Turkmenistan Golden Age

Turkmenistan is blocking US education programs again, regnum.ru reported, citing chrono-tm.org

President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov was supposed to be the big education reformer when he came to power five years ago, because he restored years of high school and college removed by the anti-intellectual past dictator Sapurmurat Niyazov.

Back in 2007, the Turkmen leader was received reverently by Columbia University in New York soon after he came to power, and a new age of educational exchange was heralded.

It never really got off the ground.

In 2009, Turkmen ministers began stopping students just as they arrived at the airport to go abroad for studies. Hundreds of these kids had to drop their plans and wait at home for the next two years while bureaucrats vetted them and their programs.

Now the ministers are creating obstructions again, says chrono-tm.org

Testing for the Future Leaders Exchange Program (FLEX) began in early January, and Turkmen teachers staged various English language contests at the same time so that students with English who might have taken the FLEX exams were sidetracked.

In Turkmenabad, the FLEX test date was January 3, but English teachers were ordered to bring their best students from 7-9th grades to an English competition.

Education ministry officials were present in Lebabap velayat to write down the names and schools of those who came to the FLEX exam there, then went to talk to their teachers the next day.

"We were summoned to the education department where, to put it mildly, we were knocked on the head for even letting anyone go to the test, and not to the competition," one school principal told chrono-tm.org.

This is just the sort of nasty obstructionism that is "plausibly deniable" — it enables both Turkmen and US bureaucrats to deny there's really a problem, if they still have some students who did take the test. But chrono-tm.org says in one province, the number of participants dropped from 400 to 120.

Why did the Turkmens stop students from going abroad? They can't possibly accommodate all of them at home, as they graduate more students each year than there are nearly enough spots in universities. What many of the "suspect" destinations had in common was that they were US-funded programs. The US went to bat for these students privately but it took ages to get the Turkmen autocrat to allow at least some of the scholars to go to at least some other more safer programs, i.e. in Bulgaria instead of Kyrgyzstan.

What were the bureaucrats afraid of? Colour revolutions — and Islamic fundamentalism.  Either or both can be found in Kyrgyzstan or other neighbouring countries, but interestingly, the students going to Turkey didn't seem to be affected as much (this may be just an anecdotal impression) although later dozens of Turkish schools were closed down when the Turkmen government became alarmed about religious training from abroad.

Why did Turkmenistan want to thwart US programs? This is the question that has to be asked about the Peace Corps delays and cuts; about medical and other exchanges cancelled; about visas not made available for various important people that are supposed to go to Turkmenistan and keep getting postponed.

Ashgabat has an uneasy relationship with the US, for sure. Their much-vaunted "neutrality" is impinged by the US military re-fueling and use of Turkmenistan as a listening post on Iran. But my guess is that they wanted something very specific they weren't getting at the time from the US, and their petulance and spite was vented on these kids.