Turkmenistan: Welcome to Refugees Less Than it Seems

News Briefing Central Asia reports that Turkmenistan's recent magnanimity regarding refugees is not all it seems.

In conjunction with the recent 20th anniversary of independence, Turkmenistan announced that it was issuing citizenship and passports to stateless people living on its territory.

Yet most of the 2,000 people who got the Turkmen passports were Tajiks who fled Tajikistan's civil war in the 1990s and have been waiting for years to process their applications.

No one knows how many stateless or undocumented people reside in Turkmenistan -- the government periodically takes measures in fact to drive people like the Uzbek wives of ethnic Uzbek men living in Turkmenistan back across the border to Uzbekistan, despite their marriages.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) conducted a massive registration campaign in May and June to try to legalize stateless persons in Turkmenistan. Yet these were people who had lived in Turkmenistan for many years. As UNHCR reports, "no new asylum-seekers have been registered in Turkmenistan for several years now."

With its poverty and human rights violations, Turkmenistan seems like a place people would want to flee from, not to. Yet civilians caught during times of armed conflicts or police crackdowns in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Iran might view a country without war as a haven.

Afghans and others don't seem to get asylum, however; UNHCR says "a small group of refugees who fled the inter-ethnic conflict in Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, as well as Afghan refugees, remain of concern to the Office."

There are also the problems of Russian speakers in Turkmenistan who find their dual Russian and Turkmen passports, previously tacitly recognized, now invalidated in the government drive to force people to chose Turkmen citizenship.

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