January 2004
Turkmenistan has one of the most repressive governments in the world. Its president, Saparmurat Niazov, has been in office since before the country’s independence in 1991, and has been declared president for life. He has absolute power over virtually all aspects of political and civic life and has crafted a cult of personality compared by many to that of Stalin.
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- Freedom of Expression
- Freedom of Movement
- Civil Society
- Political Opposition
- Key International Actors
Freedom of Expression
There is no freedom of expression in Turkmenistan. All media are tightly controlled by the state. President Niazov appoints all newspaper editors, and Russian and other foreign newspapers are prohibited. All television stations in Turkmenistan are state owned and controlled, and the government has restricted access to certain cable programming. The sole Internet server is state-owned and controlled.
Freedom of Movement
Movement is also severely restricted. Everyone must carry internal passports and endure road checks by police, as often as every fifty kilometers. Several border areas are off limits without special permits. The government punishes “those people who have lost the respect of the nation” with internal exile to remote regions of the country. Human Rights Watch has documented several cases in which this policy was implemented against political and religious dissidents.
Civil Society
Several civil society activists have struggled to continue their work in this oppressive environment, facing enormous risks of persecution. In 2003 the government heightened the risks even further, adopting new draconian restrictions. Civil society advocates who do not register now face imprisonment and “corrective labor.” The government rarely registers independent groups.
The Russian Orthodox Church and Sunni Islam are the only religions permitted in Turkmenistan all others remain the subject of discrimination and persecution. Cultural institutions such as theatres, circuses, and opera remain banned.
The government has laid waste to the education system, ending secondary education at the ninth grade, cutting back on the teaching of foreign languages, and making The Book of Ruhnama (Soul), a quasi-spiritual guide allegedly authored by Niazov, as the basis for all study at all levels.
Ethnic minorities, in particular Uzbeks and ethnic Russians, face discrimination and harassment on a daily basis.
Turkmenistan holds some of the world’s largest reserves in gas and oil. Hydrocarbon revenues are directly under the control of the president, and little trickles down to the population, which increasingly lives in extreme poverty.
Political Opposition
The key political event in recent years was an armed attack on President Niazov in November 2002. The government convicted former Foreign Minister Boris Shikhmuradov for organizing the attack, though many observers suggested that Niazov may have instigated it to discredit Shikhmuradov and the underground and exiled opposition. The investigations and subsequent trials following the assassination attempt were characterized by a blatant disregard for basic due process and fair trial standards, starkly illustrating the degraded quality of justice in Turkmenistan.
According to officials, sixty-one people were arrested during the course of the investigation, but human rights groups believe the number was well over 100. Fifty-seven people subsequently were charged with involvement in the attack. The trials were closed, and defendants were held incommunicado and not granted counsel of their choice. In some cases defense counsel had little or no notice prior to the beginning of court hearings. “Confessions” by some defendants, such as Shikhmuradov, were broadcast on television. Reports suggested that these “confessions” were scripted and likely the product of torture and mind-altering drugs administered in custody.
Human Rights Watch received credible reports of ill treatment and torture of suspects. Methods reportedly included suffocation with plastic bags, beatings with batons, food and sleep deprivation, and injection of unknown narcotics.
Relatives of many suspects were also targeted. They too were detained and subjected to torture and psychological pressure in an effort to force them to incriminate their loved ones or, in cases where the suspects remained at large, to disclose their whereabouts. The Turkmen Helsinki Foundation and Deutschwelle Radio reported the deaths in custody of two relatives of Saparmurat Yklymov, one of four former high-ranking government representatives charged with organizing the alleged “assassination attempt.” They were apparently tortured to death in March of 2003.
The Turkmen government’s harassment and persecution of the political opposition does not stop at the Turkmen border—within Russia, Turkmen human rights defenders and those active in the Turkmen opposition movement continue to be threatened and harassed by the Committee for National Security (formerly the KGB). Human Rights Watch has documented several cases in Moscow in which unknown individuals have harassed, threatened, and physically beaten Turkmen dissidents, such as Mukhamedgel’dy Berdyev, a prominent Turkmen human rights activist and Radio Free Europe journalist, and his son Shanazar, as well as Avdi Kuliev, a leading opposition activist.
Key International Actors
Turkmenistan’s long-standing isolationism and President Niazov’s blatant disregard for international opinion and law pose obvious challenges to international institutions seeking to improve the human rights situation in the country.
In response to the Turkmen government’s crackdown after the alleged assassination attempt, the OSCE for the first time in its history invoked the “Moscow Mechanism,” designed to review the human rights practices of a member state. However, President Niazov refused to co-operate with it, and denied a visa to the rapporteur nominated by the OSCE. At its 59th session, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution deploring the human rights situation in Turkmenistan and calling on the government to invite U.N. special rapporteurs to visit the country.
The EBRD, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank as well as other multilateral financial institutions and bilateral donors have chosen to limit their support to the Turkmen public sector in view of the country’s failure to move toward multi-party democracy, a more pluralistic society, and a transparent market-based economy.
Russia is the most obvious candidate to exert influence on the Turkmen regime due to strong commercial links regarding natural gas. However, Russia, dependent on inexpensive natural gas supplies and lacking any alternative source, has been reluctant to cut its support for Niyazov.
