Thug in a Rug

Thug in a Rug
Afghanistan isn't Central Asia's only trouble spot.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, November 29, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

Amid news of the war in Afghanistan, I keep wondering about the future of another Central Asian country still suffering a wretched hangover of Soviet misrule: Turkmenistan. The problem there is not radical Islam, nor, as far as I know, does it harbor nests of terrorists. What ails Turkmenistan is a ruler, Saparmurat Niyazov, who for the past decade has been on a spree of despotic excess that in some ways starts to rival the Kims of North Korea.

A country about the size of California, with a population of five million, most of them moderate Muslims, Turkmenistan is rich in potential. It sits atop some of the world's largest known reserves of natural gas. But apart from a recently built small pipeline to Iran, Turkmenistan has no egress for its gas except the old Soviet pipeline network through Russia, which until quite recently has proved an unrewarding conduit.

Given Turkmenistan's border with Afghanistan, one of the pre-Osama-era notions now back on development drawing boards is the project of running a pipeline from Turkmenistan, across a revived Afghanistan, to Pakistan. Perhaps inspired by such visions, as well as by the immediate quest to recruit Turkmen cooperation in the war, Secretary of State Colin Powell last month praised Turkmenistan as "a source of stability in Central Asia."

Hardly. There are signs here and there that the stocky, white-haired Mr. Niyazov has overstepped the bounds of stability, and may be ripe for a fall. The question, then, is: Given Turkmenistan's volatile neighborhood, home to war next door and the old Great Game, what comes next?

Back when the Soviet Union was starting to implode, Mr. Niyazov was Turkmenistan's local Communist Party boss. In 1990 he ran, uncontested, for president of the then-Soviet republic. He won, and the next year ended up as ruler of the newly independent nation of Turkmenistan.

Since then, wielding a Soviet-style security service with a record of silencing, jailing, torturing and occasionally exiling any opposition, Mr. Niyazov has dispensed with presidential elections, declared that Turkmenistan is enjoying a "golden age" under his rule and been exalted to president for life--though he says he'll step down in 2010. There is no free speech in Turkmenistan, no freedom to leave the country and scant development of a private economy. There's little in the shops, and not much for the average, miserably poor citizen to live on.

But there's plenty of Mr. Niyazov, who since the early 1990s has gone by the honorary title of Turkmenbashi, which in the Turkmen language means "father of the Turkmen people." Cities, streets, parks and airports carry his name. His image is woven into decorative carpets; his face appears on the currency; portraits of him bedeck many of the buildings. Statues of Mr. Niyazov--standing, walking, commanding--abound. In the capital city of Ashgabat is a huge "Arch of Neutrality," a tribute to Mr. Niyazov's hope of turning Turkmenistan into the Switzerland of Central Asia--but the only thing actually turning is a revolving big golden statue of Mr. Niyazov himself, set atop the arch.

At a state rug-weaving enterprise, workers recently completed a carpet of record-breaking size, measuring more than 3,300 square feet and titled "The Golden Age of Great Saparmurat Turkmenbashi." On the state-run Golden Age television channel, the event of the season has been the new series "Turkmenbashi, the Patron," sequel to the 19-episode series, "Turkmenbashi, My Leader." And Mr. Niyazov has now come up with his own 400-page roster of moral commandments, a philosophy called "Rukhname." This screed was unanimously approved last month by Turkmenistan's Parliament as the nation's spiritual code of conduct. None other than Mr. Niyazov himself declared it should rank right up there with the Bible and the Koran.

Such vanity might be merely ludicrous were it not backed by Mr. Niyazov's chokehold on almost every aspect of life and his habit of directing the country's resources to his favorite and often unprofitable projects. He personally controls the country's foreign-exchange reserves--a privilege that people at the International Monetary Fund say amounts to a private bank account of more than $1.5 billion, which by IMF estimates equals about half the country's annual gross domestic product. Mr. Niyazov has decreed that foreigners who want to lease land in Turkmenistan must get his personal approval, as must any Turkmen companies before paying back any foreign loans. Another recent fillip is that any foreigner wanting to marry a Turkmen citizen must drop $50,000 into the Turkmenbashi-controlled till.

