According to officials in Turkmenistan, it is still “Altyn Asyr,” the Golden Era, as it supposedly has been for many years now.
By Bruce Pannier
Image Attribute: Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow Graffiti / Source: Wikimedia Commons
According to
officials in Turkmenistan, it is still “Altyn Asyr,” the Golden Era, as it
supposedly has been for many years now.
But recently
things have been different in Turkmenistan. Cracks are appearing within the
dictatorship and the shine is rubbing off the Golden Era.
Of course,
with Turkmenistan it is always difficult to tell what exactly is happening
inside the country, dubbed the hermit kingdom, so it is difficult to see where
the country is headed.
RFE/RL’s
Turkmen Service, known locally as Azatlyk, assembled a panel to look at what we
know about recent events in Turkmenistan.
Azatlyk
Director Muhammad Tahir moderated the discussion. Participating in the talk was
Peter Leonard, Central Asia editor at Eurasia Net, Ruslan Myatiev, journalist and founder of
the AlternativeTurkmenistan News website. And since I’ve been following the often bizarre
events in Turkmenistan for many years, I said some things also.
Myatiev
started by saying, “A lot of things have changed especially in the last year.
That applies to the economy, to the social life… to the freedom of the people
in the country.”
Hard times
have hit Turkmenistan, the sort of hard times the country really has not seen
since it became independent. Turkmenistan is heavily dependent on natural-gas
exports for revenue. The recent sharp decrease in gas prices on world markets
seems to have touched off a chain reaction in Turkmenistan. As Leonard said,
“This sort of cushion of large riches flowing into the country has suddenly
dried up, kind of creating a great crisis of confidence.”
There is ample
evidence of crisis. Last year, the Turkmen government announced cuts in
subsidies for gas, electricity, and water, which were all previously free.
Rates are still very low for the use of these utilities but they could get
higher quickly if the government acts on a proposal to totally do away with
these subsidies.
There are also
reports of growing unemployment, though the Turkmen government does not speak
about unemployment, so it is unclear how bad the problem is. Some opposition
websites, based on information from people inside Turkmenistan, reported there
were layoffs in the gas industry and suggestions nearly half the gas workers
would eventually be let go. Recently, authorities have been preventing
nonresidents of the capital Ashgabat from entering the city. One thought is
that officials are preventing a mass migration of unemployed people seeking to
find work in the capital.
Leonard
cautioned that in Turkmenistan the government has a counternarrative it has
been preaching for years when it comes to socioeconomic problems. “In
Turkmenistan, the state message is [that] the white marble, the big projects,
the stadiums, the hippodromes, the statues, whatever, all of this is a sign of
economic success. The signs of economic failure are not unemployment or drops
in productivity. The signs of economic failure are holes in the road, ugly
buildings, all of these things,” he said.
That explains
to some extent how the government has been able to cut back on social spending
while at the same time allocating state funds for realizing grandiose projects,
many of which seem to serve little or no purpose.
All the same,
there have been some reports of social discontent, the kind of reports not
heard out of Turkmenistan for some two decades. The gas workers in the eastern
Lebap Province went on strike last summer. Something happened last year in the
late winter in the city of Tejen, some 220 kilometers east of Ashgabat, that
involved mass arrests but there have been conflicting reports about the cause.
Conflicting
because of course it is nearly impossible for outside news services to gain
access to Turkmenistan, especially to areas outside the capital or Caspian
resort area Awaza, especially in recent months. Azatlyk, for example, has been
able to do some reporting from inside Turkmenistan, but last year, as the
economic problems set in across Central Asia, harassment of Azatlyk correspondents
increased and Azatlyk correspondent Saparmamed Nepeskuliev was arrested.
Nepeskuliev
was charged with narcotics possession, was held in custody without authorities
informing his family, and was quickly convicted and was sentenced at a trial
where he had no legal representation. [You can find out more about this here.)
Turkmen
authorities prefer to control what information comes out of the country.
Azatlyk was allowed to work within tight and tacit parameters but Nepeskuliev’s
case, and that of other Azatlyk correspondents, seems to show those parameters
have contracted as conditions inside Turkmenistan have gone into decline.
Myatiev said
it is part of a broader pattern of renewed repression. “People started to
display their disagreement with the current policies and the repression here
started to become… more tangible,” he said.
The reduction
in revenues may also be leading to infighting in the government. There have
been a wave of dismissals in the government in recent weeks (I deal with that
in a report to be released soon), more so than usual.
Leonard
suggested “under [the president] are all these people trying to grab a now,
smaller and smaller pie, and that the best way to get a piece of the pie is to
say ‘look at that guy, he’s stealing’ or ‘he’s doing his job badly’… this kind
of fighting under the rug is going on.”
I’ve made it
all the way through this text without mentioning President Gurbanguly
Berdymukhammedov by name. That’s not easy when writing about Turkmenistan.
Myatiev agreed
with Leonard that there is “fighting under the rug” and said the source of this
is Berdymukhammedov’s family, which has been acquiring ever more sectors of the
economy.
And all this
comes as amendments are about to be introduced to the constitution that will
allow Berdymukhammedov to run for a third term in office in next year’s
election, and possibly stay on far longer than just this one additional term.
The panel
looked at these topics in greater detail and touched on other important events
taking place currently in Turkmenistan. An audio recording of the discussion
can be heard here:
Majlis
Podcast: Turkmenistan -- Rotting Away From The Inside
About The Source:
About The Source:
Qishloq
Ovozi is a blog by RFE/RL Central Asia specialist Bruce
Pannier that aims to look at the events that are shaping Central Asia
and its respective countries, connect some of the dots to shed light on why
those processes are occurring, and identify the agents of change. Content will
draw on the extensive knowledge and contacts of RFE/RL's Central Asian services
but also allow scholars in the West, particularly younger scholars who will be
tomorrow’s experts on the region, opportunities to share their views on the
evolving situation at this Eurasian crossroad. The name means "Village
Voice" in Uzbek. But don't be fooled, Qishloq Ovozi is about all of
Central Asia.
Copyright (c)
2015. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
