Turkmenistan - Different Stans

October 12, 2013

WikiLeaks Propaganda Stunt “Mediastan” Smears, Endangers Local Central Asian Journalists

WikiLeaks barged into offices all over Central Asia, pressuring independent journalists like these reporters at the highly-respected Asia Plus to instantly sign agreements on WikiLeaks' terms to publish US cables about their country. Here Marat Mamadshoev and a colleague are being told to sign the agreement immediately, but decline.

I'm sickened by Mediastan, the latest propaganda piece by anarchist impresario Julian Assange.

This is my quick take upon first view of this video (so sorry if there are mistakes or names missing, they will be fixed). It's available for rent ($2.99) or pay $7.00 plus on Vimeo. Naturally, I'm unhappy that I had to give a dime to WL, which I oppose on principle — and I have to wonder how it is that Paypal could agree to accept these payments when it has blocked payments directly from WikiLeaks (and I plan to raise this issue with both Vimeo and PayPal).

This piece of vile stuff is supposed to be Assange's attempt to provide an "antidote" to a movie about him coming out in theaters October 18 which he doesn't like called The Fifth Estate (it's too critical) which he trying to kill off in various ways.

Perhaps he's counting on the fact that most people don't know anything about Central Asia, and will merely be impressed that he and his merry band of hacksters caroming around the perilous but picturesque mountain roads of Central Asia — complete with Soviet-style policeman stopping and searching traffic, tunnels under repair until who knows when, and lots of sheep blocking the road — are the coolest of cypherphunk hipsters going on a " journalism" trip through dangerous territory.

Except it's not at all that. What this journey consists of is a bunch of people from the region whose first names only are given within the film (but see the credits below), and the discredited journalist Johannes Wahlstrom, son of the notorious antisemite and provocateur Israel Shamir. Discredited — because of the tendentious way he has covered Israel-Palestine issues, and disgraced because he is accused of falsifying quotes and of antisemitism.)

So an unintended bonus is that with Wahlstrom narrating most of the film — when the Great One Himself isn't butting in and pontificating — is that WikiLeaks cannot claim anymore that Shamir and Son don't have anything to do with them and don't represent them. They most surely do, as this film proves.

Johannes is a Russian speaker because he likely grew up in Russia or at least speaking Russian with his father — who has played a sordid role in the Snowden affair, too, about which you can read on my other blog, Minding Russia. But he and the other handlers or minders or whoever the hell they are really have no sense of this region, whatever their Russian language ability, and burst in aggressively — and disgustingly — to try to strong-arm local news media in dire straits in Central Asia, where there is a huge list of murdered, jailed, disappeared and beaten journalists, into publishing WikiLeaks cables.

Another bonus is that one of the Russian-speaking journalists on the tour admits openly that he fabricated stories at his job (supposedly because he felt himself to be pressured to do so by his bosses and their need to sell newspapers) and then was ultimately fired. This is just about the level of journalistic quality we can expect throughout this film.

(The reason I mixed up Wahlstrom and this Russian in an earlier version of this blog, since corrected is because both are accused of fabrications; the Russian admits it in the film, Wahlstrom denies it. And while some WikiLeaks operative @Troushers is accusing me of "lying" here in my summary of the dialogue of this Russian journalist, I stand by it — indeed he openly admits he fabricated letters and indeed the implication is that he was pressured by his boss, who needed to sell papers even if he didn't say literally that phrase — Internet kids are so literalist. The obvious reality is, the theme throughout the entire film is that editors and journalists in mainstream media only do things to sell newspapers — i.e. the obvious point of the snarky portrayal of Bill Keller and Sulzberger talking about traffic for a column of Bill's "half supportive" of Obama. Here's the script verbatim from Dmitry Velikovsky, from Russkiy Reporter, who has been active in covering Manning's trial in the past. Russkiy Reporter also sponsored the showing of the film in Moscow.

Velikovsky: I began with some funny study. I was obliged to edit the column "letters of readers". But the problem was that there were absolutely no letters to edit. But the column should be published twice a day. And so I was obliged to to invent those letters me myself. And I just invented a lot of them.

Wahlstrom: did you get some, any letters at all from real readers?

Velikovsky: Yes we got some maybe three, four or five in two months but they were all containing some critics.

Wahlstrom: but these letters you didn't publish.

Velikovsky: I wanted to publish those letters in the factual content of the newspaper because I found it rather important to have some kind of self criticism. But our marketing department had no self criticism and they forbid me to publish it. So i invented letters about problems of veterans, problems of pensioners, problems of no matter whom. So that's how I became a journalist.

Cue tinkly music…

Astoundingly, this aggressive, beligerent crew have no sense of themselves in this film, so imbued are they with their self-righteousness, even as they beam in Julian Assange on Skype who instructs the locals how they are to treat this material.

It's very clear WikiLeaks has absolutely no interest in the substance of the local stories, they just want to collect partners — or conversely, shame those potential partners who refuse to deal with them for various reasons by making them look like they are boot-licking lackeys of the United States.

They tape phone conversations with people that are rather sensitive — like a journalist in danger discussing whether he should publish a story about somebody who wants to run a coup in Tajikistan (!) — and we have no idea if the people involved were informed that these calls would be taped — and included in the film.

The single most damaging aspect I've seen in this agitprop trash is that the utterly unsupported claim is made that the local press are paid by the US Embassy to print flattering things about the US in order to get the leaders and publics of these countries to bend over while the US uses them as a launching pad and staging area for their war in Afghanistan.

The WikiLeaks people are too ignorant and blinded by their anti-American ideology to understand that a) the US has no need for this because these countries have cooperated anyway b) these tyrants have their own interests in playing off the US against Russia and China c) it doesn't matter as the US is pulling out of Afghanistan next year anyway.

Now, I write as someone who for six years worked at EurasiaNet and Open Society Foundation and wrote critically about the US role in Central Asia, particularly about the severe human rights and humanitarian issues — about which the US government was oftne silent — and the issues around the Northern Distribution Network, the supply path to Afghanistan from Russia which enabled the US to bring non-lethal cargo to NATO troops.

I probably wrote more than anybody on the WikiLeaks cables in Turkmenistan, strategically located between Iran and Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries with heavy US involvement, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. You can search for all these articles and those of my colleagues here eurasianet.org

I also worked in the past as a free-lancer for RFE/RL ("(Un)Civil Society" and "Media Matters") and never experienced any censorship — I wrote and published directly to the site. I recall only instances when care was taken in covering mass demonstrations once in Ukraine to make sure that the article didn't incite people — as RFE/RL has a history of being charged with causing uprisings, i.e. in the Hungarian revolution and invasion by Soviet troops. RFE/RL is funded by Congress, but it doesn't have overlords hanging over you as you write — there is far more independent coverage there than anything you'd see at RT.com, the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda outlet or Al Jazeera.

I have no relationship whatsoever to the US government, so I am certainly qualified to say that this film is an unfair hatchet job on people in harm's way — oh, so typical of WikiLeaks.

The film opens with the WikiLeaks crew rolling through the mountains with Mehrabanb Fazrollah of Pyandj, Tajikistan, born 18 October 1962, in the back seat of the car telling his story. He was held five years in Guantanamo about which you can read some here.

Through a series of astoundingly leading questions, broad innuendos or outright promptings, the WL gang incites Fazrollah into saying he really knew nothing of any military significance, and his jailing was all for nothing, and boy is he mad. I don't know anything of his case except what I've read in the papers, but the duplicitious smiles and repeating of what foreigners want to hear are very old stories to me from having traveled in this region (I haven't ever been in Tajikistan but I've spent years travelling to Russia and other countries and interviewing Tajiks outside of Tajikistan).

Assange claims bitterly that this poor fellow spent five years ""to find out about a couple of fucking refugees in Tajikistan".

