Our Twelfth Concern: Three Countries You Don't Hear Much About

Our Common Concern is back with a new look and a very thorough guest blog by Dan Gilligan. Dan's a fellow N.C. State grad and he focuses our attention on three countries we don't hear much about, beginning with Turkmenistan. Look for a discussion on Zimbabwe this coming Sunday.

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Our First Concern was the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. While there are many human rights concerns throughout the world, it may be worth some time to look at three more countries. These nations have very different but sadly very similar problems that don’t get as much media attention as others at the moment: Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe, and Burma/Myanmar. We’ll look at the first of these today and the others shortly. In no way is focusing on these three meant to suggest that there are not many other countries with grave human rights concerns; rather, this is just meant to provide a starting point.

Part 1: Turkmenistan

The most recent coverage of Turkmenistan in mainstream media occurred this past December when their current and only President in the post-soviet era Saparmurad Niyazov, a.k.a. Turkmenbashi or “Father of the Turkmen” passed. Turkmenbashi had long been a punch line, especially in European media, for some of his eccentricities which were reminiscent of the most decadent of the Caesars. Among them:

- renaming months of the Turkmen calendar after himself and his mother

- having an oversized solid-gold statue of himself installed in front of his palace that was rotated to always be facing the sun

- and styling himself after Elvis Presley.

What was not so funny was the fact that while Turkmenbashi was spending much of the profits from his country’s vast resources building palaces and statues meant to build a ‘Turkmen Identity’. 60% of the population lived and still lives in poverty. As well as making a reservoir in the desert and ski slopes on sub-tropical, arid mountains for his and his family’s recreation, minorities suffer under repressive government policies. Religious minorities were persecuted under Turkmenbashi, and the only allowed religion was a truncated form of Islam presented in the form of the Ruhnam, a collection of sayings and Koran tracts collected and authored by Turkmenbashi, which incidentally was the only book that schools are allowed to teach from.

The sort of extreme poverty combined with Islamic fundamentalism present in Turkmenistan has been compared to Afghanistan in the early 1990's. Despite the opportunity for change that the death of President-for-life Saparmurad Niyazov presented, elections this past February brought to power a long-time Saparmurad aide, Acting President and head of the Turkmen Democratic Party Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow by an Eighty Percent Margin. No other formal political parties have been allowed to organize.

Fast Facts:

- Turkmenistan has the world’s fourth largest *natural gas* reserves.

- Unemployment in Turkmenistan is estimated at about 60%; the same percentage live below the poverty line.

- Turkmenistan had the second-worst press freedom conditions in the world behind North Korea.

- Any act of homosexuality in Turkmenistan is punishable by up to five years in prison.

Learn More By Visiting:

1. The BBC News Country Profile

2. Amnesty 2006 Report

Take Action by:

1. Supporting Amnesty’s recommendations to Turkmenistan’s new government

2. Joining Amnesty’s Appeals for Turkmenistan’s Prisoners of Conscience

3. Writing to your Congressperson and Two Senators asking them to make engagement with and international scrutiny of Turkmenistan a greater concern.