Deep in his messianic dream, Mr. Niyazov has been isolating his people from the modern world and running his country into the ground--steering clear of reform, spooking investors and, by accounts of various folks acquainted with his country, dismissing business deals that are not precisely to his liking. He has filled the capital with fountains, monuments and fancy government buildings, while most of his countrymen scrabble to survive. In old Soviet style, he offers things such as free water in a desert nation, and imposes price controls on such basics as food--policies that backfire into government-created scarcities.

It is dangerous for people in Turkmenistan to tell the truth to journalists, but when I made a reporting trip there some years ago, two brave medical workers in a provincial town showed me the old, bent hypodermic needles they had no choice but to reuse. One told me there was no chance to think about their jobs: "All we think about is how to get food."

While Mr. Niyazov lauds Turkmenistan's progress, the IMF estimates that per capita income has fallen to about half its already miserable level at independence 10 years ago. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, appalled at some of Mr. Niyazov's policies, threatened in July to cut off all dealings with Turkmenistan if the country did not make major economic and political reforms within the year. Human-rights organizations such as Freedom House and Human Rights Watch call Mr. Niyazov's regime one of the most repressive on earth.

Four weeks ago came a highly visible sign of ructions within. Boris Shikhmuradov, a former Turkmen foreign minister and ambassador to China, turned up in Moscow, announcing he was going into "open opposition" to Mr. Niyazov. Calling Mr. Niyazov a "scoundrel" and denouncing his regime a "black hole in which the well-being and hopes of the people and the national property are disappearing," Mr. Shikhmuradov spoke of a "democratic national movement" coalescing to oust Mr. Niyazov.

In Ashgabat, the Turkmen capital, Mr. Niyazov's regime responded the next day by filing corruption charges against Mr. Shikhmuradov and demanding that Russia hand him over--which so far has not happened. Circulating in Moscow now are rumors that a coup attempt may be in the making against Mr. Niyazov, a move some think Russia might support. "My sense is that Niyazov's control is potentially quite shaky," says Martha Olcott, a Central Asian expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who met with Mr. Shikhmuradov this month in Moscow.

While rumors in Moscow of every shape and size are nothing new, there are plenty of reasons why Russia might be tempted to help knock Mr. Niyazov from his pedestal--especially if it might mean installing a Kremlin-approved regime. Central Asia is part of the Russia's old stomping grounds, a group of countries formally independent but in Moscow's view still "the near abroad." Indeed, Russia never really left neighboring Tajikistan, and as part of America's war on terrorism, Russian "technicians" are now back in Kabul. Niyazov-free access to Turkmenistan's vast gas reserves would be no small prize. And since Russia was reborn in September as a U.S. ally, a Washington deep in the immediacy of conducting a war might be less prone to keep Moscow in check on other fronts.

But Russian backing for a coup in Turkmenistan would revive a precedent fraught with its own dangers. Russia may be reforming, but it is still far from a normal market democracy. Fresh bouts of expanding the empire won't help. There is no record so far of any country under the Kremlin's sway truly flourishing--apart from some recent good economic news from Russia itself. Rather, Russia has a long history of turning its dominions into breeding grounds for fresh trouble. To bring it full circle: Witness the legacy bedeviling Central Asia, most dangerously Afghanistan, but also Turkmenistan, today.

Perhaps, as Mr. Powell said, Turkmenistan is "stable." Or perhaps, in the best of all worlds, it isn't, but there is some remote hope that the people of Turkmenistan will themselves find a way to catch up with the modern world of freely elected leaders. That would be a desperately overdue development that we could truly celebrate, and the beginning of genuine, healthy stability.

But on the chance neither of these applies, someone in Washington might want to get primed for yet another twist in the Great Game. That should include reminding Moscow that fighting terrorism in Afghanistan does not mean the Kremlin should regard the rest of Central Asia as again up for grabs.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."