Actually, that's not even what the cable said or even what the man in the film says. They said there were 100,000 refugees. This is relevant of course regarding the Northern Alliance and the Tajiks in Afghanistan. The fellow is charged with membership in the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan (IMT) allied with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group on the American list of terrorist organizations.

Sorry, but this is not nothing, these are real terrorism movements, even if supposedly in decline (like, you know, Al Shabaab was in decline and chased out of their stronghold when they hit Westgate Mall in Kenya?)

You would never know from Assange's sneers that this is a country that was in a civil war for years, that it had the highest number of journalists murdered — some 50, nearly as many as Algeria, also in a civil war at the time, that these journalists were killed by Islamists because they were secular or visa versa because they were not approved Muslims killed by state security. The war is a complicated one but to pretend that terrorism and war isn't a factor here — right next to Afghanistan — is absurd.

This is of course the game, too, of the International Relations Realist school in Washington and elsewhere, who minimize terrorism and laugh it away as a fantasy of Pentagon planners. But the reality is that both are true — real terrorist acts have occurred here and there are in fact real Islamists pressuring secular society including press, and there are also fake terrorists that the oppressive government thinks up to keep itself in power. And you know something? I surely do not trust Julian Assange and his crew of losers to tell the difference.

I will never forget in my life the terrified face of a Tajik journalist who had been receiving death threats that I helped rescue from Tajikistan in the 1990s — and it was a brave man going the extra mile inside the US Embassy actually that got him and his family out of there.

In the film, after reading some cables on Gitmo — and as I said, the cases may be innocent, but the WL goons are hardly the judge, and there are real complex problems of terrorism and pressure on secularism in these countries — Assange and Wahlstrom sit and guffaw about a line in a memo they've found about Bildt getting in touch with Karl Rove instead of really trying to understand the complexities of the region They find this such a smoking gun and so "evil" that they roar for minutes, but we don't get the joke.

The translator asks outrageously leading questions and they all laughed and carried on and made it clear they sympathized with the Tajik taken from the battlefield from Gitmo and don't interview him impartially or critically at all. In the same way the pick up a memo from someone named Michael Owens, and start roaring about the US "empire of the 21st century" — which is of course a rather lack-luster claim these days — some empire of the 21st century which they are just now leaving, eh?

Then they read from cables — only partially — with a "scene-setter" — talking about how the Tajiks have "unfailingly" allowed their overflights, which is all they really wanted from them. They then purport to read from a cable implying that these "imperialist Americans" in Dushanbe want to "make the local media more pro-American" and will first plant positive stories in the Russian media, then pay the local media to reprint them in the local press.

They don't actually cite from any document or give any source, and it isn't in any known cable from the WikiLeaks Cablegate already published that the US Embassy engages in this practice.

So without anything to bolster this claim, WikiLeaks smears gazeta.ru, Interfax, and Ekho Moskvy, claiming that they've somehow engaged in this practice.

It really is an outright lie. I have read the Russian-language press in this region for years. They are critical of the US and there aren't these glowing planted pieces they imagine. And the US doesn't need to engage in such a silly, crude practice.

First of all, CENTCOM, the US military command for the region of Central Asia, has its own official news service, but more to the point, it has its own supported English- and Russian-language Internet news service everyone knows they are behind as they tell you, that it uses to put stories for the local media to pick up – where they are identified as such and sourced from this page, not hidden under bylines or mastheads from the indigenous media.

Secondly, none of these papers in the region have very big readerships — they don't have the capacity. We are talking about newspapers with 50,000 or 100,000 or 500,000 possibly at the most, but more at the low end. It's just not a way to reach people. Internet penetration is very low in some of the countries — it's about 60% in Russia but drops down sharply as you go East.

The US already has Voice of America as an outlet to cover the perspectives of the US, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty which serves to enhance or enable struggling local media — they have open partnerships with some local stations, and because they are far more independent than the official media of these authoritarian states, they have more credibility. To be sure, RFE/RL are not going to be radically antithetical to the foreign policy of the United States, any more than the BBC or Al Jazeera or RT.com. But unlike Al Jazeera and RT.com, RFE/RL really tries to cover critical local news without fear or favour, and proof of that is just how many journalists have been arrested, jailed or expelled over the decades. The US government doesn't need to crudely pay somebody to hide behind, in other words. But these, too, don't have a huge audience outside the intelligentsia in the big cities.

The fact is, WikiLeaks has not produced proof of this disreputable claim, because they've cited one cable only partially where it sounds like a proposal that one doesn't know was fulfilled, and in citing another cable, in Kyrgyzstan, it appears that the Kyrgyz foreign minister presents this idea, and that it doesn't come from the Americans.

To be sure, paid-for press and infomercials and advertorials are rampant in this region in the official and unofficial press. But to claim that these brave independent outlets take payments to portray te US nicely is just an outright smear for which there isn't an iota of proof. It puts these brave people in danger to suggest it.

(more…)

4 comments on WikiLeaks Propaganda Stunt “Mediastan” Smears, Endangers Local Central Asian Journalists

Afghanistan, Central Asia, Eurasia, EurasiaNet, Human Rights, Internet Freedom & Policy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, NATO, NDN, Russia, Tajikistan, Terrorism, Turkmenistan, US, Uzbekistan
March 15, 2013

Turkmen Foreign Minister Headed to Washington This Month

Turkmens were turned out by the state to plant trees in the desert this week: will they take root? Photo by Golden Age turkmenistan.gov.tm

This is interesting — Rashid Meredov, the only one of past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov's men left standing in the Berdymukhamedov administration — and still left standing there, too, unlike so many other ministers dismissed in disgrace! — is coming to the US "some time later this month".

Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs has a lengthy statement on Turkmen-American affairs, such as they are, at the Turkic American Conference this week.

I was wondering to what do we owe the pleasure of some of the recent political prisoner releases. Such things don't happen "just so" in this part of the world — they happen as part of a careful bargaining. So somebody — our ambassadors, in Ashgabat, in Vienna, elsewhere — have been pushing for some of these "concessions" before Meredov got the gift of this trip.

That's my hunch. Of course, it might not at all be that stark or that conscious or that stated. But it is sort of in the area of the sweeteners that have to happen to do transactions with these regimes.

What does the US need from Turkmenistan?

o oil and gas rights — but they won't get those, not any time soon

o help to Afghanistan so they don't have to give it — and they get some of that

o access to go in and out of Afghanistan and prosecute and wind down the war — which they get some of, and at a price

o help with Iran, i.e. by not helping Iran — which they get some of

o other stuff — regional cooperation on water, building the Wall of Shame around Russia, things like that.

And then there's TAPI. TAPI strikes me as one of those totemic Silk Road illusions that never comes to pass but maybe is never meant to come to pass, as it is a metaphor to bring together people across borders, like the Internet…or something.

But Turkmenistan has gas, Pakistan and India need gas, and Afghanistan does too, and there it is. It inches forward.

Interestingly, human rights and democracy — or whatever passes for those issues in Ashgabat — are now always woven into the statements on Turkmenistan like a red thread in a Turkmen carpet. But not a red thread that will stand out compared to the orange thread of gas…or something. But still:

In January I had very productive
meetings with President Berdimuhamedov and other senior Turkmen
officials in Ashgabat, and later this month Foreign Minister Meredov
will come to Washington to meet with Secretary Kerry. In these talks we
discuss frankly, as friends, all aspects of our relationship, including
our appreciation for the support that Turkmenistan provides to
Afghanistan and its leadership on increasing regional connectivity and
economic cooperation; the growing commercial relationship between our
countries; and the importance of building civil society and democratic
institutions and ensuring respect for human rights.

Increasing people-to-people ties
and cultural exchanges are an important part of developing any bilateral
relationship. Last November, our embassy in Ashgabat staged a three-day
“U.S. Culture Days in Turkmenistan” event that featured American jazz,
bluegrass, and rock groups; a painter and a jewelry maker, both from
Albuquerque, New Mexico, with which Ashgabat has a sister city
relationship; a delegation from the Smithsonian Institution, which has
longstanding collaboration with Turkmenistan; and a chef from New York.

