ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan (AP) – An old woman taps her throat, drops her head and shuts her eyes. A young man tightens an imaginary noose around his neck. Another woman fashions her fingers into a gun and puts it against her head.
They are among the chilling gestures Turkmens use when they fear they’ve said too much about the nation’s secretive and repressive regime.
In a dingy room with peeling yellow paint, an old woman – knocking back shots of vodka to calm her nerves and sobbing at the thought of living out her life in Turkmenistan – was willing to say more than most about life under late autocrat Saparmurat Niyazov, whose reign rivaled that of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il in strangeness and brutality.
“You cannot speak, you cannot complain because if you do, they send you know where,” said the old woman, who pleaded with a reporter not to reveal anything about her family out of fear of reprisals.
It was an unusual glimpse into the reality behind the elaborate facade of golden monuments, flowing fountains and artificial forests created during Niyazov’s two decade rule, which ended with his death in December.
Foreign reporters were allowed into the energy-rich Central Asian nation last week for the inauguration of new president Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov, but access to ordinary Turkmens was strictly limited as government minders accompanied reporters everywhere they went and said trips outside the capital were “impossible.”
This reporter encountered the old woman on the street during a rare unsupervised moment, and she invited him into her home. She kneeled before a low table on a carpeted floor and spoke of the brutality of the police and their omnipresence, of friends stripped of jobs or citizenship on political whims, of discrimination against non-ethnic Turkmens, and of a culture of fear and corruption.
“Now there’s a new president and we all hope that something better will happen, but nobody knows,” she said.
At one market, a group of women proudly said they had also voted, but none could remember the name of the man they had voted for. “The first one,” several of them finally agreed, apparently referring to the first name on the ballot.
Turkmen authorities reported a 99 percent voter turnout, with Berdymukhamedov taking 89.23 percent of the ballot. The election was not monitored by international authorities and according to numbers this reporter jotted down at the inauguration ceremony, the vote percentages for the six candidates added up to more than 100 percent.
The old woman spoke of relatives “starving” in the countryside, and of entire neighborhoods in the capital being destroyed to make room for Niyazov’s grandiose monuments to himself.
“We want to do renovations, but maybe they’ll tear this down too,” she said, pointing at the peeling walls. She said travel was highly restricted, crime and drug abuse were becoming rampant, and the sputtering economy offered few opportunities for the honest.
A recent International Crisis Group report on Turkmenistan backed most of these claims and added, “the human rights record under Niyazov was one of the most abysmal in the world.”
Despite the uncertainty and fear, the woman had some typical words of praise for Niyazov – pointing out how his repressive policies had helped preserve peace. “There’s no war, that’s the principle,” she said. “We don’t have to wake up to war, and that’s something.”
Such statements could be heard in other, government-monitored, interviews across the capital.
Many Turkmens had especially effusive praise for the policy of giving away free gas, electricity, water and salt, and keeping fuel costs negligible. At one point, however, a young man who had been persuaded to discuss what he wanted from the new government stopped talking when he noticed a minder approaching – then mock-hanged himself with an imaginary noose.
The minder smiled and proceeded to help translate the rest of his interview.
Turkmenistan’s government has used its extraordinary natural gas wealth not just to warm and light homes, but to keep its people isolated and pacified for more than two decades. With war-torn Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the southwest and radical Islamists on every side, Turkmenistan has in some ways been an oasis of stability in a volatile neighborhood.
Its strategic location and energy resources make it extremely attractive to powers competing for a toehold in Central Asia – among them Russia, Iran, the United States, Turkey and China. It has been in the regime’s interest – and perhaps also that of the influential nations seeking to exploit its gas wealth – for order to be maintained at any cost.
“There are no bombs in the streets,” said Annakordova Raisa, a 60-year-old lawyer who was standing near a monument to Turkmen independence. Like so many others, Raisa added a good word for the former president: “Whatever we wanted, he gave us,” she said.
In the places reporters were allowed to go, Turkmens appeared for the most part to be friendly, cheerful and proud. And for all of its gaudiness, Ashgabat is something of a marvel to behold, a sort of theme park of marble and gold dedicated to Turkmen greatness, where fountains gush from the sand and forests sprout in the desert. “The 21st century is the golden age of Turkmen!” signs everywhere proclaim.
