A few weeks before Turkmenistan's 20th anniversary of independence on October 27, the official government web site "Turkmenistan Golden Age" got a make-over.
In fact, the new spacious horizontal design reminded us a lot of another site's new horizontal look, implemented after recovery last summer from a massive distributed denial-of-service attack from hackers who didn't like independent news coverage.
On the official site, the same over-the-top agitprop articles are still there at the top, such as the president's pronouncement today on his "humanistic political strategy" on the occasion of the Muslim holiday known as Kurban bayramy (Eid el-Adha), and there are still those breaking news pieces with riveting titles like "Promoting Mutually Beneficial Cooperation."
At the bottom, you can still find the feel-good pieces on archeological discoveries, race horses and youth art contests and the wonderous things constructed under the reign of Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov (like a dolphinarium or an ice hockey rink in the desert).
Sure enough, the search box still doesn't work at all -- but it's better that way, because you might find something in the memory hole that reflects something different than what the government is saying now.
But one thing is disturbingly missing, and that's the "Laws" section. This section used to contain all the numerous laws and regulations passed and approved by the president in this authoritarian state, as well as various presidential decrees. This is the area where you could follow amendments to the constitution or the code of criminal procedures.
Now, however, if you click on the word "Laws," you are merely bounced back to the home page. It's been six weeks now, and there is still no restored archive or an "under construction" sign.
Authors of The Private Pocket of the President (Berdymukhamedov): Oil, Gas and the Law who requested anonymity told EurasiaNet that they fear the reason the "Laws" section has suddenly gone dead is because their report was chock-full of links to these very legal pages on the official website.
Indeed, the entire premise of their report -- a hard-hitting expose of presidential corruption -- was that with careful attention to the various amendments of public laws, you could track the president's outrageous grab of oil and gas revenue and his total control of every aspect of the hydrocarbons industry and relations with foreign customers.
There's another huge annoyance connected with the Golden Age renovation, and that is that all URL links to past articles are now broken. Given the lack of a workable search, and the disappearance of articles from the first page within a few days, never to be found again, diligent students of Berdymukhamedov's Era of Great Revival, as he calls his rule, have to keep archives of links pasted into notes to be able to find old pieces. Now those links lead to empty pages -- and of course all online articles that ever linked to those pages (such as from this blog) are also going to dead-end.
The links can't be accessed through Google cache, unfortunately, and the Way Back Machine only took snapshots of a few days here and there over the years, and only of the top view.
The environmental organization Crude Accountability, which published The President's Pocket is going to try to upload some of the laws soon on its own site.
*UPDATE* A colleague writes that this URL from the old site is still working to access laws in the Russian language, even though on the new site, clicking under "Laws" or "Zakony" in Russian goes nowhere. It might be a good idea to get a copy of anything you need as the link may not stay.
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