A chef. Okay. Well, good! I can't seem to find out what he cooked. Cheeseburgers?

What I do hope doesn't happen on this trip is that there are those sort of embarrassing moments with dictators that occur at things like round tables at museums where we pretend we're all interested in world culture together. Some of that is necessary to oil the wheels of commerce, but there shouldn't be any sort of Vint Cerf letters praising Berdy's contribution to the Internet as we've had in the past — ugh. Please, let's don't. Let's try to attend to appearances this time.

Human rights groups, sharpen up your petitions. It's hard to have things to ask for concretely when some of the prisoners are out, others you don't know about or they show know progress, and it's hard to capture the deplorable situation in an "ask".

Even so, I hope Kerry and others at the State Department do the following:

o not praise the press law and make it clear it's not enough and forcing stringers or freelancers or blogger to register is not on

o speaking of the Internet, open it up, stop blocking Youtube, Twitter, etc. and join the rest of the world

o move forward on university, professional, medical, etc. exchanges and restore the Peace Corps which was kicked out

There's lots one could add — "come clean and report all the revenue from oil and gas sales that go directly into the president's coffers" but State Department people like "doables" and "deliverables".

As for TAPI, one could always ask them to be more transparent on any number of things. Good luck.

What about a little thing like making the jobs exchange that is being held out as a boon to the impoverished people of these countries a transparent and accountable thing, so that the people in those countries get those jobs, get living wages, and it doesn't just get outsourced or people exploited? Use the Internet for something good.

No comments on Turkmen Foreign Minister Headed to Washington This Month

Turkmenistan, US
February 19, 2013

Will Unrest Break Out in Central Asia or the Caucasus?

Turkmens performing in state-orchestrated parade on Flag Day in Ashgabat. Photo by Golden Age, State News Agency of Turkmenistan.

No.

At least, not right now, and probably not next week.

Oh, there might be another wave of pogroms as there was in Osh in Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 where hundreds of people were killed, mainly Uzbeks, and thousands displaced, but it might be in some other setting, not Kyrgyzstan's south, but who knows, maybe Tajikistan, as police shoot-outs of suspected terrorists have occurred regularly there since the civil war was over.

Or there might be another massacre of workers as there were in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan in 2011, but probably not that again, and not there.

That's just it — whenever unrest does break out, whether in Andijan in 2005 in Uzbekistan, where hundreds were massacred or in Osh as I mentioned in 2010, the authorities make sure it is tamped down very well after that, making numerous arrests, silencing or jailing journalists and bloggers and citizen reporters. So that's that, we get it.

Except, we don't. Because unrest does occur, sometimes with large numbers of people, and it surprises those who aren't prepared. Like the overthrow of Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan in 2012, which shows signs of Russian engineering, but which couldn't have succeeded if there hadn't been underlying social disatisfaction with energy price hikes (induced by Russia) and other deeper and long-term economic and social malaise.

Nobody was ready when 20,000 or even 60,000 people came out on the main squares of Moscow and other Russian cities after Putin's orchestrated re-election, and nobody who got enthusiastic about the prospects then was ready for the severity of the crackdown that is now inevitably coming.

So yeah, unrest, but they tamp it down but then, they don't. So you have to be ready, and you have to have some theory about how society changes in these countries — and that would not be "due to Internet penetration" or "development of the middle class" — the mantras rehearsed by State Department officials and pundits worldwide. If only Internet saturation reaches X point that it reached in, oh, Iran or Azerbaijan (where unrest is reaching the thousands now in demonstration), why we might see those droids we're looking for.

But oh, remember This is What Can Happen To You, when Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior said about Azerbaijan that publicizing the news of the crackdown on Internet bloggers would chill the use of the Internet? Make people not want to go online or be very careful about their activities online? Remember how I was browbeaten to death for daring to suggest there was an Internet surge in Uzbekistan? But I countered this and said it was an Internet campaign that got the "donkey bloggers" released and I countered their theories of the efficacy of "networked authoritiarianism" (Rebeccah McKinnon's term) here and here (Is There an Arab Spring Bounce in Azerbaijan?) and then here for Central Asia. That is, I don't have ANY illusions that any Twitter revos are coming soon to these countries to utterly turn them over from head to foot, but I do ask: Why Can't We Say Azerbaijani Protest is Influenced by the Arab Spring and Social Media? Of course you can, and you don't need me to say this, you now have the released Emin Milli on the conference circuit to say it.

So last week, we were told at the OSCE Internet 2013 conference by Milli, the former political prisoner and blogger who just served 15 days in jail for his chronicling of demonstrations over the death of a soldier in the army, that there are one million sign-ups on Facebook. That's a lot of people for this small country. Socialbakers, the industry source on Facebook sign-ups, says there are more than a million now.

Says Socialbakers:

Our social networking statistics show that Facebook penetration in Azerbaijan
is 12.20% compared to the
country's population and 23.97% in relation
to number of Internet users. The total number of FB users in Azerbaijan
is reaching 1013080 and grew by more than
147280 in the last 6 months

Internet penetration was reported as 44% in 2010 by the ITU; then it was reported last year as 68% and is growing. So it's a lot, and people who say that Azeris are scared off the Internet by oppression were wrong, but people who say that such large percentages of Internet penetration will lead to revolution are also wrong, as the authorities are still very skillful in picking out people to coopt, intimidate or jail and torture as needed to keep the peace — especially for those Western oil and gas companies coming in to develop the Shah Deniz II fields.

The number of people on the square in Azerbaijan isn't one million and isn't 28,000 but more like 2,000 or 200 sometimes, depending on the topic.

Now, Central Asia is much, much more "backward" or behind when it comes to the Internet, let alone Facebook, and has not had the kind of "Youtube protests" about local official corruption that then leads to street demonstrations — although the phenomenon still can be found here and there even in these countries.

So you have to be ready, as these things can jump the synapse — significant unrest/revolution/unheavals in Azerbaijan would obviously affect other neighbouring countries and so on.

Even so, we're been getting for years now articles that tell us not to worry, everything is boringly stable in Central Asia, and implying that anyone who crafts any other scenario is just hopelessly mired in Twitter mania and Jeff Jarvis-style over-romanticization of social media's power (that would not be me) or just not "getting it" about the Arab Spring, which didn't turn out to be "all that" in the end as we well know (and this article, Aftermath of a Revolution, in the International Herald Tribune really sums it up well).

Even so, along comes Sarah Kendzior to tell us that everything is boringly stable: The Curse of Stability. Kendzior, who, together with Katy Pearce, in an article they'd probably like to forget now, told us how cautious we must all be about Azerbaijan (and the big crackdown and big sleep could be still coming there anyway as well all know, but each time the concentric circles grow).

This article was kind of written already on Kendzior's political home base, Registan.net, by Myles Smith: Central Asia: What Not to Look For, datelined January 2013.

Kendzior doesn't link to her colleague but should have, as he put down the markers for the prediction businesss, and I couldn't disagree, although as I said, you really need to have better theories of change and a more hopeful expectation about the people in these countries and their need to have a better life than they do under their current dictatorships.

I could answer Kendzior in detail but then, I already have in the past, and did on another article exactly a year ago by another specialist, Scott, Radnitz, Waiting for Spring, who told us "not to hold our breaths" and compare Central Asia to the Arab Spring — and it's a good thing we didn't, as we'd be as blue as a UN peacekeeper's helmet now.

Even so, I'll just cut and paste below the fold what I put in the comments to Radnitz's peace again, because it still applies. And keep in mind that what the Arab Spring had was Al Jazeera (not WikiLeaks or Anonymous, silly, that's just self-serving hacker twaddle). Central Asia doesn't have that; it has Russian TV. So, you get what you get, even if you add Facebook.

