A visit to Turkmenistan by Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, raised the issue of the Turkmen authorities move to compel dual Russian-Turkmen citizens to renounce their Russian passports, according to Russia’s Kommersant newspaper.
The issue of dual Russian-Turkmen citizens dates back to December 1993, when the erstwhile presidents of Russia and Turkmenistan, Boris Yeltsin and Saparmurat Niyazov, signed an agreement on dual citizenship. Ashgabat unilaterally withdrew from it following the 2002 alleged assassination attempt on Niyazov, claiming that several individuals complicit in the attempt used their dual citizenship to flee to Russia.
In April 2003, the Russian President Vladimir Putin and Niyazov signed a protocol terminating the agreement on dual citizenship, which the Turkmen Parliament ratified, and the Russian State Duma did not. Putin then made a widely publicized remark that all those who wanted to be repatriated from Turkmenistan to their historic homeland, had already done so, a statement which he subsequently dialed back. At that time, Ashgabat had signed a contract with Russia’s Gazprom to purchase Turkmen gas for resale to Europe. Both sides have denied a linkage between the dual citizenship issue and the Gazprom contract, though detractors claim that the Kremlin sold out Russian citizens for Ashgabat’s agreement to not participate in pipeline projects that would circumvent Russia.
In 2003, the Turkmen authorities intended to compel citizens to give up their Russian passports within the two months after the signing of the protocol, causing panic among Turkmenistan’s Russian-speaking population. In resonse, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that by signing the protocol to terminate the dual citizenship agreement, Moscow only intended that new passports would not be issued, that old ones would continue to be valid, and that individuals who received citizenship before 2003 would be able to keep it.
In 2008, Turkmenistan, under current President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, adopted a new Constitution which ended dual citizenship, giving citizens a five year transition period to decide. That transition period is coming to a close, and has been the focus of discussion between the presidents of Turkmenistan and Russia as the July 10, 2013 deadline approaches.
Though little mention of the issue is made in the official Turkmen media, Russian and online media have been generating a heated debate on a crop of online sites that have been appearing, such as Turkmeninform, Asgabat.net and newscentralasia.net, representing a range of Russian and Turkmen interests.
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