Fighting in Turkmenistan

Back in May 2006, The Economist ran an article on Turkmenistan which said:

There is, though, much speculation about the 66-year-old Turkmenbashi’s health. He has had heart surgery, and has a team of eight top-notch German doctors constantly on call. This raises other problems, most obviously the lack of a mechanism for an orderly transfer of power, coupled with the lack of any democratic tradition in a conservative, tribal society. Pessimistic Turkmen fear that a lost generation, uneducated beyond the Ruhnama, may fall prey to Islamic radicalism—and create a nasty failed state that could destabilise an already volatile region.

Upon the death of Turkmenbashi 7 months later in December 2006, I recalled that article in this blog post, adding:

Fortunately, I think his death may have come too early for Islamic radicals to move in.  Had Niyazov been around for another decade, education in the country would have been almost eliminated in all meaningful sense. 

Had [Niyazov’s eradication of education] been allowed to continue, or indeed if it does continue, then the country will likely join the likes of Somalia and Afghanistan as fertile grounds in which to establish Islamic fundamentalism.  But with a lot of luck, and in the hope that Russia and the US can cooperate to help get Turkmenistan back on its feet without squabbling to the point where things are left to get worse, the situation should improve. 

There have been mild overtures from both Russia and the west towards enticing Turkmenistan back in from its self-imposed isolation, but events in Georgia and other issues have prevented any definitive actions regarding the gas-rich Caspian state.  And with the current climate between Russia and the US, it is unlikely that there will be much cooperation between the two on anything, let alone ensuring Turkmen development is supported in a bipartisan manner.  I always keep half an eye on the developments in Turkmenistan, and so I noticed this story from the BBC:

There has been heavy fighting in Turkmenistan between Islamist militants and security forces in the capital, Ashgabat, unconfirmed reports say.

Residents told news agencies that at least 20 police officers had died in gun battles on Friday night, and that police were now patrolling the area.

This report generates as many questions as it provides information, the most prominent one being where are these Islamic militants coming from? Turkmenistan borders both Iran and Afghanistan, where Islamic hotheads are not in particularly short supply.  Or are they home-grown?  Or a mixture of both?  I read an account in one of Colin Thubron’s books where the author asked some Turkmen whether militant Islam could take hold in the country.  The wisened son-of-the-desert Thubron addressed the question to said that any such threat would come from Iran and had little chance of being produced domestically.  But it’s probably best not to extrapolate too much from one person speaking to a travel writer passing through the Karakum desert.

However, Russia would do well (and I’m sure they are) to find out pretty sharpish if this story is true and where the troublemakers are coming from.  If it turns out to be Iran, we could see a shift in attitude between Russia and Iran.  For some time the Russians have been gambling that a belligerent Iran poses more of a problem for the US than Russia, even to the point that they seem prepared to extend this assessment to a nuclear armed Iran.  An Iran which can export trouble to Turkmenistan – which also shares doesn’t share (see comments) a border with Russia – might make the Russians reconsider.  They’d do well to make up their minds before Iran advances much further with its nuclear plans.

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The Welcome Death of Turkmenbashi

As I read about the death of Saparmurat Niyazov, president of Turkmenistan, I was reminded of this article in The Economist, written back in May, which warned of the danger of Niyazov’s sudden death:

There is, though, much speculation about the 66-year-old Turkmenbashi’s health. He has had heart surgery, and has a team of eight top-notch German doctors constantly on call. This raises other problems, most obviously the lack of a mechanism for an orderly transfer of power, coupled with the lack of any democratic tradition in a conservative, tribal society. Pessimistic Turkmen fear that a lost generation, uneducated beyond the Ruhnama, may fall prey to Islamic radicalism—and create a nasty failed state that could destabilise an already volatile region.

Fortunately, I think his death may have come too early for Islamic radicals to move in.  Had Niyazov been around for another decade, education in the country would have been almost eliminated in all meaningful sense.  As the same Economist article describes:

Every Monday at 8am, Turkmenistan’s schoolchildren line up to recite the oath of allegiance to the president, part of a youth-indoctrination programme that is progressively replacing the conventional curriculum. Its core is the two-volume Ruhnama, “The Book of the Spirit”, a homespun collection of thoughts on Turkmen history and culture that pupils are required to spend hours studying. Visits to bookstores reveal shelves lined with nothing but the president’s works. Meanwhile, mandatory education has been reduced from ten years to nine and most rural kindergartens have closed, as have all libraries outside the capital. Russian-language teaching has been largely phased out, music and ballet schools closed and almost all teachers of ethnic-minority origins sacked under rigorously enforced “Turkmenisation” policies that demand racial purity, traceable back three generations, for all workers in state institutions, including hospitals.

Higher education is severely run down. The annual intake is now under 3,000, a tenth of the pre-independence figure, courses have been cut to two years and standards are so poor they are unacceptable abroad. Worse, the president has ordered that no foreign degrees will henceforth be recognised. Anyone with a qualification gained abroad is either being sacked or refused a job. One economist says that all but two of her high-school class of 30 have emigrated because they see no future at home. “You have students returning with degrees from the world’s best universities—MBAs from Stanford, for instance—who can’t get jobs,” she says. “We are the last educated generation,” sighs another professor.

Had this been allowed to continue, or indeed if it does continue, then the country will likely join the likes of Somalia and Afghanistan as fertile grounds in which to establish Islamic fundamentalism.  But with a lot of luck, and in the hope that Russia and the US can cooperate to help get Turkmenistan back on its feet without squabbling to the point where things are left to get worse, the situation should improve.  In this respect, and indeed in any other, Niyazov’s death is welcome and could not have come too soon. 

Following on from this, in the coverage of his death I am unimpressed with the last line of this BBC article:

If Turkmenbashi’s death unleashes instability, the rest of the region, and indeed the world, may miss him too.

I hear this kind of nonsense a lot in the left leaning media, most recently in the form of “removing Saddam has destabilised the region”, but also “Russians were better off under the Soviet Union”.  What is so ignorant about statements of this kind is the failure to understand the inevitability of a painful recovery once a totalitarian system has been put in place.  I liken the situation to somebody suffering from heroin addiction, in that there is no easy method of weaning them off the stuff which will not make them for a period suffer a whole lot more than when they were using.  Yet unless action is taken, the end result is death and an almighty mess all round.

Nobody in their right mind other than those directly affected should mourn the passing of Niyazov or any other dictator.  Any “stability” they may have brought was always at the expense of others, and will always result in a period of uncertainty and instability afterwards, and that time will at some point inevitably come to pass.  Thinking that the best interests of the region, or indeed the world, are served by Niyazov continuing to run a totalitarian state in which political dissent was forbidden and proper education all but erased is akin to thinking a heroin addict’s best interests are served by sparing him the pains of withdrawal. 

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