(more…)

No comments on Will Unrest Break Out in Central Asia or the Caucasus?

Arab Spring, Azerbaijan, Central Asia, Human Rights, Internet Freedom & Policy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Registan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
January 21, 2013

UPDATE: Civil Society in Turkmenistan? What Civil Society in Turkmenistan?!

USAID provides a gift of microscopes to Turkmen medical personnel. Photo US Embassy in Ashgbat

So when I heard that Robert Blake, Assistant Secretary of State for Central and South Asia, was going to "meet with civil society representatives" on his day-long trip to Turkmenistan last week, naturally I took out my microscope here, like these Turkmen medical workers took out these handy gifts from USAID.

Not to say anything bad about people fighting the good fight and all, but…civil society? Turkmenistan? Really, guys?

I was really, really curious what they would come up with.

It's true that there are a very tiny handful of human rights defenders in Turkmenistan, or intellectuals who question the regime modestly, and such, and perhaps that's whom they met? But there's no transcript of the meeting or even a press release — there's only a round table with journalists which is separate.

UPDATE: I've now found out about Blake's meeting, although not from his office, and as I suspected, it
was a very tiny number of people who are very beleaguered, so I won't
mention their names, so as not to put them further in the spotlight and targeted for repression. Although I do hope that this meeting with the somewhat influential United States will guarantee them in fact some modicum of protection.

I've
also been hearing more from various human rights groups about the press law,
and found it is quite fake: you must be accredited by the state to be
called "a journalist," so that freelancers and bloggers do not count and
are not protected. Remember the old American adage: the best press law
is no press law. That's why it says "Congress shall make no law…" in
the First Amendment.

There are many issues that should have been
discussed by Blake in his meetings with officials, but we don't know
what they were because they're secret (except for the answers to the
press at the round table, which were not very complete, despite his
protestations).

There are the appalling conditions in the prisons;
the long sentences to political prisoners who are missing or who don't
get visits for very long periods.

There's the entire issue of
Russian migration/citizenship which has been handled horribly by both
Russia and Turkmenistan, forcing people either to give up their jobs and homes and
flee to Russia in uncertainty, or stay in Turkmenistan but unable to
leave and live as second-class citizens.

One of the reasons I
insisted on keeping Jackson-Vanik on the books is because Turkmenistan
remains as essentially a non-market economy which restricts emigration
— it keeps a black list of people not allowed out of — or into –the
country.

***

So…did they mean that they were going to meet with the Galkynysh Galkynysh Galkynysh imenno Galkynysha? ("Galkynysh" is a Turkmen word that means "renewal" or "revival," and the state makes very heavy use of it for just about everything — they renamed their gas fields by this word, and it's also the name of a fake government-organized civic movement that in fact actually got disbanded and folded into something else recently, I think. Galkynysh is also the name of Berdymukhamedov's yacht.

If you look down below at the recommended articles, you will see one BBC story, "Turkmen FM Missing for 10 Years". He likely was outright executed in the prison system or died of mistreatment. I've always been astounded that an actual foreign minister — a man who met with all kinds of foreigners and was known around the world because of the role this gas-rich state played in the region — could actually go missing and no one would really seem to ask for him anymore. Does anymore? There's your answer about civil society: that. When they find him — or confess to what they have done with him, that's the day that maybe civil society might begin…

Right before Blake's plane touched down, the Turkmens churned out a new "liberal" media law. I'm sure it will be implemented in practice *cough*. As usual, with his latest house-cleaning, Berdy has kicked the latest TV director to the curb. Who would ever agree to take that job?!

Now, I'm the first to say that civil society doesn't have to exist in registered NGOs, let alone USAID or Soros grantees. If anything, the more a social movement can exist without those confines, which can be deadly in their own way, the better. Civil society can take lots of forms. In this part of the world, you can't be horribly picky. You work with what there is. If all you can do is GONGO work, you do that, just because it's better than a stick in your eye.

But when you do this sort of fake stuff, you have to keep pinching yourself and reminding yourself it's fake — and I don't think enough people do that these days, especially younger people. They come to believe the fiction that USAID is helping "the community" when they do this or that in a place like Turkmenistan. In fact, they are helping strengthening the autocratic government. It's like the questions I asked about the Navy Seabees, God bless them, when they go help the Stroibat in Tajikistan. This has its blessings, but it's good to ask what at the end of the day it is reinforcing, an abusive coercive army that is displacing what could be a viable private sector in construction or…

No doubt some bureaucrats somewhere are trying to tease out the tendrils of this new press law and call it some sort of "improvement"…

To be sure, various things go on in Turkmenistan that are touching or quaint or that provide people with a sense of "humanity" that gives them hope that "maybe" civil society is possible. Of course, if civil society means the ability to go to a Western film show, then we've lowered our standards and we're not thinking of institutions anymore, but just semblances.

Turkmens were moved as any one would be of the horrific massacre of school children in Newtown, Massachusetts, and they left out flowers and stuffed animals just like people around the world.

US Embassy Ashgabat 2012.

And Turkmens learn "California Dreamin' to sing for a foreign guest".

But while endearing and human, it's humanity, not civil society, which is what enables societies to be humane as well as human.

I was looking at some photos of North Korean scenes the other day and I saw one that showed a couple and their child having a picnic in a park. The father was bouncing the child up and down. Sure, North Koreans have picnics, even in their totalitarian horror. Even so, it reminded me of Erik Bulatov's painting DANGER with the picnic. The borders loom…

The US had toned down the human rights/democracy/civil society rhetoric quite a bit in dealing with Turkmenistan in the earlier years of Berdymukhamedov's reign. I think they wanted to make sure they didn't queer any gas deals.

But now that those deals have remained elusive for some 6 years now, and all those promised blocs for Chevron and ConocoPhilips and such aren't materializing, the US has gotten a little bit more forward-leaning on the human rights portfolio.

So now someone like Blake will actually weave these words into his speeches but of course in an entirely anodyne fashion:

As I said earlier, we had a good discussion on human rights issues, some
of the new laws that have been passed here in Turkmenistan, as well as
on educational and exchange programs that are of great importance.

This was an opportunity to say something a tad more critical about that press law with the paint not even dry on it, but, alas…

Unfortunately, when the US does this, well, not so forcefully, and does it much more in places like Belarus, it gets this snide reaction from the Russians, as gundogar.org reported about an interview with Sergei Mikheyev, general director of the Center for Current Politics on Voice of Russia:

By the way, some information came out about how [Blake] would meet with representatives of civil society, and talk about human rights. I think such a conversation in Turkmenistan will be extremely uninteresting, especially given the background of America's vested interested in the region.

It's just interesting to see their approaches: in some parts of the world, they trumpet about their principled and uncompromising adherence to the struggle for human rights even to the point of hysteria, and in others — they simply don't notice obvious things in places where it is profitable for them.

Ouch. Well, no angel he, as Russia's appalling support of the most murderous regime on the planet now after the North Koreans — Assad in Syria — just trumps anything any Russian wants to natter on about human rights.

But he doesn't say anything any different than US human rights activists who complain about the selectivity with which the US bashes Belarus — because it can — and is mute on Russia and Central Asia.

This is because of the 60% chokehold that Russia has over us with our need to go through their back yard with the Northern Distribution Network.

Turkmenistan does not let us send trucks or trains through their land, but they allow overflights of "non-lethal" materials and they have a "gas-and-go" arrangement at their airport — and are building a new airport.

At the press round table we see the real limitations of this semblance of advocacy:

Question: You last visited Turkmenistan in 2011 as part of a
regional tour of Central Asia as well as Azerbaijan. During your last
visit you criticized the very slow speed and tempo of reform and
democratization in the region, and in Turkmenistan in particular. So
what has changed?

