Uncle Berdie?
Stomatologbashi has decided to cancel a minor portion of Afghanistan’s debt. I’m sure they’re appreciative. But will he actually change anything, in any real way, for the normal people in his country?
That’s the question posed by this fascinating interview, one of the very few conducted without government minders nearby to censor local views.
ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan – An old woman drinks shots of vodka in a warm, dingy room, sobbing at the thought of living out her life here – that is, in the Turkmenistan that outsiders aren’t supposed to see, behind the marble and gold facades.
“They lie when they say there’s no famine,” she says, telling of relatives starving in the countryside where reporters cannot go. The government imposes brainwashing and imprisons on a whim, she says.
Most of all, she talks of the desperation under the reign of longtime dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in December, and fear that it will continue. Niyazov used the nation’s vast wealth in natural gas to create monuments to himself in a society that he virtually sealed off from the outside world.
One could say it was a place with a very North Korean temperament. Only in North Korea you’d never see things like this:
Even with the minders present, there were hints that something was off here: on the street, a talkative young man tightened an imaginary noose around his neck and hanged himself, a sign that he worried about saying too much. A woman in a market fashioned her fingers into a gun and put it against her head, signaling the same.
Everywhere, Turkmens repeated the same mantras: “Whatever we wanted, he gave us,” Raisa said of Niyazov, whose cult of personality is rivaled in the modern world only by that of Kim Jong Il in North Korea.
There we go. It would be trite to say they can only go up from here (and partially not true). But it would be nice if Berdimuhammedov followed through on his promises of reform.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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