US Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake, Jr. quietly visited Ashgabat last week before the conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, in which Turkmenistan also took part. Blake met with President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and attended a ministerial meeting in Ashgabat on terrorism co-organized by the United Nations and the European Union. Blake said he appreciated Ashgabat's help to Afghanistan and promotion of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline which is supposed to both revive the Afghan economy and stabilize the region -- although the parties haven't agreed on all the price and security arrangements yet.
In his talks with the Turkmen leader, Blake also said the forthcoming February 2012 presidential elections would be “a splendid opportunity to demonstrate the results of the democratic, political, social and economic reforms in Turkmenistan," the State News Agency of Turkmenistan (TDH) quoted him as saying. This seemed to ascribe virtue where it had not yet appeared, perhaps in the hopes of inducing it.
TDH further noted that “Turkmenistan’s constructive policy of reforms as a guarantee of sustainable development and further democratization of the country opened up the vast opportunity to foster Turkmenistan-US partnership and expand effective business contacts.” US policy with Central Asia, particularly those cooperating with the Northern Distribution Network to supply NATO troops in Afghanistan, is to sell the idea of democratization – greater freedom of media, association, and travel – as good for business. Perhaps the idea is that the region’s autocrats, uneasy about the undermining of their regimes by demands for human rights, might find democracy more acceptable if they see it as somehow linked to economic gain.
The expected democratic reforms haven’t arrived in Turkmenistan, however. An interview of Mejlis (parliament) leaders in the state daily Neitral’nyi Turkmenistan claimed that groups of citizens and political parties would be able to nominate candidates and take part in campaign discussions with national and foreign press. Yet nothing was said about the need to pass the enabling legislation to legalize multiple political parties. Even the one officially recognized Democratic Party, the successor to the Communist Party, technically doesn’t have legal status.
Existing law also requires that nomination groups register with local authorities, so they may be denied permission on technicalities. Even if they manage to register, and assemble the minimum number of participants, each person at the meeting has to provide their passport information. The Turkmen parliamentarians also said that foreign observers would be allowed to monitor the elections, and foreign media would be invited. Yet their stays in the country will be strictly limited to the immediate period of the elections for observers, and they, too, much pass registration requirements. No alternative parties or movements have appeared, even under control of the state, so it is not clear what kind of other candidates may emerge.
A headline on the Russian edition of the Turkmen government official website used the same word which Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev popularized in the 1980s -- glasnost’. Even the Soviet brand of openness of 25 years ago would be an improvement for Ashgabat, but it doesn’t seem as if we can expect any critical coverage of the president in the state media or tolerance of independent press.
Former British defense secretary Geoff Hoon, now chief executive for the joint British-Italian helicopter manufacturer AgustaWestland, received an audience with President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov on December 1, the State News Agency of Turkmenistan (TDH) reported. Hoon made some undisclosed proposals to the Turkmen president that he said he would review carefully. Turkmenistan has bought helicopters from Tatarstan’s KAMAZ in the past, as well as from Italy’s Finmeccanica. Hoon was suspended from his position last year after he was secretly filmed offering his consulting services while in office. The visit was part of a disturbing trend lately of indications of influence-peddling in the UK related to Central Asia.
The UN Centre for Preventive Diplomacy in Central Asia which sponsored the ministerial meeting on terrorism very rarely substantively comments on its work and never discusses issues related to Turkmenistan, its host country. The UN site untuk.org in Ashgabat is also very circumspect about critical issues in Turkmenistan. In Geneva, however, the UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the various bodies charged with reviewing compliance with human rights treaties publish critical conclusions, such as those of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which recently issued a statement about problems of discrimination, censorship of the Internet, and lack of freedom of religion. Other sites such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva also carry critical articles from other sources such as News Briefing Central Asia. But inside Turkmenistan, only positive pieces praising the cooperation of the Turkmen government appear from the UN, with none of the material viewable in Geneva.
Recently, the UN made much of the fact that Turkmenistan signed two treaties regarding the rights of stateless persons, and issued 3,000 passports to aliens who had long been residing in Turkmenistan, in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of independence. Yet while some officials were busy handing out some passports to Uzbeks and others who had sought legalization for many years, others were busy refusing the leader of the Kazakh minority in Turkmenistan, which numbers 90,000, the right to travel to Kazakhstan. Bisengul Begdesinov told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that on December 2 Turkmen border guards stopped him from boarding a plane from Ashgabat to Almaty, saying that the Prosecutor-General's Office had barred him from leaving the country. This is how many people find out they are on Turkmenistan’s blacklist – when they cannot leave the airport.
And nothing was said by the UNHCR in Ashgabat about the tens of thousands of Russians and Russian-speakers with Russian passports who are now being heavily pressured to give up their Russian citizenship and take Turkmen passports in order to access basic services like education or to be able to travel to Russia. Notices have appeared in travel offices recently that in order to purchase tickets to Russian cities, a Turkmen passport and a Russian entry visa will have to be presented, and Russian passports will no longer be recognized starting in 2013. The new policy will force Russians to leave Turkmenistan for good. Moscow has not publicly commented on the problem, despite the effort of some Russian parliamentarians to inquire about the status of their compatriots.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick compiles the Turkmenistan weekly roundup for EurasiaNet. She is also editor of EurasiaNet's Sifting the Karakum blog.
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