Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov likes to remind his countrymen that the development of sport is a national priority. You might think then that sports would be comprehensively covered in the servile local press, and yet there was barely any news of the country's performance at the football Commonwealth of Independent States Cup that ended January 29 in St. Petersburg, Russia.
That may, alas, have been due to the fact Turkmenistan placed last out of the 12 national teams taking part.
The 20th edition of the under-21 competition, which pits several former Soviet nations (and Iran in this edition) against one another, was subject of some unusual international attention. Both FIFA president Sepp Blatter and UEFA chief Michel Platini turned up to watch.
Turkmenistan started well by beating Estonia 1-0, and sure enough we learned all about it in great detail on the local news. Government mouthpiece daily Neutral Turkmenistan trumpeted the achievement, as did the Vatan television program, which is normally dedicated almost entirely to hailing the president's accomplishments.
National youth team coach Bayramdurdy Durdyev enthused about his players in the post-match press conference, saying, "they are great."
Then things began going downhill. Kazakhstan handily brushed aside the Turkmen team 3-1. And finally, a 0-0 tie against Russia denied the team qualification into the quarterfinals.
These performances were greeted by a stony silence in local media at home.
Central Asia is chock full of beautiful places, pristine prairies and mountain valleys that look as if they’ve never been touched by mankind. But many spots are well-documented environmental wastelands. How does the damage measure up to the rest of the world?
Radio Free Europe has flagged an interesting new ranking of global environmental performance, which shows Central Asian countries crowding the bottom of the list.
Researchers at Yale and Columbia universities have ranked 132 countries for environmental performance based on 10 categories, such as the effects of water and air pollution on human and environmental health, a country’s approach to managing natural resources, and climate change policy. The sixth annual Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranked Kazakhstan 129th, Uzbekistan 130th and Turkmenistan 131st. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, with the most lackluster economies in the region, fared slightly better at 121 and 101, respectively.
RFE/RL spoke with Angel Hsu, EPI project director at Yale, who said Kazakhstan’s poor performance is explained in part by its emissions record:
"For Kazakhstan, they performed the lowest on climate change and air [quality], and this is due to the fact that they have heavy dependence on coal." According to Hsu, "forty five percent of their carbon dioxide emissions come from the country's coal-fired power plants, and what I found interesting is that they have very little active government policies to expand renewable energy in the electricity sector."
Diversion of rivers and other water management problems – politically-charged issues that plague the region as a whole – also dragged down Kazakhstan's score.
When characterizing Turkmenistan’s human rights record, international watchdogs often resort to descriptions that could come straight out of dystopian literature or memoirs of the Stalinist Terror. Turkmenistan continues to have one of the most brutal regimes on earth, a grim place marked by “enforced disappearances,” “draconian restrictions,” an all-powerful leader, and the dumping of nonconformists into “psychiatric facilities.” Then there are the mundane attempts to control access to information, such as when “Internet cafes require visitors to present their passports.”
Like the section on Uzbekistan, the Turkmenistan summary in Human Rights Watch’s new annual report offers EurasiaNet.org readers few surprises. But for the record, here are some of the grisly highlights:
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov’s authoritarian rule remains entrenched, highlighting Turkmenistan’s status as one of the world’s most repressive countries.
The country remains closed to independent scrutiny, media and religious freedoms are subject to draconian restrictions, and human rights defenders face constant threat of government reprisal. The United Nations Human Rights Committee expressed concern about allegations of widespread torture and ill-treatment, and of enforced disappearances in custody.
On “the Protector”:
President Berdymukhamedov, his relatives, and associates enjoy unlimited power and total control over all aspects of public life in Turkmenistan. In 2010 and 2011 newspapers and other publications began to bestow on Berdymukhamedov the honorific title arkadag (patron), symbolizing the strengthening of his cult of personality.
When it comes to assessments of political rights and civil liberties in Uzbekistan and neighboring Turkmenistan, it often feels like someone has taped down the repeat button.
Of 195 countries assessed in Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2012 report, released January 19, both received the lowest score possible, again: 7 out of 7. Once more, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan made the list of the “worst of the worst,” an exclusive club of nine countries where citizens can count on essentially zero accountability from their leaders. In terms of rights and liberties, both nations have remained eerily consistent: Turkmenistan is holding a presidential election next month where we already know the winner; Uzbekistan continues to jail and torture critics; leaders in both continue to show an occasional distaste for reality.
Tajikistan has joined the list of Central Asian countries rumored to be planning to relocate its capital.
The construction of a new international airport in tiny Dangara, 100 kilometers southeast of Dushanbe, has invited speculation that President Emomali Rakhmon plans to relocate the seat of government there, RFE/RL reports.
That speculation began in earnest back in July, when Rakhmon’s advisor, semi-official policy weathervane, and then-director of the state-run Strategic Research Center, Sukhrob Sharipov said, “it is necessary to say goodbye to the Soviet past in all things, including the capital, Dushanbe.” Sharipov posited that Dushanbe is a “small town, not designed to handle the overloading it now experiences,” proposing three still smaller towns as possible replacements -- Dangara, Kulyab, and Penjikent. Journalists and analysts uniformly dismissed the latter two, particularly Penjikent, which is often cut off from the rest of the country in winter. But Dangara, interestingly, is Rakhmon’s hometown.
In recent years, the Tajik government has invested millions in Dangara’s infrastructure, improving the main west-east highway that runs through and linking it to the nearby railway that once bypassed it. Other cosmetic improvements have been conspicuous, particularly in comparison to neglected regions of the country further afield.
