Year in Review 2005 - All Turkmenbashi all the time

There was precious little change in the one-party state of Turkmenistan in 2005, where authoritarian President Saparmurad Niyazov continues to dominate the politics and economy of the nation. Under the weight of his 13-year-old dictatorship, social and economic conditions in Central Asia's most reclusive state continued to stagnate or worsen over the past 12 months. Niyazov maintained tight control over political life in the largely desert state, responding to outside international pressure only occasionally. Amnesty International (AI) said human rights abuses in Turkmenistan remained widespread in a new report released in early May. Small steps to fend off criticism of the country’s human rights record failed to adequately address concerns raised by human rights groups and intergovernmental bodies, including the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR) and the UN General Assembly. Religious minorities, civil society activists and others exercising their right to freedom of expression faced harassment and imprisonment or were forced into exile. Relatives of dissenters continued to be targeted. Those imprisoned following an alleged assassination attempt on the president in November 2002 continued to be held incommunicado. Conscientious objectors to military service were imprisoned. According to AI, Turkmenistan's human rights record stands in stark contrast with its commitment to uphold key human rights principles that it made when ratifying a series of important UN human rights treaties. It is bound to uphold these as a member of the OSCE. "It is now particularly crucial that the international community press for implementation of its previous resolutions and recommendations in a consistent and principled way," a statement from the group said. Efforts to curtail religious freedom in the reclusive energy-rich state of Turkmenistan continue, with at least seven mosques demolished in 2004 alone, activists said in January 2005. "By destroying mosques - as well as a Christian church and Hare Krishna temples, as was done in the past - the Turkmen government is demonstrating its contempt for the rights of believers of different faiths to maintain their own places of worship where they can pray freely in the way they wish to," Felix Corley, editor of Forum 18 News Service, an agency covering religious freedom in the former Soviet republics and eastern Europe, said. In November, Forum 18 strongly criticised a US government report that failed to designate Turkmenistan a country of particular concern (CPC) on the issue of religious freedom. "Turkmenistan's government still refuses to allow residents of the country to practice their faith freely," Corley said from London. A report on health care and human rights in Turkmenistan, published by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in June, highlighted the deteriorating situation in the former Soviet republic. "The current situation in Turkmenistan's healthcare system is very serious and, in recent years, the healthcare system has been systematically dismantled. Since independence, state funding for healthcare has significantly decreased," Bernd Rechel, one of the authors of the report, said. "User fees have been introduced for an increasing range of medical services, rendering healthcare services financially inaccessible to the majority of the population. Many people are dying prematurely, because they cannot afford healthcare," Rechel added. The ‘Human Rights and Health in Turkmenistan’ report, by Rechel and co-author Professor Martin McKee, was undertaken in late 2004 and early 2005 by the European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition (ECOHOST) with funding from the New York-based Open Society Institute (OSI). The plight of ethnic minorities in Turkmenistan remained bleak, despite claims to the contrary by the Turkmen government during August's session of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). "Each of Turkmenistan's ethnic and racial minorities bears a heavy burden of discrimination and exclusion in the environment where preferential treatment is openly afforded only to ethnic Turkmen," Robert Arsenault, president of the International League for Human Rights (ILHR), asserted from New York. He went on to describe the human rights situation in Turkmenistan as alarming. "The president for life, Saparmurat Niyazov, has defined the newly created country of Turkmenistan as the glorified home of the ethnic Turkmen," Erika Dailey, director of the Open Society Institute's Turkmenistan Project, added from New York. "In that conceptualisation, there is no room for non-ethnic Turkmen in Turkmenistan. So the state has attempted to "Turkmenify" its non-Turkmen population," added Dailey. Press freedom remained severely curtailed, according to watchdog group Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Turkmens had to make do with government-controlled television that only broadcasts writings and poems by the president, whose gilded profile appears permanently in a corner of the screen. There is no news, comedy, discussion or Western music and programmes end at 23:00. Foreign stations are always jammed. Journalists who dare to work with foreign media are hounded by the government. Radio Free Europe (RFE), which broadcasts pro-democracy material, has been especially targeted. There were some developments in Turkmenistan that were recognised by international organisations as progressive in 2005. In February, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) welcomed a decision by the Turkmen parliament to pass legislation banning child labour and guaranteeing freedom from economic exploitation as a right of children. "The government is aware of the issue of child labour in Turkmenistan and this new law has been formulated to deal with the issue," UNICEF country head, Mahboob Shareef, said in the capital, Ashgabat. His comments follow the adoption of the law by the Turkmen parliament two days earlier. The text of the law, signed by the president, states the legislation is aimed at fulfilling the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as the law of Turkmenistan. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the government of Turkmenistan completed the first ever registration of all refugees in Turkmenistan, UNHCR spokesperson Ron Redmond announced on 18 March, in Geneva. The exercise began in October 2004 and was finalised at the end of February. In total, some 11,000 ethnic Turkmen who had arrived from Tajikistan and more than 500 ethnic Turkmen from Afghanistan were recorded. "The exercise will now lead to negotiations with the government of the Central Asian nation on finding a durable solution for the registered population. It is a major step toward the resolution of a refugee situation created by the conflicts in nearby Afghanistan and Tajikistan," Redmond said. The Year Ahead Despite recent political change in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, change in Turkmenistan in 2006 is unlikely under the current political climate, observers maintain. “It is likely the president will continue to use Turkmenistan’s natural gas reserves as his key tool for implementing his will on major fronts. Domestically, continuing to provide free or subsidised gas and water the face of almost complete dependence on the state for basic subsistence will maintain his monopoly on power,” Dailey said. Regionally Turkmenistan is likely to continue its position of neutrality while growing closer to Moscow – exclusive importer of Turkmen gas, analysts believe. Criticism of the country’s human rights record and lack of democracy is likely to be tempered as international investors pursue interest in a trans-Afghan pipeline and Washington keeps Ashgabat as a key regional ally in its war on terror, Dailey added.