Criticism of Turkmenistan government stifled

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 said, telling of relatives starving in the countryside where reporters cannot go. The government imposes brainwashing and imprisons on a whim, she said.

Most of all, she tells of the desperation under the reign of longtime dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in December, and fears it will continue. He 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.

He asked his people to call him Turkmenbashi, “father of the Turkmen.”

‘Here is to risk death’

“You cannot speak, you cannot complain’ because if you do, they send you to you-know-where,” said the old woman, who pleaded with a reporter not to reveal anything about her family for fear of reprisals. “To tell the truth, here is to risk death.”

In two trips to Turkmenistan after the unexpected death of Mr. Niyazov, 66, from heart failure, the interview with this woman was exceptional for two, undoubtedly related, reasons: It was unsupervised by government minders, and it was the only conversation in which a Turkmen would utter a critical word about the country’s leadership.

A small number of foreign reporters were allowed into Turkmenistan last month for the inauguration of new President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov, a former dentist and career Niyazov loyalist. But access to ordinary Turkmen was strictly limited, as government minders accompanied reporters nearly everywhere they went and said trips outside the capital were “impossible.”

But the old woman, who invited this reporter into her home in a rare unsupervised moment one evening, knelt before a low table and spoke for more than an hour. She spoke in Russian, through another reporter who translated, of the brutality of the omnipresent police. Friends were stripped of jobs or citizenship with no recourse. Non-ethnic Turkmen suffered discrimination. There was a broad culture of fear and corruption.

She spoke of rampant crime and drug abuse and of entire neighborhoods razed to make room for Mr. Niyazov’s grandiose monuments to himself. His government built a capital city of glorious extravagance, with fountains gushing from the sand, artificial forests sprouting in the desert and gold-covered domes and statues proclaiming Turkmenbashi’s greatness.

“Maybe they’ll tear this down, too,” she said, pointing at the peeling walls.

A recent report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based organization that monitors conflict zones, backed most of her claims and added, “the human rights record under Niyazov was one of the most abysmal in the world.”

“Prisoners of conscience swelled the prison population,” many of them in “appalling conditions, including extreme overcrowding,” it said, citing a study by the London-based International Center for Prison Studies, which estimated that 22,000 Turkmen were imprisoned in 2000, the last year for which data was available.

“Torture and drugging with psychotropic substances were common,” the ICG report added. “Large parts of Turkmenistan,” it said, “are off limits even to citizens.”

The police state and excesses of Turkmenistan were funded by what the CIA says is about 480 cubic miles of proven natural gas reserves in a country slightly larger than California and with a population of just over 5 million.

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