Assistant Secretary Blake: Well, in all of my meetings today I
just expressed the view of the United States that political development
needs to keep pace with economic development, and that it’s very
important for any society to have a vigorous civil society to help
ensure popular support for the programs of the government.

So we talked about the new law on mass media as well as the law on
national security agencies and, again, I urged progress on all the
fundamental freedoms, not only because those are important in their own
right, but because those will help to ensure a stable, democratic, and
prosperous future for Turkmenistan.

Question: Can you provide more specifics?

Assistant Secretary Blake: I think I’ve been pretty specific.

I've followed up with a query to him on Twitter on who these people were in "civil society"; I think it will "go nowhere".

Well, one wonders if in the conversations, Blake asks things like "Say, where's your foreign minister? He's been missing for a decade. Did you find him yet?" Or "Say, how are those young people who put up Youtube videos of that explosion in Abadan? Are they out of jail?"

I suspect the conversation doesn't go that way. And it's hard to make it go that way when the real hysterics and trumpeters are people like the regime representatives, not only about how wonderful they are, with their iodine in the water and safe baby zones and everything like that, but how awful the rest of the world is by contrast.

What you have to do with a situation like this, as I said, however, is work with what you can. Yes, it's good to have the visiting inspectors and firemen raise the tough cases. Those who have to work there have to try to do the benign things like windmills or anti-AIDS programs that they can get passed.

They have to try to find their "counterparts" in the professions and try to break their isolation. Of course, all the people allowed to meet with foreigners are groomed and cleared and you end up talking to the same ones over and over again at the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights WITH the President, in meetings where the Protector, as he is called, beams over you from a portrait. No matter, you keep trying, especially to get Turkmens to travel outside their country where they can have some new experiences.

No doubt Amb. Robert Patterson does all of these things, with his considerable experience from Leningrad to Somalia; he speaks Russian, and probably tries every little thing you can try there to try to create normalcy. But it is hard, and you can't do it alone. It would help if the US could get the EU more on the same page so that things like German doctors agreeing to preside while Berdymukhamedov, trained as a dentist, operates on a hapless Turkmen patient, don't happen and therefore don't add lustre to this lunatic.

It's about damage control, and pushing the envelope, and not conferring legitimacy on them. And hoping for a better day…

Meanwhile, in a place like Turkmenistan, it's best not to organize something called "a meeting with civil society" when it most certainly doesn't exist even in the tattered form it does in say, Uzbekistan.

Related articles

U.S. Senior Diplomat Visits Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan

Turkmen Secret Police Hack Independent Turkmen Website

New Turkmen Law Promises Freedom Of Media

New exhibition at State Academy of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan

Turkmen FM missing for 10 years

3 comments on UPDATE: Civil Society in Turkmenistan? What Civil Society in Turkmenistan?!

NDN, Turkmenistan, US
December 14, 2012

Turkmen Secret Police Hack Independent Turkmen Website

The logo of Chronicles of Turkmenistan, the publication of the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights

For the third time this year, the website Chronicles of Turkmenistan at chrono-tm.org has been hacked, and has been down for over three days.

Past hacks have been nasty, but this was likely the nastiest and most enduring to date — the site was disabled, but then pornographic pictures were put up in its place, and insults of the site's manager, Farid Tuhbatullin and his sons.

More information (in Russian) is at a separate Blogspot page, where these independent Turkmens plan to keep posting news.

They also have a Facebook page — but they warn readers that "layki" (i.e. "likes," which sounds like the word "barks" in Russian!) could reveal users' interest in independent Turkmen news to the authorities.

They also have a Twitter account (in Russian).

The group is keeping up their work publishing a multi-part series on the 10th anniversary of the coup attempt on past dictator Sapparmurat Niyazov.

I was wondering if perhaps this hack was related to the 10th anniversary — which was November 25 — but it came somewhat later.

The site owners believe it was related to a report they published about the death of two Turkmen students pressed into unpaid state service in one of those huge mass productions of people singing and dancing for the dictator on a state holiday. The two young men died after falling ill at the parade rehearsal — they were ordered to dress lightly and it was cold, and they worked long hours.

Their report can also be found at the Russian news site Lenta.ru still.

Chrono-tm.org reported that the mass performance was cancelled after the deaths, but I see various official ceremonies still went forward on or around December 12 for "Neutrality Day," as the Turkmen state calls the day in which it pretends that it hasn't been supine to — at various times and places and sometimes to all four at once — China, Russia, Iran, and the United States (in that order).

I had to wince when I saw the way this story was covered at Eurasianet.org, where Chronicles of Turkmenistan was described as "operated by members of Turkmenistan’s opposition-in-exile".

I winced because we spent the last ten years trying patiently to make a distinction between the Turkmen human rights movement in exile and the opposition in exile. For some, this might be a distinction without a difference, and it's blended in the case of other groups, but since it can be a matter of literally life or death and how the regime targets them, it seemed like it was worth making.

Truly, an opposition group is different than a human rights group, even though with a country like Turkmenistan, even the mildest human rights documentation is going to feel "political" to the regime and feel like a threat to their power, and then feel like "opposition". That's why you get Putin threatening human rights groups and charities under the "foreign agents" act. A group like the TIHR starts out trying merely to keep the record and tell the story and giving voices to others, but soon, due to the constant assaults on themselves they are driven into a corner next to the opposition, such as it is, which isn't much for Turkmenistan — the secret police is pretty thorough.

It would have been easy to make a tiny opposition party, or an opposition group with a newspaper, or just an exiles club that took vocal political positions — there are a number of them scattered around the world.

But Farid and his colleagues specifically made the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights — a modest name that doesn't indicate any institutionalization or global ambitions — because they saw the task with Turkmenistan to be much more basic than making a lonely and likely small exile party — the very task of free flow of information itself about this closed, authoritarian nation located between Iran, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan and tracked through by the great powers.

The TIHR haven't made a political program nor do they create manifestos about how they would like to see their homeland arranged — all of that is premature in any event as the dictator isn't going anywhere and civil society is essentially crushed. Instead, they tried to simply publish the news, accompanied by commentary from different perspectives and even humorous Youtube videos and cartoons.

So here's my stern request to those who have supported and helped this site: you have to step up and do better than this.

It's no good blaming the victim and indulging in knowier-than-thou pronouncements about how people who are hacked haven't attended to their craft or their security.

I recall seeing one of the hacks and it looked like a common SQL injection hack which might have been prevented, but some of these other assaults are more serious and sophisticated and devastating — as only hacks from a state with resources can be. And yes, it's certain that the Turkmen secret police hacked this site. Do you know anyone else who would care about a Turkmen exiles' site enough to hack it? Okay, then, let's stop the pretend-impartial speculation.

I'm aware also of a past well-intentioned but unexpectedly inept attempt to help that ended in making things worse, and that shouldn't have happened.

What's needed here isn't the most sophisticated white-hat nerds to resist attacks, or "free" open source software that starts a meter running of coders at $50/hour; what's needed likely is a simple commercial site like Typepad or other services that have scores of engineers that do nothing all day but fend off attacks for you as they protect their sites overall. These engineers at commercial platforms have gotten very good at deflecting and resisting hackers — and mopping up after them quickly when they occur. So that's what's needed, along with the support to sustain it.

Again, this site is way too important to let it be victimized so that someone can make them an object lesson for their security training workshops. Citizens' journalists and exile publishers shouldn't have to be bogged down in worrying about the mechanics of a web site, which after all, are just like plumbing or garage mechanics and not magical unicorn spells only the secretly initiated can learn.

Meanwhile, the web owners are "routing around" as the Internet always does when it faces censorship and providing some alternatives on Twitter, Facebook, and another blog page. Let's hope they get back up to speed again!

No comments on Turkmen Secret Police Hack Independent Turkmen Website

Turkmenistan
July 27, 2012

State Gets a Bit More Starchy on Turkmenistan

Dragon Oil rig in Caspian. Photo by Turkmenistan Golden Age 2012.

