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Today, May 25, Boris Shikhmuradov turned 58 in Ovadan-tepe prison 70 km away from Ashghabad. The continued incarceration of Saparmurat Niyazov’s long-time foreign minister is a reminder of the incompleteness of that country’s political succession, especially since the international community is still denied access to or information about this well-liked establishment-turned-opposition figure.
Right now President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov is caught between potentially conflicting needs. To stay in power, the newly elected president must consolidate his power base within the elite and deepen the roots of his perceived legitimacy among the population.
He is trying to do both simultaneously, shaking up the government in recent weeks, and using the March 30 session on the Halk Maslahaty to introduce a program of agricultural reform.
The import of these actions still remains unclear. Some of the cadre changes seem quite positive. Berdymuhammedov got rid of the powerful, but reportedly odious, head of the Presidential Guard Akmurad Rejepov, who held this post since the time of Turkmen Communist Party boss Muhammad Gapurov, freeing Turkmenistan’s new leader to liberalize his country’s security forces should he so choose.
Instead, Berdymuhammedov seems more inclined to modify the repressive Niyazov-style system to serve a new leader—-him—-rather than to dismantle the security state that “Turkmenbashi” created. State media has been put on notice that they have to toe an ideological line - a confusing strategy as the content of post-Niyazov state ideology is still unclear.
There seems little or no elite support to retain the content of the former cult of personality, but no obvious substitute for it. In the USSR, rolling back Stalinism still left you with Lenin around whom to build an ideology. Without Niyazov, the ideology of Turkmen nationalism would be almost without content. Creating a new content is an unnecessary distraction when the country faces serious economic problems.
For now at least ideology is unlikely to be the glue which holds the state together, and the security forces are not yet fully dependable. This means Berdymuhammedov is forced to rely on “the carrot” to keep the Turkmen population in tow.
It also means that for the immediate future he must sustain the social welfare net where it was, meaning at minimum large state subsidies in the domestic energy sector. Turkmenbashi’s lavish spending habits have left the Turkmen government living largely hand to mouth—-spending money from gas sales to Russia almost as quickly as it receives them.
As a result, Ashgabat is tied into continuing to sell gas to Russia at least for the short and mid-term. The new pipeline agreement between Kazakhstan, Russia and Uzbekistan is simply recognition of this reality. New contracts with foreign developers will depend on sound information about the actual size of Turkmen reserves, which must precede the “green field” projects necessary to bring in FDI. This requires expertise which is currently in short supply in Turkmenistan, given Niyazov’s cadre policies.
Agricultural reform will require even more expertise to succeed. The new laws and projects that are being introduced to “reform” the cotton economy do not represent a fundamentally new approach, and provide limited economic incentive to the country’s farmers, falling far short of any kind of meaningful “market-based” reform.
Berdymuhammedov’s behavior to date has been sufficiently “forward-looking” to create a readiness of international financial institutions to be willing to try reengaging with Turkmenistan. But this reengagement will not have the effect that they or even he wants unless he can muster competent cadres to sit at the Turkmen side of the table.
And this will not occur until the new Turkmen leader reaches out to the old Turkmen leaders’ enemies. Certainly, from an international point of view, the kind of amnesty of political prisoners that the International Crisis Group called for in February 2007 would be ideal. But barring that, Berdymuhammedov must at least eliminate the unstated practice of guilt by association, so that protégés and relatives of the various political opposition figures who remain in jail, under house arrest or in exile will be able to serve their homeland to the best of their abilities. Anything less is certainly against the best interests of the Turkmen population.
Martha Brill Olcott
Senior Associate