In an information-starved and arbitrarily governed part of the world, such speculation spreads easily.
The Turkmen presidential campaign has produced no surprises yet.
The cookie-cutter candidates running in opposition to President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov all come from state controlled organizations or industries and are not straying from the incumbent's program.
Perhaps their purpose is to get a tiny bit out in front of the Turkmen leader so as to test which ideas are more feasible. For example, Rejep Bazarov, deputy head of the government in Dashoguz velayat (province) proposed that Turkmenistan curtail the practice of hand-picking cotton, and mechanize the harvest. He also wanted to increase manufacturing of products for export in the provinces.
Kakageldi Abdyllaev, head of a branch of Turkmengas has stumped for the building of the Trans-Caspian Pipeline. He believes energy demand from Europe will grow. "Our country will not regret efforts in this direction, since representatives of global oil and gas business have made offers of new projects and proposals in this direction," said Abdyllaev, not specifying which companies. He also called for pumping more gas to China, Iran and Russia, and moving ahead with the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline.
Ana Abayeva, a school-teacher in Ashgabat, attempted to run for president but her application was rejected by election officials, the Turkmen Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported. Abayeva was supported by the unregisterend non-governmental organization Civil Society Movement, so the lack of legal status disqualified her candidacy. A Justice Ministry official contacted by RFE/RL said that the NGO would first have to be registered itself.
The hallmark of Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov’s coming to power in 2007 was his opening of Internet cafes and restoration of the education system – these steps into the 21st century for his isolated Central Asian nation caused Westerners to become the most hopeful about change in Turkmenistan. In fact, the cafes came with soldiers and passport checks, and remained too expensive for most users.
Since that time, Internet penetration shot up, while remaining the lowest in Central Asia at 1.6 percent of the population, but then slowed to a plateau, and service grew far more expensive, facing many obstacles, even as other countries have found connection costs dropping.
In his campaign speech January 9, when Berdymukhamedov spoke of moving his country from the agrarian to the industrial stage, he meant that most Turkmens are outside of the oil and gas industry, eking out a living in agriculture or low-wage municipal jobs or jobless in poverty. As much as gas revenue is supposedly plowed into social development, there is little to show for it – new clinics and schools sit half empty with new equipment gathering dust because there aren’t enough trained people.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has used his considerable "administrative resources" -- i.e. his total control over state television -- to announce his program in the essentially uncontested presidential elections on February 12.
The Turkmen leader nevertheless took the faux-humble approach, saying that his statement was important "for me, with the heavy but noble burden to serve my people" and for Turkmens themselves "who have the opportunity to oversee all the facts of my promises today."
Turkmens actually don't have that opportunity, without free press, but it's interesting that the notion of public oversight has become urgent enough at least to simulate.
Berdymukhamedov then explained his campaign promise: "to turn Turkmenistan from a primarily agrarian country to an industrial power" -- a pledge that capturedthe headlines.
But there's some obvious questions lingering under all the president's invocations of the need to obtain the latest advanced technologies.
For one, what has Berdymukhamedov been doing for the last five years, if his country is still "primarily agrarian"? To be sure, he's proudly mentioned all the new factories built on his watch, but it's not clear how well they're producing or what percentage of state revenue they bring, given that statistics are either hidden or exaggerated.
More to the point, it's the gas and oil industry, not cotton or wheat that already make up the lion's share of Turkmenistan's GDP (a lot of which goes into the president's own account) -- making the president's emphasis on moving from nomadic pastoralism to farming a bit strange.
President Berdymukhamedov delivers campaign speech on state television, January 9, 2012
What’s this? Is Turkmenistan’s authoritarian-minded president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, trying to distill some of the mojo from Vaclav Havel or Andrei Sakharov? Or St. Augustine?
In his January 9 televised campaign speech, Berdymukhamedov repeatedly linked Turkmenistan’s economic development to a need to democratize the country’s political system. He even called "for the creation of new parties and the organizations of independent mass media," explaining that Turkmenistan would benefit from "parties that would consolidate the people, inspire the people to creative labor in the name of the further flourishing of our Motherland." There was a catch to his pronouncement, naturally. Democratization will not apply to his own presidential reelection bid on February 12.
Not surprisingly, state media reported January 11 that the country’s rubber-stamp Mejlis, or parliament, passed a law creating a hypothetical foundation for the formation of new political parties. With only a month before elections, though, there is not enough time for any potential political party to meet registration requirements and put forward a presidential candidate to challenge Berdymukhamedov. Under Turkmen law, candidates have until 25 days before elections to register.
Neitral'nyi Turkmenistan, the state Russian-language newspaper, now has an English-language supplement, the State News Agency of Turkmenistan (TDH) reported. It looks to be as propagandistic as the Russian edition, with "achievements and prospects of the modernization of the Turkmen fuel and energy sector" and a priority for "diversifying gas exports."
The health section of the new insert "spotlights the successes of the state health policy." There are predictable items on Avaza, the president's pet project to create a tourist zone on the Caspian sea coast; on the restored circus; and an ancient calender which is yet another achievement of the Turkmen people.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has now installed Viktor Zaitsev as editor-in-chief of Neitral'nyi Turkmenistan, turkmenistan.ru reports. His predecessor Vladimov Gurbanov, was dismissed last month without any explanation at the time.
Now the semi-official news site turkmenistan.ru reports that Gubanov, who is also chair of the Committee on Science, Education and Culture of the Mejlis (parliament) was released from his duties at the newspaper "in connection with an increase in his work load at the Mejlis."
