Turkmen Foreign Ministry Furious Over Russian Media "Lies, Provocations"
The Turkmen Foreign Ministry is hopping mad this week at the Russian news agency Regnum for allegedly printing "lies and provocations," the semi-official news site turkmenistan.ru reports.
The ministry issued a statement following Regnum's story claiming that Turkmenistan was giving Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka a loan to cope with his spiralling economic crisis.
Regnum describes itself as a "federal non-governmental news agency" with a large network of its own correspondents. It can sometimes appear pro-government and anti-Western (i.e. a story on US Eurasian energy envoy Richard Morningstar's upbeat claim that Russian interests will not hinder US policy in the Caspian is titled "One Slap After Another") but Regnum is also occasionally rapped by the Kremlin for being too critical. It's often one of the fastest sources on what's happening in Eurasia.
In fact, the Belarusian story actually came from the German government foreign broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) originally -- Regnum ran a headline June 6, "Berdymukhamedov's money will help Lukashenka in his struggle with the crisis and Russia."
Citing DW, which had referred to "a source close to the government of Turkmenistan," Regnum said the Turkmen leader was going to help bail out Lukashenka to reduce Minsk's dependency on Moscow, and had arranged to commission Belarus to build the potassium plant for $1 billion -- a deal that was also going to enrich Turkmen officials.
This blog had also wondered back in April what exactly Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka was doing rushing to Ashgabat as his national currency was crashing -- and on the very day that his main nemesis, the opposition presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov, went on trial for organizing a post-election demonstration. There were certainly questions to ask about the hasty trip, at a time when it seemed Russia wasn't going to rescue Belarus once again. Lukashenka was under pressure to sell to Russian investors the Belarusian Potassium Company (BKK), in order to be eligible for $3 billion in loans.
For his part, Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov was so preoccupied with meeting the Belarusian leader that he snubbed the European Parliamentary delegation on a fact-finding mission in Ashgabat, as Arkady Dubnov noted. The two leaders went fishing, DW reported.
The Turkmen Foreign Ministry insisted that the story about the potassium plant has long been covered by the state media and has been the subject of various bilateral meetings and an agreement between Belarus and Turkmenistan for the last 18 months (true -- but the Turkmen state media hasn't exactly explained how the construction is being financed).
But what got the Turkmen government even more mad was another story by Regnum that Lithuanian Foreign Minister Audronius Ažubalis, the chair-in-office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) who recently visited Ashgabat, called for NGOs to be registered, saying "There will be no democracy in Turkmenistan until the government establishes cooperation with civic activists." We wondered where that story came from, too, although RFE/RL reported it, because it wasn't in the official press release on osce.org.
The Turkmen Foreign Ministry furiously denied that the Lithuanian foreign minister had ever said such a thing:
No such calls on the part of the current OSCE chair-in-office were made, at least in the course of his talks in Ashgabat. Regnum is citing clearly unreliable sources, or, at best, entirely freely interpreting the subject of the talks.
The Foreign Ministry then went on to claim -- utterly falsely -- that NGOs, religious communities and groups of all kinds operate "freely, legally, and have all rights provided by law." In fact, only presidentially-controlled organizations exist, and any independent civic activity is crushed quickly. A new NGO law has yet to be drafted.
Although the sources for both these stories that so angered Ashgabat in fact are German and US foreign broadcasting stations, respectively, the Turkmen government is turning its ire on Russia, seeing the Regnum stories as part of a pattern of "provocative" articles that the Russian media has published about Turkmenistan.. The Foreign Ministry has protested what it sees as Kremlin-orchestrated intrigue before -- for example, on the claims -- later denied -- that Ashgabat was interested in talking to Russia about the Turkmenistan-Ashgabat-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline.
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