The signing of an agreement to build the Turkmenistan Afghanistan Pakistan India (TAPI) pipeline by the leaders of the four countries in Ashgabat in December 2010 generated a certain momentum, yet there are still a number of crucial pricing and security issues to be resolved. A delegation headed by the deputy of the state-owned Turkmengaz headed to New Delhi February 7 to discuss a gas price purchase agreement with Indian counterparts at GAIL, the Indian energy company that will lead the TAPI consortium. They did not reach an agreement and later talks among the countries were also inconclusive. At stake is not only the transit price that each country will charge as the pipeline passes through, but an additional transportation fee for the project itself to be collected by the consortium as reimbursement for its investment. At the end of the line, India stands to pay the most for the nearly 14 billion cubic meters of gas it will receive, and wants to change the price structure.
A new Turkish ambassador has been assigned to Turkmenistan, after the removal of Ambassador Huseyin Bichakli, the previous envoy, who was exposed by WkiLeaks publications in The Guardian last year of cables alleged to have come from the U.S. Embassy. Amb. Bichakli had reportedly expressed concerns (evidently unfounded) about the possible shipping of radioactive materials to neighboring Iran on a railroad being constructed from Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan and Turkey were unfazed by the leak exposing a less-than-trusting relationship between two neighbors allied by centuries of cultural, religious, and linguistic ties. The relationship is too big to fail, as Turkey is Turkmenistan’s second largest trading partner, responsible for most of the major state construction works and involved in the textile and food industries as well.
WikiLeaks also fetched up a cable dated 2008, allegedly sent from London which described an anodyne exchange with the Turkmenistan government’s aptly-named Presidential Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, then headed by Shirin Ahmedova, who has since been dismissed. The carefully-scripted exchange with this official was trained and retrained numerous times by numerous agencies was indicative of a new softer approach by the UK and Europe in general in dealing with Central Asian dictatorships. What was interesting about the cable was that Her Majesty’s Government believed that the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office had influenced Germany’s drafting of the Central Asian policy while it was president of the EU in 2007. The exchange program involved trading visits to prisons and holding seminar on legal reforms, as Turkmenistan embarked on revision of the criminal justice, a process still unfinished.
The theory for such lower-key engagement, meant to replace sterner condemnation believed to be ineffective, is that officials may make use of the technical assistance when circumstances improve. The reality, however, is that when countries really change, it's seldom state officials from the discredited regime who are the ones who then transform the judiciary or the prisons.
The limits of individual foreign countries or multilateral bodies in trying to influence insular Turkmenistan are clear – they have little scope for action beyond holding educational seminars. The center run by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has long been criticized by states as well as NGOs at home and abroad for its passive stance and refusal to become involved in human rights criticism, due to a limited mandate. Recently, Ambassador Arsim Zekolli, the Macedonian diplomat who headed the OSCE Centre in Ashgabat was dismissed by the Vienna secretariat of OSCE amid rumors of staff dissatisfaction and the broader issue of Turkmen citizens finding the Centre ineffective in addressing their complaints. It is hard to say what sort of ambassador might be acceptable now as a replacement, given the tightening of the screws lately by Ashgabat; most likely the replacement will continue the status quo.
Turkmenistan is very far from any sort of revolution like those rocking Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries in recent weeks. While some of the same ingredients are present – a dictator presiding over an abusive prison system and suppression of civil society, there are significant differences. Some pundits have put Berdymukhamedov in the list of Western-supported dictators; others have left him off, possibly because either he has succeeded in maintaining the illusion of reform, or has not been so subservient to Western interests, preferring to do business with China, Japan, Iran, and other powers of Asia and the Middle East.
Unlike the Middle East, Central Asia has no equivalent of Al Jazeera, the Qatar-owned TV station that has helped foster democratic movements by criticizing Arab regimes and providing a platform for dissidents. Indeed – fortuitously, as it happened – as the world was watching and discussing the Tunisian and Egyptian demonstrations, Berdymukhamedov shut off the cell phone service of 2.4 million customers of Russia’s Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) in Turkmenistan when the contract expired. He refused to renew it, leaving many people without Internet access or the ability to spread news outside the heavily controlled state broadcasting system.
One similarity with Egypt is the rise in food prices and the impoverishment of ordinary people in Turkmenistan – anecdotal reports provided by News Briefing Central Asia indicate that prices have tripled in the marketplace for basic staples, despite government subsidies.
For revolutions to happen, there has to be some kind of social movement that can get started and find solidarity among both intellectual elites and ordinary people. And the suppression of any non-state group is so swift in Turkmenistan that most people are intimidated from any sort of activism.
A female university student was able to get a letter out of the country and published on the exile site chrono-tm.org recently, giving a sense of the strict control of students by a government fearful that they could be influenced by either “color revolutions” or Islamic fundamentalism or any kind of democratic activism. Students must be in their dorms by 8:00 pm every night and cannot have visitors; they cannot rent apartments outside the university. Officials regularly conduct sweeps through their rooms, looking for any sign of alcohol use or birth control. The students are required to wear uniforms and study rote state-controlled texts, including even Ruhnama, the cult book established by past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov. The students are not allowed to have cell phones – many of which don’t work now anyway, as former MTS customers wait in long lines to try to switch to the one state provider.
A LifeJournal blogger about Turkmenistan named voxclamantis_tm describes a different phenomenon militating against any type of Egyptian-style unrest: the successful cooptation of young people by the government. A certain number use connections or bribes first to get into university, then to get into state jobs which they maintain by currying favor and working as little as possible. Those close to the government and in the dominant Tekke tribe of Turkmenistan are more affluent, and are able to buy their children cars.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick compiles the Turkmenistan weekly roundup for EurasiaNet. She is also editor of EurasiaNet's Sifting the Karakum blog. To subscribe to the weekly email with a digest of international and regional press, write [email protected]
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