Fear of instability after death of eccentric Turkmen leader

The death yesterday of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan's autocratic and eccentric president, raised the threat of instability in a Central Asian republic that is an important energy supplier to Europe.

Niyazov, known as Turkmenbashi or Ruler of the Turkmens, left the former Soviet republic he rulled for more than 20 years impoverished, internationally isolated and with no obvious successor. Niyazov died from cardiac arrest, Turkmen state television reported. He was 66.

The president's death is expected to spark both an internal power struggle and a tussle for influence between Russia, China and the US over a country with the world's fifth-biggest gas reserves. Any disruption to gas exports from Turkmenistan via Russia to Europe, mostly to Ukraine, could affect the continent's energy security. But analysts said there were no immdiate signs of unrest that could threaten supply.

Niyazov was appointed president for life by Turkmenistan's parliament in l999. The leader, who renamed months of the year after family members and erected thousands of gold statues to himself, admitted this year to suffering from heart disease.

According to the constitution, the parliament's speaker should have taken power. But the speaker was blocked yesterday as justice officials opened a criminal probe into him. A deputy prime minister was instead named acting president.

Several former and exiled Turkmen officials said they were considering returning to the country. But Nurmukhamad Khannamov, a former Turkmen ambassador to Israel who is now an opposition leader, warned that returning might be too dangerous.

Mr. Khannamov said the opposition would call for democratic elections and an investigation into Niyazov's huge wealth. "Niyazov had several foreign bank accounts and we will insist that the money is given back to the people," Mr. Khannamov said.

A US embassy spokesman in Ashgabat, the capital, said the US hoped for a "peaceful, smooth, constitutional succession". Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, said Moscow hoped "that continuity in our relations is ensured".

Nayazov, a former head of the Turkmen communist party, crushed or exiled opposition in the republic bordering Afghanistan, Iran and Uzbekistan, leaving it with no free media.

The governors of Turkmenistan's five main provinces have been sacked since a failed grain crop this autumn. Niyazov sacked most of the top oil and gas officials last year, accusing them of taking bribes from unnamed foreign companies.

Great link! I think she pretty much gets it right. And think about it -- here's a guy who grew up under the bizarre Soviet regime, then served as Soviet leader of the Turkmen Republic, and then suddenly found himself in charge of an independent nation, with significant natural resources, and a population largely mired in the Soviet mentality (which involved venerating Lenin in a God-like way -- I lived in Moscow for a couple of years as a child, and honest to God, there were pins for sale bearing a raised golden likeness of the face of the child-Lenin, looking to be about age 5). On top of that, his country was/is surrounded by Afghanistan, Iran, and somewhat more benignly, Uzbekistan.

While I find many vague references to his "brutal repression" of opponents, specifics seem awfully hard to come by, and large numbers are utterly absent. Certainly there have been no wholesale slaughters. The State Department's 2005 Human Rights report on Turkmenistan is unalarming in the grand scheme of things http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61681.htm ("There were no reliable reports that the government or its agents committed any politically motivated killings, . . . There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.").

Free housing, electricity, gas, water, and most recently iodized salt were guaranteed by decree to the people, and apparently most of them actually got those minimums on at least a semi-regular basis. Perhaps most interestingly, the guaranteed hand-out decrees were set to expire in 2030. He apparently viewed this as a transitional period, from the totally government-dependent mentality of the Soviet state, to the notions of capitalism and private property mentioned in his "Ruhmana" ("Keep goods at your home that have been earned by your own labor and efforts. Prophet Noah said: "Do not take other people’s goods. Do not bring them to your house, and do not make them yours,"") http://www.ruhnama.info/ruhnama-en/kitap-htm/s9.htm

Honestly, I think the guy was doing the best he knew how to improve his country. None of his people knew the first thing about how to "do" capitalism, and he was pulling himself up on the learning curve for that (per Wikipedia: "On September 5, 2006, after Turkmenistan threatened to cut-off supplies, Russia agreed to significantly raise the price it pays for Turkmen natural gas, from $65 to $100 per 1,000 cubic meters"). And if I had the Taliban-run Afghanistan on one side of me, Iran on the other (remember, the vast majority of Iranians actually democratically voted the Ayatollah Khomeini into power), and about a fifth of the world natural gas reserves under my feet, I expect I'd be a tad paranoid about political opposition too, and likely also inclined to grandiose dreams of leading my nation to glory. Given that he certainly knew was happening around him, and what measures had been used by the Soviet regime, his measuring stick for what constitutes "brutality" was presumably a bit different from ours, but his activities were not even in outer fringes of the ballpark of the big-name mass-murdering dictators.