State Department officials are usually very circumspect when it comes to Turkmenistan, a gas-rich and freedom-poor authoritarian Central Asian nation on the Caspian Sea. Turkmenistan is far more closed than Uzbekistan — there are hardly any human rights activists or opposition figures there. Hence virtually no one for lonely foreign officials to visit, when they might get a few hours free from their minders, and have nothing to do but rattle around in the huge white marble city in the "dictator chic" genre, with broad avenues and desert-dry air.

So that's why it's news when all of a sudden, in testimony to the US Congress, Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, whose statements are generally as bland as canned pears, suddenly puts the phrases "pipeline" and "human rights" and "transparency" all into one paragraph:

The recent signing of gas sales and purchase agreements between Turkmenistan, Pakistan and India enables the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline to move to the commercial phase. This project is one example of the potential Turkmenistan has to be a leader in the economic prosperity of the region. We encourage Turkmenistan to build clear and transparent mechanisms for investment in its country.

In order to realize its potential, Turkmenistan must make significant steps to fulfill its international obligations on human rights. The United States consistently raises concerns about respect for human rights at every appropriate opportunity and we have offered assistance to help advance space for civil society and building democratic systems.

That's exceptional, because in recent years, the US has been so eager to court the hard-to-get President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and line up some business with him, especially for American oil companies, that they have tended to keep any comments about human rights to carefully-choreographed private discussions. To be sure, this was a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, where officials can expect a little more questioning than usual, but still, the rhetoric seems more edgy than in the past.

So, why is this happening now?

Well, for one, the US has been persisting in trying to work with the Turkmens now for the more than six years Berdymukhamedov has been in power, and has precious little to show for it. If anything, despite finally installing a new ambassador after a five-year hiatus, holding special business exhibitions and promotions, offering help and training and educational opportunities, the Americans have at times been kicked in the teeth. Peace Corps members with visas and air tickets in hand have been suddenly delayed and gradually their numbers whittled down to little or nothing. Students ready to leave at the airport for exchange programs are pulled off programs. Chevron and others are seemingly promised an offshore drilling permit, then never get any — and they'd rather be onshore anyway. US officials work overtime trying to fix these situations up, and it's all kind of mysterious. Now why do the Turkmens do that? After all, we are paying them top dollar to use their country as a re-fueling station for planes bound to supply NATO troops in Afghanistan with non-lethal equipment.

What's up? Perhaps the "multi-vector policy" that rotates so widely from China to Iran to Qatar to Austria to Belarus to England and seems so affable with so many other countries with so many high-level meetings has its saw-toothed edge? Nothing shows you're independent like bashing America! The pudgy dictator has had 249 meetings with foreign dignitaries in the last year! Ok, 317. Alright, I don't know how many exactly but — a lot, and somewhere in the miles of turgid Turkmen wire copy you can find this exact number.

So because they aren't getting anywhere despite being silent on human rights for all this time, perhaps US officials have decided that they should be a little more forward-leaning. It's a shame that human rights could be seen as a club in that respect, but that is how it's done.

There could be another reason — Blake and others may be expecting increased NGO protests as the Asian Bank for Development takes the Turkmen-Afghanistan-Pakistan-Indian (TAPI) pipeline out for its road show this fall to various world capitals, in search of oil majors to help build the project and take on the financing and security headaches that will abound. So pre-emptively, so to speak, State has indicated that they realize there are human rights and "transparency" problems. That's for sure — no one can really be sure just how much money Berdymukhamedov has his hands on — and it all seems to come through his hands — and how much he parts with to try to better his fellow citizens' lot — as distinct from building lots of white palaces.

Nothing gets NGOs agitated like "the extractive industry" — it easily exemplifies everything they hate about capitalism and commerce, and even if they are not anti-business, they can get behind concern for the environment which is never misplaced when it comes to drilling and pipelines.

Berdy also seems aware of this protest wave that may crest on his country, and talks up a good story about how pipelines under the sea are less dangerous than those above ground. I don't know how much people want to test those theories in a region that is prone to earthquakes, spills, sabotage (remember the April 2009 explosion?), terrorism and even wars — and of course those vague "shortcomings in performance of work" for which hundreds of officials have been dismissed in the Era of Revival and now the Era of Happiness and Stability.

Of course, as I'm pointing out, the wrath of NGOs is somewhat misplaced on Turkmenistan, when the American companies which they love best to hate aren't even able to drill an inch into the karakum. China has already spent more than $8 billion building a pipeline out of Turkmenistan to China, and not a single demonstration, newsletter, poster, or even email appeared from the usual Western environmental groups. We have no idea what that very rapidly-build pipeline did to the environment or areas or people in Turkmenistan, and that's not only because it's a closed society, but because nobody cared to chase the Chinese National Petroleum Company — it just doesn't get the juices flowing like US petroleum corporations. In fact, the major Western environmental organizations tend to ignore Central Asia because it's hard to get information.

The exception is a small adovcacy and research organization called Crude Accountability which has Russian-speakers and a network of colleagues in the region and who have persisted in getting the story of environmental damage and oppression in Central Asian countries. You seldom hear of Greenpeace trying any of its "direct action" protests on ships around Russian and its allies — maybe that's because when local chapters of Greenpeace simply try to hold a rally to protest against Arctic drilling, 23 people are arrested.

So snarkiness of the predictable adversarial culture really seems misplaced, when a company like Chevron — which in fact has been there all along and isn't "stealing in like a thief" — hasn't even got a deal. And then there's this — what I always ask people spouting the usual hysteria on forums: what do you cook your breakfast with every morning, firewood? Pipelines exists in a lot of places of the world where protests no longer appear (Alaska) although it might if something goes wrong again (Alaska). We'd all like to live in a world of outdoor solar-powered offices and computers and Burning Man camp-outs like Philip Rosedale, but we're not there yet.

So it's good to start early and often to hammer on the problem of "lack of transparency," but realistically, it's not going to go anywhere in Turkmenistan until the society experiences much greater changes than have been in the offing since 2006 when past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov died. The Turkmens have figured out (from paying attention to NGOs but not allowing them in their own country) to play the transparency game, and have turned the tables on Chevron and others as I've written, sulking about their supposed lack of transparency for not parting with proprietary technological secrets that no company would part with (say, how about more from the Turkmen side regarding those Gaffney, Clines Associates estimates of the reserves, eh?)

Turkmenistan is a very hard nut to crack — and nut-cracking in general hasn't gone so well for the US in Central Asia. The US ambassador has actually accomplished a fair amount on his watch, quietly getting some political prisoners freed or getting them family visits and trying to solve the students' cases and keep a positive momentum for both educational exchange and business. There's a theory that trade is a tide that raises all boats. I've never seen that happen in any country in the world. It's claimed for China and Kazakhstan, but we only see continued problems with everything from media suppression to environmental hazards to murders — business doesn't auto-magically install democracy any more than a USAID project does.

I really don't have a recipe for Turkmenistan other than that more people need to try to go there and report what they see, and more efforts have to be made to get the word out about what happens there, and to pay more attention to those who already get many stories out, such as Chronicles of Turkmenistan. To the extent possible, NGOs should try to follow the TAPI story to see if their interest and efforts to get more information might be some deterrence on the usual bribes and slush funds that abound around things like this.

Yet I'm skeptical that TAPI will start getting built any time soon, or that Western companies will even be involved in it, and the X marked on the map where the backhoes are going to appear may be right at the Turkmen border, not inside Turkmenistan, as Ashgabat continually repeats the refrain that they will "sell their gas at the border," and Europeans and others are taking them more at their word since the collapse of the ambitious Nabucco project.

