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.
" One of the chief reasons that most of us have barely heard of Turkmenistan before is that nothing really awful has happened there" - You're kidding, right? I guess Hitler only got rid of a few bankers and Stalin only sent a few folks East for their health...
Have you actually been to Turkmenistan or are you basing your comments just on what you've read?
It's not tough to control any information going out of the country when you've reduced the population to nothing more than a frightened heard of goats...
Let us first see how many first cousins married each other in his lineage before we evaluate his sanity. Appears to me there were many.
I have no idea if you are right or wrong on your assessment of Niyazov, but on another of my posts today I was given the same link to his Ruhnama as you list. I read to page 23, and frankly for a Muslim, I thought it was pretty tolerant, and non-hostile to other peoples of the Book. He also specificially said women should expose their faces to the sun, men should not beat their wives and children, and Noah, Jesus, the prophets were OK people. I await more factual information to form an opinion.
I just read an evaluation of the Koran made statistically by another commenter at another post. After reading his evaluation, it seems the Ruhnama may be an attempt to extract the better parts of the Koran, and give his people specific instructions on how to live a decent life
Belated thanks for a long and thoughtful reply.