The Columbia Journalism Review has published a piece on the shootout in Ashgabat, first reported by our own Kayumars Turkestani (who gave permission to build off his post). An excerpt:
Just before midnight of Friday September 12th, the police in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, began an all-night shootout with a group of radical Islamists. Saturday morning’s reports said twenty policemen died in the fight, indicating that the energy-rich Central Asian state might be turning into a new front in the war on terror.
Except it wasn’t true. While the Ashgabat police certainly got into an hours-long gunfight, and while somewhere between ten and twenty policemen might have died, they were fighting criminals, not terrorists. Such news carries altogether different implications—both about Turkmenistan and the way some news agencies covered the situation.
As always, please read the whole thing, and feel free to comment liberally.
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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{ 8 comments }
You have your chronology a little mixed up on this story. RFE/RL was the first not only to report on the gunfight altogether, but also on the reported Islamist extremist component. Moreover, they did so (not in the link you included, but in an item in the news sidebar that is no longer accessible) citing unnamed sources.
The practice of not naming the source of a story is fairly standard procedure for reporters working in Turkmenistan, which has in the past jailed, tortured and killed Radio Free Europe reporters and collaborators.
The line taken by both the BBC and the AP was that Gundogar is a “foreign-based opposition Web site,” information is strictly controlled in Turkmenistan and that state media did not report on the incident. They both also noted that “Islamic violence is virtually unheard of, as the government has vigorously stamped out all opposition.” What exactly you require as qualification aside from that, other than saying that Radio Free Europe and Gundogar are compulsive liars, is not clear from your essay. You evidently have your own views, which you don’t share, and have failed to provide even basic information, such as telling the reader that Gundogar is run by the son of the former foreign minister and that he has regular links with his home country.
Moreover, you are somewhat incomplete in your media survey, which leaves out reporting from other Turkmen opposition sites (Khronika Turkmenistana, Turkmenskaya Iskra), Russian newspapers (Vremya Novostei), and German radio station (Deutsche Welle) among others, all of whom have necessarily reported the Islamic angle. Not because it is undoubtedly true, but because that was the speculation that arose immediately, and has persisted, amid a vacuum of actual information.
On point of fact, nobody has reported the Islamic radical link as observed fact as you claim.
You rely on your purportedly definitive (yet oddly hedged) account largely on the government’s narrative and partly on the U.S. Embassy, which is itself briefed on security matters, like all foreign missions in Ashgabat, by the authorities. That is by all means a perfectly admissible stance if you feel comfortable with that source. Of course, if you maintain that line, you can accept only that the Turkmen security forces mounted a raid (badly), that an undefined number of people of uncertain identity perished in the process and that a gang of bad men was neutralized or liquidated, depending on what word you prefer. Also, you would have only heard those details by the middle of the week; some days after the event actually took place.
One might also consider that even that discreet degree of disclosure was almost certainly prompted by the reporting that preceded it, which is the service that journalism is in part supposed to provide.
Bearing all this mind, your bewildered enquiry about why there is so much reliance on rumours is peculiar. When even the U.S. Embassy itself holds up its hands and refers in its Warden Messages to “several unconfirmed rumours”, it should tell you that the problem is, as I wrote above, is that there is precious little else to go on. The only real alternative is to report nothing at all other than government-sanctioned news, which is almost what happens anyhow.
Of course, we could rely purely on our powers of speculation. That would lead us quite merrily to bizarre conclusion that a 12-hour-or-so gunfight at a water-bottling plant was precipitated by some indignant motorists who have apparently been stealing gasoline (really don’t know where you got that one from).
Well Peter if I want to play your game I’d gripe at your deliberate simplification of the scenario by not mentioning that the 12-hour gunfight supposedly involved hostages, and that the Turkmeni forces’ unfamiliarity with these kinds of standoffs is what most likely led to so many of them being killed. I also, if you noticed, didn’t disavow the drug smuggler angle, merely that the whole thing doesn’t make much sense (which is hardly relying on the government’s account as “purportedly definitive”).
But really, understanding that we live in a world of word counts and imperfect information, I don’t get what your problem is.
Frankly, I don’t think you _do_ understand that we live in a world of imperfect information; or in the case of Turkmenistan, virtually no information at all.
My problem, or my point as I prefer to think of it, is that your essay is a completely illegitimate hatchet job on reporting in a highly problematic country. The articles on the violence in Ashgabat (by AP, BBC, RFE/RL, AFP, Reuters and all the opposition Turkmen sites) were replete with eyewitness accounts, and reporting rumours and speculation is only one part of what they did and should have done.
As for the involvement of hostages, that is also speculation, which confirms my point exactly that it is important to rely on even the slimmest fragment of information in cases like this, instead of piously relaying the government line, that being the only line in town.
Peter, please help me see where I’m touting the government line. I mention that embassy releases in the days leading up to the violence there indicated it wasn’t a surprise, and I express guarded skepticism at the Turkmen government’s claim it was with drug traffickers.
I think you’re misunderstanding the point I’m making — that cries of Islamic radicalism are breathlessly hyped without reason, a charge familiar to students of the region — while complaining I wasn’t comprehensive enough in a 700-word article.
Which is deeply unfair of you. Re-read the last paragraph of that essay — it is complaining that news reports are not skeptical enough, that they report rumor or even official stories with too much certainty, and so on (that’s the running theme of all my work at CJR thus far). You’re looking for something that isn’t there.
It seems like you’re both saying close to the same thing here, which means you don’t need to accuse each other of being unfair. No one is saying that any one account should be taken at face value. Josh, you do make it sound like you have dismissed the “Islamic terrorism” narrative in the second paragraph of your essay by saying it is “not true,” despite the fact that no sources are available to prove that.
Another thing to keep in mind is that all of these separate narratives (Islamic, narcotic, and political strife) may very well be intertwined in some way. I’m thinking of the way these things are often intertwined in Tajikistan and Afghanistan; we have too little information to say whether or not the battle of Ashghabat was between government forces and Islamic drug traffickers or a political faction that funds itself through drugs, or an underground Islamist movement that opposes the government. Or none of the above-maybe it was about gas or something else entirely.
“Another thing to keep in mind is that all of these separate narratives (Islamic, narcotic, and political strife) may very well be intertwined in some way.”
I think this is an eminently sensible and open-minded comment. Especially, since the language coming from Berdymukhamedov indicated there was more to the eye than what he was letting on. Calling for the creation of a specialized unit devoted to combating terrorism in the context of the shootout last week, as he did, suggests that he perceives the problem as going beyond mere law enforcement and that the country has much more intractable security issues to deal with.
As for the drug-trafficking angle, this is something that really should be considered very seriously indeed. There is categorically no way that the trade could have flourished under Niyazov without the direct complicity of the highest officials in the land, given the oppressive nature of the regime. What the relations between the new leadership and those dealing in narcotics-dealing are now is anybody’s guess, but there are more than enough reasons to believe they are not healthy.
Frankly Joshua, I think you open yourself up to criticism when half of your posts complain about how other people have ‘got it wrong’, ‘don’t get it’, haven’t done their homework, or are otherwise ignorant and uninformed.
RFE/RL has a new report by Bruce Pannier on the Asghabat battle–it has a ring of truth to it, although some of the details are murky.