In any event, the gas-hungry rapidly-developing countries of China and India aren't going to care a whole lot about what Westerners tell them about how they should avoid all the things that Westerners take for granted like gas-guzzling personal cars and invest instead on environmental protection and mass transport. What any environmental campaign has to start with, however, is a newsletter — a newsletter that nobody is yet able to publish in Ashgabat.

No comments on State Gets a Bit More Starchy on Turkmenistan

China, India, NDN, NGOs, Pakistan, pipelines, Turkmenistan, US, Uzbekistan
July 6, 2012

MTS Back in Turkmenistan — But Only for Foreigners

Is Russia's mobile company MTS back in Turkmenistan just for foreigners, or for everybody?

Rumours have been floating around for some time, punctuated by upbeat predictions from corporate executives, that MTS was going to get back into Turkmenistan after a protracted hiatus since December 2010, when Turkmen tyrant Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov turfed out the Russian cell company unceremoniously, leaving 2.4 million customers in Turkmenistan without cell phone service — and that meant Internet access as well for some.

The reason for the expulsion was in one sense straightforward — a five-year contract had come to an end and negotiations for a renewal had floundered on the Turkmen demand to get a bigger cut. There was also an assumption that with the Arab Spring and all, the Turkmen government just didn't want 3G or 4G and further Internet expansion to come to their country. They do a good job of blocking the Internet, with all of Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites all unavailable. They also have Chinese engineers as experts and their monitoring equipment installed for a song.

Berdymukhamedov said he wanted competition to the sluggish, poorly performing sole state provider, named Galkynysh (Revival) like every other thing in Turkmenistan that is poorly performing, too. So he invited back the Finnish telecom Nokia Siemens and the Chinese mobile company Huawei and said he wanted to see even three mobile companies compete in Turkmenistan.

Not it's not clear where those deals are going, but maybe that was a ruse and a feint to get MTS back to the table on less favourable terms. Who knows.

It's also been rumoured that the Turkmen government would turn on MTS at first only for foreigners or only for those in the capital or for the "specials".

Sure enough, when an orchestrated media law conference was convened in Ashgabat this week by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the foreigners who came prepared to criticize Turkmenistan even within the confines of such an exercise were then pleasantly surprised that the cell service to which they've become addicted to in their own countries was working.

Ali Navruzov, an avid blogger an activist from Azerbaijan (@ljmaximus) reports "MTS is just back in #Turkmenistan! I was a witness of a historic moment :)" in reply to my query.

He was live-blogging the conference so check out his feed if you would like to see a less-sanitized version of events than you'll get from Turkmenistan: The Golden Age. (Why hasn't *that* been renamed Galkynysh?!)

I naturally asked if MTS was turned on just for the area around the conference with the foreigners, or for everybody all over Turkmenistan, and the next day he replied:

"As I reported yesterday, second cell phone operator in #Turkmenistan #MTS was back – today I learned it could be only for us, for roaming."

All the better to monitor you, my dears!

As Ali reports, Turkmen officials were all for the Internet and all for universal standards, but naturally asked penetrating questions like this: "MP Kurbannov: All schools should get the Internet, but question is what kind of the Internet?"

Indeed!

"What kind of Internet" is a question that Dave Winer asks!

Pete Leonard did a story on the conference but didn't address the all-important mobile issue. Mobile is how the Internet grows by leaps and bounds in these countries.

When asked why Facebook was blocked, Navruzov reports, a Turkmen Foreign Ministry official said he couldn't answer and since the head of Turkmentelekom wasn't present, he would have to wait to ask him. We saw that one coming!

No comments on MTS Back in Turkmenistan — But Only for Foreigners

Arab Spring, Central Asia, Internet Freedom & Policy, Turkmenistan, United Nations, OSCE, Multilaterals
May 25, 2012

What Will Be Tajikistan’s Plan B?

Foreign Minister Zarifi at CACI SAIS in Washington, DC, May 17, 2012.

The NATO Summit in Chicago provided an opportunity to hear a number of Central Asian officials speak who stopped in Washington on their way to the summit.

I've blogged about the many challenges Tajikistan faces as US troops exit Afghanistan in 2014 and the issue of terrorism and related challenges to religious freedom.

Foreign Minister Hamrokhon Zarifi spoke at CACI SAIS May 17 on "Tajikistan and Central Asia in Light of 2014." Dr. S. Fred Starr opened the meeting. Zarifi worked for Tajik national security, i.e. the Soviet KGB from 1973-1993 and then in the 1990s served as ambassador to Austria, Switzerland, and Hungary and then came to the US from 2002-2006. So he is an important figure in terms of understanding the deep security issues of not only his own country but the region, and also understanding the thinking in Washington.

Like so many speakers today, he described the turning point for the world and his country in September 2001; Tajikistan of course was riven by civil war from 1992-1997, in which 50,000-100,000 were said to be killed; perhaps it says something about the world's indifference and the closed nature of the society that the estimates vary so wildly.

The first thing Zarifi mentioned was his 1,500 kilometer border with Afghanistan which is "very, very different" than our borders — "it's not like Canada" he explained helpfully for people who know this but need to think about it more — and even different than Mexico. It's mainly mountainous rock, and it has very little electronic facilities; 70% of the border does not have any kind of electronic surveillance, electric fence or physical barrier or communications but just some dirt paths.

"I hope we will be well-prepared for 2014," he said — and his schedule in recent months reflects the worry of the world — he has been to Beijing, Moscow, and now Washington, and consulted with the SCO and CSTO; also Istanbul and Bonn Zarifi described his border as "quite silent," i.e. generally without incident, although of course EurasiaNet and other sites do have a number of stories of border incidents, mainly with Uzbekistan. "Except for drug aggression," he added — which, while not perhaps the precise English phrase he meant to say, conveyed something very important: the fierce determination of aggressive drug-smugglers against whom the world's various weak defense systems can't cope. There wouldn't be 30,000 illegal drug-related deaths in Russia otherwise.

So what's his thinking about how to address the post-2014 challenges? Well, he has a lot of ideas. Building highways and railroads — there are a number of projects in progress and coming on line later in the decade. Vocational training, investment, trade; regional disaster and risk monitoring, regional fiber optic networks. CASA-1000 is quite important for these plans as it is building cooperation in the electricity market — Tajikistan suffers from such shortages of electricity that it impacts its press freedom because people literally can't print news or share news online if they are in the dark. "There are serious shortages in winter-time," added the minister.

There's the Turkmen-Tajik rail system of 500 km that will go through the northern part of Afghanistan — these plans for more crossroads on the Silk Road are in play because Tajikistan does not have much ready gas and oil to export like other Central Asian nations — the deposits are very deep and not accessible, so railroads for other countries' products become important — of course, if relations with Uzbekistan ever improve enough (and Uzbekistan seems to exercise most of what we could call "transport aggression" here by simply blocking Tajikistan's passage due to disputes about the hydropower station that could deprive Tashkent of water for its cotton crops.)

Although not mentioned very often or tied up to human rights concerns in the way Uzbekistan is, Tajikistan is part of the Northern Distribution Network, with important trucking routes.

Different powers have their own idea of what the Silk Road should be, of course, and Zarifi indicates that it is not just a repeat of the old Central Asian Silk Road but draws in China, Iran, and Iraq, and connects the former Soviet Union to the Arab World.

Notably, as to future projects, particularly gas pipelines, Zarifi makes it clear that neither disputes and rivalries among Central Asian powers, or America's concerns about relations with Iran will not be factored in, to deter regional development.

"Nobody will be a resister or destroyer of these projects. Everybody will protect them." They all understand it will help their families, he added, as the economic cooperation will help the region be stable.

As for pipeline projects with Iran, "Why should we avoid participation of Iran in gas pipelines? I'm not seeing any obstacles. If Iran would be ready to discuss, we will discuss."

