RIGHTS-TURKMENISTAN: Opposition Vows To Win Democratic Reforms

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Blagov

MOSCOW, Jun 14 1998 (IPS) - The European Union has promised to take ‘appropriate measures’ if the human rights situation worsens in Turkmenistan. But the country’s democratic opposition doubt there is much chance of it improving, at least in the near future.

“The Turkmen opposition advocates peaceful, non-violent methods in our campaign for democracy in Turkmenistan,” former Turkmen foreign minister and opposition leader Avdy Kuliev tells IPS, “although at the moment people do not have the ability to change their government peacefully.”

The EU and Turkmenistan signed a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement last month to bring the Central Asian state and its four million people into line with the rest of the ex-Soviet CIS states.

According to the pact, ‘if’ Turkmenistan violates human rights or democratic or free market principles, the EU will take ‘appropriate measures’ — and without prior consultation in particularly urgent cases.

Yet human rights activists have long condemned Turkmenistan, a one-party state dominated by president Saparmurat Niyazov, who likes to be known as ‘Turkmenbashi’ or ‘Leader of the Turkmen’.

“The human rights situation in Turkmenistan is extremely worrying,” Alexander Petrov of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki in Moscow told IPS. “The authorities tolerate no opposition.”

Head of the Turkmen Communist Party since 1985 and president of Turkmenistan since its independence in October 199, he has made little progress in moving from a Soviet-era authoritarian style of government to a democratic system

He has encouraged a cult of personality of the like rarely seen since the darkest days of Stalinism. The capital Ashgabat is filled with huge statues of Niyazov and his portrait is emblazoned across buildings and streets in throughout the city.

Interviewed by IPS in Moscow, Kuliev says he plans to strengthen ties with other Turkmen opposition activists based in Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey. He hopes to return again to Ashgabat in the future and urged the outside world put more political pressure on Niyazov.

Kuliev was briefly arrested in April the day before Niyazov left for a trip to Washington, but was released after U.S. President Bill Clinton made a personal appeal. The Turkmen authorities accuse Kuliev of plotting armed rebellion and embezzling state

funds while a minister, but Kuliev dismisses the charges as fabrications.

The Communist Party, renamed the Turkmen Democratic Party, retained a monopoly on power after the Soviet break-up in 1991.

The government will not allow the formation of other parties and continues to repress opposition political activities.

Though the constitution allows the right to hold personal convictions and to express them freely, in practice the authorities severely restrict freedom of speech and do not permit freedom of the press, according to the U.S. State Department.

“Turkmenistan is a completely closed society in terms of mass media,” says Vitaly Ponomarev, a Russian human rights activist and Kuliev supporter. “There are no journalists from countries outside the former USSR based in Turkmenistan, and reporters working for Russian media are permanently harassed by Turkmen security services.”

The Turkmen government effectively controls the media, censoring all newspapers and rarely permitting independent criticism of government policy or officials. Two nominally independent newspapers established under presidential decree, Adalat (Justice) and Galkynysh (Revival), are still censored.

The government prohibits the media from reporting the views of opposition political leaders and critics, and it rarely allows even the mildest form of criticism in print. The government has threatened and harassed those who contribute to critical foreign media coverage.

In the manner of the former USSR, Niyazov’s regime does not tolerate criticism of government policy or the president in academic circles, and the government-controlled Union of Writers has expelled members who criticised government policy and ordered their books removed from public libraries.

Security forces continued to beat and otherwise mistreat suspects and prisoners, and prison conditions remained poor and unsafe, say the State Department. Arbitrary arrest, detention, unfair trials, and interference with citizens’ privacy were all widely reported.

“This ‘anti-people’ regime allows inhuman conditions in its prisons,” Kuliev says. The Committee on National Security (KNB) is charged, like its predecessor, the Soviet-era KGB, to ensure that the regime controls of society and discourages dissent.

Dissident Durdymurad Khodzha-Mukhammed remains held in a psychiatric hospital in Geok-Depe, and dissident Ata Aymamedov is still imprisoned for calling for the president’s removal from office. Another dissident, Khoshali Garaev, was kidnapped from Moscow by Turkmen secret police and sentenced to 13 years in jail.

“These cases must not be perceived as separate incidents, as they reflects the conscious policy of Turkmen leadership,” says Valentin Gefter of the Russian human rights group Memorial.

Turkmenistan is largely desertified, with cattle and sheep raising and intensive agriculture, especially cotton, employing half the population. But it is also blessed with huge oil reserves and the fourth largest supply of natural gas in the world.

All this wealth is still in state hands, though the government has promised to bring in a market economy at some point. The populace is still waiting for this wealth to find its way into infrastructure and social expenditure.

“There cannot be any social stability in a country where the annual budget amounting to some 400-600 million dollars and where the president’s personal wealth is estimated at some three billion dollars,”says Ponomarev.

The country’s dependence on a single ruler is potentially destabilising for Turkmenistan, not least because the problem of succession is yet to be resolved, says Ponomarev.

Last September Niyazov underwent five hours of heart surgery at a Munich clinic, and it remained unclear who was ruling in his absence. There are 10 vice-premiers under Niyazov, who is also prime minister, but there was no official word on who was in charge.

However the president may legally remain in office for five more years. Niyazov extended his presidential term in a 1994 referendum until 2003 and claimed that 99.9 percent of voters supported the move.