One of the chief reasons that most of us have barely heard of Turkmenistan before is that nothing really awful has happened there, nor has it exported any perpetrators of anything really awful. Given its neighbors and its historical Muslim religion (which Niyazov seemed to be putting a rather healthy, if "creative" new twist on, while writing as if his broad-minded version of Islam had been the religion of the Turkmen people for countless centuries), that's actually quite an impressive accomplishment in that neck of the woods. When I look at our efforts to impose something resembling civilization on Iraq, and consider the tremendous intellectual and material resources that we've been in a position to bring to bear on that effort, I have to appreciate that building an orderly and prosperous society in that part of the world is a pretty awesome task. We can ridicule his mandatory schooling in the teachings of his Ruhnama all we like, but personally I can't manage to summon a lot of negative feelings for a guy who is insisting that all the schoolchildren in his surrounded-by-Islamo-barbarians country get stuff drummed into their heads like "If one upsets his wife or daughter, he is not a TÜRK ÝMAN", and "In the course of the development of humanity, many nations and countries have made momentous contributions to the world community. China and India achieved enormous advances". Let's not forget what sort of curriculum has been prevalent in Pakistan, Iran, and other Muslim nations of the region.

I tend to believe he was being sincere when he wrote in the Ruhmana: "Fate gave me the role of being leader of Türkmenistan at the juncture of the second and third millennia. The burden of the responsibility of taking my people from the last years of the second millennium, in which things did not go well, to the summits of the third millenium fell onto my shoulders. This position and responsibility, which have been given to me without my asking, have motivated me to call up my spiritual, intellectual and physical strength that Allah granted me with and use them as a societal force to achieve progress in my country." The true test of how well he did may be about to unfold. So far, the country has shown no sign of breaking down into violent chaos. If it can actually get new leadership formally in place without that happening, I'll rate Niyazov's career pretty highly. He may have understood better than we do what was needed to build the foundations of a sane society in Turkmenistan. Or maybe not . . . we'll see.

I really hope somebody writes a thorough and objective biography of Niyazov. I suspect a complicated, intelligent, creative, well-intentioned historical figure is hiding under all the autocratic and egomaniacal nonsense.

What information do you have that the state department doesn't have? And that Western journalists who have visited Turkmenistan don't have?

Turkmenistan was hardly a highly developed society before its transition to independence under Niyazov. Look what's happened in/from other Muslim countries in that region? Were the terrorist training camps and madrassahs that produced the 9/11 attackers and other terrorists in Turkmenistan? Last I heard, reliable authorities had traced these things to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, with smaller contributions from other Muslim countries. I haven't heard of a single terrorist, not even a single Gitmo detainee, traced to Turkmenistan (one former Gitmo detainee was listed as a Turkmen national, but he was 65 years old and born in Afghanistan, so it's not clear how much connection to Turkmenistan he actually had -- given his age, he was clearly not a product of Niyazov's rule). The horrific school massacre and opera house massacres in Russia were the work of Chechen Muslims, not Turkmen Muslims.

As for what may have happened inside Turkmenistan at Niyazov's direct or indirect orders, I'm not declaring him totally innocent. But I think his approach may well have resulted in a lot less unjustified torture and killing and poverty-induced suffering than any of the realistic alternatives. And when you're in charge of a country that's susceptible to falling under the control of al-Qaeda or Chechen or Taliban type Muslims, you may honestly believe that some moderate amount of torture and killing to keep your own regime in control is preventing the much larger amount of torture and killing that would ensue if one of these alternatives succeeded in pushing you out. There is no evidence that Niyazov was engaging in barbarism on anything approaching the scale of Saddam Hussein, much less Hitler or Stalin, and I think there's a good bit of evidence that he actually wanted to improve life for the people of his country.

History is littered with unspeakably brutal regimes that came to power when civilized predecessors were unwilling to engage in the lesser amount of brutality necessary to keep the unspeakably brutal regimes from coming to power. It's not that I'm a big fan of "moderate brutality", but if I was an ordinary citizen of a country in this situation, I'm sure I'd prefer the moderate brutality to the completely unrestrained variety.

Realistically, I think Niyazov may have gotten better results overall in Turkmenistan, than anyone else who was willing to take on the task could have, or would have. The list of people who were both willing to and in a position to take over leadership of Turkmenistan when it separated from the former Soviet Union was certainly short and, by our standards, unimpressive. I'm encouraged by the calm which has so far reigned in the wake of Niyazov's death. The Washingon Post reported today that "The military was put on heightened alert, but there were no signs of increased military or police presence in the city." Don't look for any reports like that out of North Korea after "Dear Leader" dies. I'll be further encouraged if the calm continues through tomorrow's funeral.

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