository of all official government information, only read articles that give accounts of the president’s own statements. Everything else is usually empty air and of little substantial interest. Granted, the site is also brimming with exhaustive paeans to the merits of the Avaza tourist resort and the many glories of the Akhal-Teke horse breed.
Try to learn which presidential addresses to read or ignore. Cabinet meetings are a must, although annoyingly always held on Fridays. That means you will have to break up your Saturday morning - when the Turkmen State News Agency eventually gets round to filing its detailed report in Russian – to learn if the president has banned something, lifted a ban on something, fired somebody or made some vague and inscrutable remark about the country’s energy policy.
Once you learn to home in on those articles that you care about, you will still need to learn how to scan-read the interminable accounts, which can drone on for thousands of words at a time. State television and news outlets avoid the danger of accidentally editing out some essential morsel of presidential wisdom by reporting his words verbatim.
Now, take as an example, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov’s meeting with the Security Council on May 11. Mostly, it is a lot of guff about the greatness of the Turkmen military and their cracking show at the recent Victory Day celebrations in Moscow, where they impressed crowds with their astounding horsemanship. Or something. There may have been some other stuff, but I wouldn’t know, because it was probably boring and pointless. And I have been doing this for too long not to immediately fast-forward to the important bits.
You do this by looking for keywords, which in a meeting with military and police officers will tend to include несоответствие (unsuitability), недостатки (inefficiencies), с сожалением (with regret), соответствующие меры (adequate measures), освобождение (dismissal) and countless others.
Berdymukhamedov has gone a little drug-crazy recently and with the Goknar-2010 (Opium-2010) operation underway, he wants everybody pulling their weight. But some people just are not playing ball, he complained in a brief passage you will find all the way toward the bottom of this article:
“With regret, the head of state noted that there are also that have undertaken the path of criminality in their own personal interests. This pernicious path is being followed by some law enforcement officials, who are committing transgressions that shame the lofty honor of the Interior Ministry. These grievous acts are yet more evidence of the unsatisfactory educational work with the individual components of the Interior Ministry, said Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, demanding that the chiefs responsible quickly take adequate measures.”
If I were one of the “chiefs responsible,” I would be thinking about other lines of work, since this kind of warning is usually a prelude to some staff clear-outs.
Once you think you have worked out some imminent event, like a raft of dismissals, you can impress your friends by loudly revealing your findings at cocktail parties and Central Asia seminars. And the upside of this trick is that even if you turn out to be wrong, nobody will remember anyway.
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