Under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union adopted the abhorrent practice of treating dissidents as mentally ill, shutting them into psychiatric hospitals and drugging them until or because they wouldn’t recant. It was one of the many ways Moscow’s deplorable treatment of dissidents gave the West much ammunition for protesting and opposing Soviet suzerainty over new territories.
Now we can add Turkmenistan to that list. Sazak Durdymuradov, a contributor to RFE/RL, has been held at a mental hospital in eastern Turkmenistan, barely a week after RFE/RL discovered he had been arrested and tortured. It remains unclear why he was singled out for abduction, since he was generally considered a moderate.
For needed context, this arrest has taken place against the backdrop of widespread harassment by Turkmen authorities of human rights activists, and journalists ahead of the June 24 Human Rights Dialogue with the European Union. Whether there is a connection remains to be seen, but it cannot yet be discounted.
Steve LeVine voices his disappointment at this turn of events. I must echo it: I was very hopeful that Stomatologbashi would ease Turkmenistan off the nastiest of Niyazov’s authoritarian impulses and slowly liberalize and open the country (see here and here). Durdymuradov’s arrest is a gigantic step away from the very positive steps the Turkmeni government had taken toward becoming a normal, functioning country.
Where might this lead? It is, unfortunately, uncertain: this could either be a hiccup or an actual reversal. For the moment, though we are simply left hoping Durdymuradov doesn’t suffer too terribly.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 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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Everything I’ve seen from Turkmenistan’s new regime convinces me Berdymuhammedov wants the country to be well-run, as opposed to a bizarre cult prison camp, but that he has not intentions of political liberalization. Granted, that’s still a major improvement.
Sad to say, Durdymuradov’s arrest and the way he is being kept is neither new, a hiccup nor a reversal on any supposed improvement in Turkmen human rights policy. Indeed, his is only the most high-profile of recent worrying developments, as I wrote over at neweurasia some days ago.
http://turkmenistan.neweurasia.net/2008/06/25/turkmenistan-jails-another-dissident/
You should skim through Amnesty’s exhaustive report issued last week for a proper understanding of the scale of the problem.
In a sense, this matter is only worsened by Turkmenistan’s increasingly glowing reputation in the more ill-informed Western diplomatic circles, which has served only to cloud many observers’ judgement. Alleged imminent cooperation between NATO and Ashgabat, as also reported recently by RFE/RL via Der Spiegel, suggests that the West may be readying itself to turn a blind eye on humanitarian issues, as it has done often in the past.
I would even contest Brian’s conclusion that Berdymukhammedov wants the country to be run better. Clearly, any leader would want that, but the current president’s penchant for regular cadre rotation and mania for gesture politics indicates he may be little more than Niyazov-lite. He has his own foibles and minor eccentricities (namely, his obsession with turning the Caspian shoreline into a giant tourist resort) that have little to do with the well-being of the population at large. His management style appears primarily geared at maintaining his own primacy and little else.
The money-generating hydrocarbon sector remains as opaque as ever, while media reports (vide recent IWPR bulletins) point to violations of basic rights standards for workers at foreign-owned energy resource exploration projects.
Consider also that there are serious environmental implications implicit in Turkmenistan’s energy projects. That might seem an irrelevant point, but you only have to note how green activists have also been scooped up in the initimidation strategies deployed by Berdymukhamedov.
If the West (most notably the EU in these days) does not take a clear stand on these matters, it will be to its profound shame.