Turkmenistan: Surprise Invitation from President to Opposition to Join Elections

Embassy of Turkmenistan in Russia

Young Turkmens in State Parade

The Turkmen government is still spinning the tragedy of an explosion in Abadan as a mere ignition of fireworks, claiming there were no casualties, and Turkmen diplomats are making indignant statements that the foreign media is publishing "lies and provocations", AP reported.

Meanwhile, independent eyewitnesses keep coming out with cell phone pictures and reports from the scene as people start to trickle back into the troubled city to try to rescue their belongings, with buildings still smouldering and unexploded ordnance still lying around, chrono-tm.org, the website of the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights reports.

The state television is still running musical programs and upbeat reports of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov's various meetings; today the state newspaper Neitral'nyi Turkmenistan carried only a brief mention of a special government commission that supposedly has the Abadan disaster under control, before moving on to breathless reports of presidential birthday greetings still pouring in. It's surreal.

Suddenly, in the midst of this disconnected maelstrom, the president appears on television with a surprise announcement: an invitation to those who call themselves the opposition to take part in next year's presidential elections on a level playing field, AFP reports.

But as AFP noted, only an excerpt of the speech ran, and was heavily edited -- and as voiceover.

The report bears following up, because the full account of the cabinet meeting today from the State News Agency of Turkmenistan, where the Turkmen leader discussed the elections, contained no mention of any involvement of the opposition at all. The exhaustive account didn't mention the disaster 18 kilometers outside of town, but announced that salaries and stipends would be increased to enable some of Turkmenistan's new gas wealth to benefit people more.

Then heads rolled throughout the country as the president reprimanded, fired, or reshuffled various regional officials guilty of insufficient attention to the grain harvest or the shoddy construction of silos. Strangely, while focusing on the poor quality of Turkmen wheat in one part of the marathon session, the president swung back later to claim that not only could Turkmen secure its own food supply now, it could export grain -- a claim that independent experts at News Briefing Central Asia have questioned, given reports that Turkmenistan has been facing a severe drought, still imports grain and produces sub-standard wheat products.

Could state TV -- frequently the target of presidential ire with managers constantly replaced -- have slipped off the rails in interpreting the president's remarks about civil society overbroadly? It's not clear whether the "opposition" in question is the presidentially-created agrarian party that was supposed to come into being even a year ago, but never materialized. The parliament has yet to complete the draft law on parties that would enable the existence of other entities besides the ill-named Democratic Party, the sole political party in the country.

Also unclear is whether the invitation extends to exile groups and organized opposition parties abroad, who have traditionally been ignored, banned from entry to the country, or even targeted in presidential directives to security forces, who are supposed to fight terrorists, drug smugglers, and "those who undermine our democracy" -- critical civil society groups -- all as sworn enemies.

Some are wondering if the president's position was prepared in advance and opportunistically released now, along with various glowing economic reports designed to instill faith in the "Era of Great Renewal," as Berdymukhamedov has dubbed his reign, or whether the Turkmen leadership was spooked into making a concessionary announcement like this out of fear of growing unrest over the explosion -- and even a belief that it was sabotage by some protest group.

So far the origins of the explosion are still shrouded in mystery and are likely to remain so as no local independent or international media are allowed into the area and police have been arresting any citizen journalist trying to take pictures on cell phones. In his speech at the cabinet meeting, Berdymukhamedov claimed there were now independent newspapers and television stations in Turkmenistan and that they were helping to create civil society, yet there is no evidence of anything of the sort -- new publications and TV shows created in the last year continue to feature the president and all his works and hew strictly to the state propaganda line.