Russia once again began making concerted overtures to Turkmenistan this month, after a long period of strained relations following the drastic reduction of Gazprom's purchase of Turkmen gas and disputes about compensation after a pipeline explosion in April 2009.
On August 12, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov met with Russian First Deputy Premier Viktor Zubkov, regnum.ru reported. The Turkmen leader reiterated boilerplate comments that cooperative relations were "one of the strategic priorities of Turkmenistan's foreign policy" – but evidently falling somewhere after China, Malaysia, Iran, and even the European Union, as no major new plans were announced.
To be sure, Ashgabat has maintained some trade ties to individual Russian Federation constituents such as Tatarstan, Astrakhan and Leningrad Province, and has continued to buy some Russian weapons and vehicles. But the Kremlin continues to be snubbed. Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev took the initiative to call President Berdymukhamedov and invite him to Moscow, the Turkmen leader merely responded with an invitation to Medvedev to come to Ashgabat. A press statement from the Turkmen president's office said that the meetings would be scheduled through diplomatic channels, but it wasn't clear who would go first. The two leaders have not met in a year; when their paths last crossed in June 2010 at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Astana, they did not have a meeting.
The official State News Agency of Turkmenistan reported that the two leaders expressed support for Russian business and joint ventures to increase their presence in the Turkmen market. But both knew that Berdymukhamedov had unceremoniously turfed out MTS, the major Russian mobile telephone company, abruptly ending service for 2.4 million Turkmens when the Turkmen Ministry of Communications refused to extend an expired five-year agreement. Gazprom has not purchased more than 10 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas -- as much as Iran orders – with the downturn in global demand and failure to come to terms on the price of Turkmen gas.
Medvedev's gesture was no doubt motivated by a pertinent development threatening further competition to Russian interests: as long-time Central Asia observer Arkady Dubnov writes in Moscow News, plans are underway for a trip by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to come to Turkmenistan soon, on a date not yet scheduled. Ukraine announced that it was seeking a lower price for Russian gas, and also considering taking deliveries of Turkmen gas. Russia will make this concession only if Ukraine joins the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, and opens a pipeline to Russia. Yet talks between Medvedev and Yanukovych in Sochi on August 11 were inconclusive, and Gazprom's Aleksei Miller and Ukraine's minister of energy and the coal industry also failed to reach agreement, says Dubnov.
Meanwhile, Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov travelled to see Yanukovych while he was vacationing in the Crimea on August 17. He then met with Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov who discussed re-starting deliveries of Turkmen gas to Ukraine through existing routes and through building a Caspian-Black Sea pipeline system. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Viktor Mayko also led a delegation to Ashgabat for talks this week.
This current state of play -- where Russia is trying to stop Ukraine from playing its Turkmenistan card and Kiev is trying to get a better deal with Moscow -- means that Ashgabat is in a good position to bargain hard with Moscow to gain concessions -- and even revenge, says Dubnov. Ashgabat's relations with Ukraine are cordial, although marred in the past over construction disputes; Ukraine has turned to Turkmenistan in the past when undergoing price disputes with Russia, which led to Moscow turning off the gas in 2006. It's not clear Kiev will really go through with any deal with Ashgabat, and may only be trying to put pressure on the Kremlin; it's possible that more talks will be held at the CIS anniversary summit next week in Tajikistan, and Yanukhovich may combine a trip to Ashgabat with his trip to Dushanbe.
Ovliyakuli Jumakuliev, the hapless minister of communications who has been repeatedly chewed out by Berdymukhamedov and threatened with dismissal if he did not fix the deplorable state of mobile communications "within three days," still appears to be at his job. At a government meeting on August 16, President Berdymukhamedov received a report on progress toward the building of a gigantic new television tower, the opposition news site gundogar.org reported. The elaborate tower will be visible from any point in Ashgabat and its suburbs and feature an eight-point star with stained-glass windows showing the legendary figure of Oguz Khan, which will change colors according to the time of day – apparently Berdymukhamedov's answer to the infamous revolving gold statue of past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov.
Berdymukhamedov has revived Niyazov's orders to remove all satellite dishes from apartment buildings, ostensibly because they hurt the view, and is now ordering his ministers to advertise the wonders of cable TV. Many people are expected to ignore the orders, as they rely on Russian and Turkish cable TV to get news and entertainment unavailable on Turkmenistan’s heavily controlled state TV. But with the president demanding regular reports on the removals and the promotion of cable, the state may make some inroads into this one area of citizens' freedom that has resisted encroachment.
While Jumakuliev is still clinging to his job, it's not known what, if anything, he actually did to fix the mobile telephone situation. According to a report from News Briefing Central Asia (NBCA), people are still waiting in long lines for sim cards, and are being forced to choose between a card for cell phone service or a USB for Internet connection. They must also present their domestic passports in order to get service. An engineer who spoke with NBCA on condition of anonymity said that the government was maintaining surveillance over both land lines and mobile networks. They evidently have some help from the people who built the great Chinese wall of cyberspace. A Chinese delegation of specialists met with counterparts in Ashgabat this week to provide expertise in “modernizing” the telecommunications system of Turkmenistan and to train personnel.
It’s not clear what experts from the BBC World Trust, UNESCO, Germany, and Russia were hoping to accomplish by participating in a recent joint seminar on international media norms with Turkmen parliamentarians and government officials. On these occasions, Turkmen bureaucrats announce that they will comply with “international standards” for media development, yet they may prefer to borrow from the experience of China rather than the United Kingdom. By attending these functions, foreign experts inevitably associate themselves with the suppression of the free media in the Turkmen dictatorship. When Turkmenistan faced the crisis of the explosion of an arms depot outside of Ashgabat, citizen journalists who recorded the unfolding tragedy and reported casualties far higher than the government was willing to admit soon found themselves detained and questioned, and their computers and cameras confiscated. Journalists who assisted a French TV company to make a documentary in the Niyazov era are still languishing in prison.
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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