Turkmenistan: The brazen and the beautiful
Fishy goings-on at a cosmetics services center, talking human rights with the EU, and more in this week's Akhal-Teke Bulletin.
Beauty, as the old saw goes, is in the eye of the beholder.
In Turkmenistan, however, it is in the pockets of the president’s family.
As an investigation produced jointly by exile-run news outlets Turkmen.News and Gundogar, together with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, has revealed, a $51 million cosmetic services center built at the state’s expense was sold at a sharp discount to relatives of the ruling family.
The International Burns and Aesthetic Center, to use the facility’s full title, was opened amid customary pomp and fanfare in October 2020. Then-President (and now National Leader) Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov wowed his guests, who included medical specialists from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, by allegedly delivering a speech in German without notes. (Footage of the ceremony broadcast at the time, though, looks suspiciously like Berdymukhamedov was speaking in front of a green screen, suggesting his televised speech may have been pre-recorded).
As the president told his audience, his government’s priority was to ensure the public with “high-quality medical services” and “increase their life expectancy.”
It seems that was not his top priority, though. As has now emerged, only two days before that grand opening, Berdymukhamedov secretively approved a decree allowing for the cosmetics services center to be privatized without need for a competitive public tender. The manat price was set at an equivalent of $44.5 million as calculated using the official exchange rate. In real-world terms set by the black market, the price was probably closer to $6.6 million.
As Turkmen.News, Gundogar, and the OCCRP learned, the eventual buyer, a company named Ashgabat International Aesthetic Treatment Center, includes Berdymukhamedov’s relatives among its shareholders.
Hard-hitting exposés of this type can only be done by outlets based outside the country. Turkmenistan has no real independent media ecosystem, and certainly nothing that would dare question the regime’s conduct.
It so happens that increasing “the visibility of the activities and effectiveness of interaction between public authorities, civil society institutions, the media and the private sector” is listed as a goal in the the National Action Plan on Human Rights in Turkmenistan for 2021-2025. As is the creation of a “culture of intolerance to corruption in society,” but never mind about that.
On December 18, a Turkmen government delegation traveled to Brussels to meet with European Union officials for discussions on how that action plan is being implemented.
The Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights and the International Partnership for Human Rights seized on this opportunity to call on the EU to press Turkmenistan on a number of shortcomings. These include the chronic harassment of journalists and activists inside and outside the country, de facto travel restrictions on much of the population, the torture of political prisoners, and the effective ban on public assembly and free expression.
Brussels will pay these pleas only lip service, if that, and will certainly do nothing to risk embarrassing the Turkmen government in public.
Europeans can easily be mollified with highly non-specific auguries of developing cooperation from the Turkmen government. Speaking at a Cabinet meeting on December 15, Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov listed what he described as constructive interactions between Ashgabat and the EU over the course of 2023.
These included a meeting between President Serdar Berdymukhamedov (the son of the former president) and European Council President Charles Michel in September, when nothing of any note was said or done. And then there was an event held under the auspices of the EU-Turkmenistan Inter-Parliamentary Dialogue framework — a pointless exercise since the Turkmen parliament is an institution of nonexistent importance. Meredov continued in this vein, naming one time-wasting exercise after another.
Russian-dominated talking shops at least offer the virtue of dollar and cent figures to hang one’s hat on.
Speaking at a Commonwealth of Independent States heads of governments get-together in Moscow on December 18, Khojamurad Geldimuradov, the deputy prime minister with the portfolio for economic affairs, revealed that Turkmenistan’s trade turnover with CIS partners amounted to $2.6 billion in January-October. He said this figure represented 16.5 percent of Turkmenistan’s total foreign trade turnover. The figure for trade with CIS partners for all of 2022 was $3.2 billion.
Geldimuradov seized on the occasion to again express his government’s desire to see new transportation corridors created and to tout the port of Turkmenbashi as a key to making that happen.
Variations of the phrase “willingness to develop relations with [insert partner],” as deployed by President Berdymukhamedov and his minions, is starting to acquire the quality of numbing repetitiveness. On December 18, Berdymukhamedov delivered a message to the Emir of Qatar congratulating him on his country’s National Day. He then put the emir’s mind at rest by assuring him that Turkmenistan remains ever ready “to carry out joint work to further comprehensively strengthen relations between our countries.”
On December 15, Berdymukhamedov likewise vowed to his Kazakh counterpart, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, that they would “continue to strengthen mutual understanding and expand cooperation … for the benefit of our peoples.” That same day the king of Bahrain, which celebrates its National Day on that date, was informed that Turkmenistan is committed to “the further development and expansion of relations in the interests of our peoples.”
This is mere politeness on one level, but the cordiality is motivated by a desire to see those partners get onboard with strategic investments.
On December 16-17, Meredov, the foreign minister, led a working trip to the city of Herat in neighboring Afghanistan for another round of talks on progress implementing the trans-Afghan TAPI natural gas pipeline and the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan high-voltage power transmission line projects. Another focus of the exchange was the ongoing effort to expand Afghanistan's railway network.
A largely uninformative Foreign Ministry statement did appear to imply that Turkmen and Afghan companies are currently at work installing unspecified items of energy and transportation infrastructure. A photo accompanying the statement showed Meredov chatting with the Taliban regime’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, in front the forlorn stump of an incomplete gas pipeline. The Foreign Ministry of the self-styled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan said only that the time was now right for TAPI to get underway following decades of delay.
Akhal-Teke is a weekly Eurasianet column compiling news and analysis from Turkmenistan.
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