Zarifi also spoke optimistically about converting crops from opium to sweet potato, which Afghanistan exported 20 years ago. Obviously, the cash values of these crops differ wildly…

Dr. Starr pointed out that a lot of the projects, such as those related to CASA-1000, were due to come online in the future — 2016, 2018, and so on. Meanwhile, 80% of the GDP of Afghanistan derives from the NATO countries. "A lot of bad things could start to happen" when that's withdrawn, he cautioned.

"First, we don't know, some will stay," said Zarifi hopefully about the troops. The Coalition should "finish his job," he said.

"Do you have a Plan B?" asked Starr. Indeed.

What sort of Plan B could Tajikistan, a small and poor country with 25% of its own GDP made up of remittances from labour migrants in Russia, have regarding this tremendous challenge on its border?

That's of course why the US military is in Tajikistan spending $1.5 million and more to train and equip troops particularly to make a more secure border.

I heard a discussion at this conference that encapsulated the problem of this region for me in a way that nothing I have heard in a decade has: A stable Afghanistan is of interest to Iran and a stable Afghanistan is of interest to the United States.

Now, at first glance you might thing, "Can't we all get along, and a stable Afghanistan is in all our interests."

But it doesn't, because the way this is interpeted in military and political doctrine is that a stable Afghanistan encourages Iran to become more interested in it and in fact Iran would prefer Afghanistan to be stable its way — thereby making both an increased threat to the US. A stable Afghanistan that is stable in the way the US would like it to be then becomes a threat to Iran.

I recall back in the early 1980s, analysts would comment that the real war in Afghanistan was between communism and the West, as liberals often described it — a Soviet communist incursion that the West fought by proxy because it was interesetd in deterring the USSR — but rather was a war between communism and Islam. Now, we've ensured that it is more about Islam and the West.

Tajikistan has a "strategic partnership" with Russia — the labour migrants and the students in universities and of course Russia's largest military base in Central Asia is in Tajikistan. "We would like to continue this relationship," said Zarifi carefully, but of course it's not without its problems.

A stable Tajikistan is of interest to Iran as well, as they are from the same great Persian civilization. Many have concerns about a return to Islamic unrest and civil war as in the 1990s. Asked a bout a harsh new religious law, Zarifi responded:

"We all respect and love our religion, but would never have it as a diktat in our country," he said. He pointed out, however, that unlike some other Central Asian countries, Tajikistan legalized the Islamic Party. "The law is not against Muslims," he explained, "but about the responsibility of parents for raising their children."

Asked to explain why children were not allowed to attend mosques or obtain education in Islam, Zarifi said that several organizations abroad in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran were fomenting radical Islam. "We're not blaming the countries, but some groups in them," he elaborated.

According to intelligence information — and he'd be in a position to know, or for that matter, spin this information — there were plans to train young children in suicide-bombing, a la Palestine.

"We have concrete facts that children as young as 8 and 11 were going to be used," Zarifi said.

Later I asked some Tajik journalists whether they found this information compelling. They didn't, because they had a basic journalistic question: what are the names of these children? Who are their families? What are the organizations? What countries were involved?

When they find Tajik students are brought home from study in Egypt from Al Azhar, the top university, because supposedly they are being trained in suicide bombing, the Tajik journalists just aren't buying the story. It's not a sophisticated notion, they feel.

If there were children brought abroad and prepared for suicide missions, as claimed, shouldn't we get more facts about them? Where are they now?

Zarifi also points out to those worried that Islam is suppressed that in the Soviet era, there were 15-17 mosques; today, there are 5,000-7,000 — although we do hear of some being shut down.

"Nowadays, some are led by extremists who came back from the war in 1994, and nobody knows what they are teaching," the foreign minister complained. "We need to prepare our own imams."

There's a vicious circle here, however, if the belief of foreign training in Islam is accompanied with so much suspicion; 800 persons were brought back home from studies abroad due to concerns about spread of the Arab Spring.

Registan may not believe we can ever talk about the Arab Spring and Central Asia in the same breath; officials in charge in Tajikistan not only talk about it, but act on it.

"There are some in Saudi Arabia, some in Iraq, and they try to teach our children a different way." Again, we need details ultimately to be persuaded, and it doesn't seem to reflect the lion's share of Islamic activity in Tajikistan. Zarifi indicated a vision of a "modern Islam, a peaceful Islam" with people studying Islam in Tajikistan — when sufficient numbers of domestic (i.e. state-controlled) imams are prepared, "maybe we will change our laws," he indicated.

Children have to stay in the state's school, and study — they cannot be studying in religious schools. It is not that they are instructed not to go to the mosque at all; the idea is not to train them there, although for any religion, worship and instruction are hard to separate.

Ultimately, Zarifi's attitude toward religion was sort of summed up with this off-handed remark:

"If we pray five times a day, who will work?!"

Asked a number of times about his advice or his "lessons learned" from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Tajik civil war regarding NATO, Zarifi replied:

"Don't hurry. Be patient."

Can the Arab Spring reach Tajikistan? Recently, Zarifi heard a report from his chief of telecommunications in the government who quipped that they had "7 million people on the Internet." Of course they don't, in a country of 7.5 million — it's a small fraction of penetration.

But they all have mobile phones, and increasingly, the phones are getting the capacity to connect to the Internet.

Starr batted away in irritation several Russian-speakers who wanted to speak to Zarifi in the language he likely spoke better than English, insisting that English remain as the language of the meeting. Russia looms over Tajikistan, of course.

But an "extraordinary painful transition" is coming to Tajikistan with the wrenching changes in Afghanistan, "and the terms are created in Washington and not in Dushanbe, and it presents extreme dangers."

The US does have a chance in concert with other NATO members and even Russia to mitigate this if it keeps a focus and a meaningful budget on the region.

No comments on What Will Be Tajikistan’s Plan B?

Afghanistan, Arab Spring, Central Asia, Internet Freedom & Policy, Religion, Russia, Turkmenistan
May 14, 2012

MTS Returning to Turkmenistan?

MTS worker. Photo by peretzp, 2010.

The exile news site gundogar.org is reporting that MTS is returning to Turkmenistan, citing the Russian business daily Kommersant.

The Russian mobile company was unceremoniously turfed out of Turkmenistan back in 2010, when relations with Russia were souring in general, following the April 2009 pipeline explosion and the sharp reduction in Gazprom's purchases from Ashgabat.

The Turkmen Ministry of Communications refused to renew a 5-year lease that lapsed in 2009, and then abruptly shut off the service in December 2010. MTS scrambled to negotiate a renewal and then to litigate and then to negotiate, even asking the US to intervene at one point, officials say privately. The US said it doesn't get involved in overseas commercial disputes, however.

But this was way more than a commercial dispute — this was cutting of 2.4 million subscribers to a vital service that they needed for everyday life, health, education, travel — and of course news. Not all the phones had the capacity to reach the Internet, but some did, and with the galloping increases in the customer base, MTS was adding 4G capacity and it would have been readily used, and not just by ex-pats. Turkmens are geniuses at rigging up satellite TV to watch Russian, Turkish and other cable TV, even as their wily president keeps ordering them to be taking down, ostensibly because they are "eyesores". They would have grabbed at the phones like hotcakes.

MTS is saying it may return in a few months, after losing between $594 million to $1.3 billion dollars — for which it is tied up in court, litigating. I understand the cell towers and stores and everything related to the company were confiscated or made difficult to access — it's not just the customer lists they're talking about.

Ashgabat unabashedly went about courting Nokia Siemens and Huawaei, the Chinese mobile company, and talked about bringing several competing cell phone companies into being to compete with the antequated and slow state system, named Galkynysh, like every other damn thing in Turkmenistan. (The word means "renewal," and that was the official campaign name of Berdymukhamedov's first term.)

This news isn't exactly straightforward.

Vladimir Yevtushenkov, chairman of the board of Sistema AFK, the company that controls MTS, announced that MTS would return to Turkmenistan in 3-6 months, according to an AFP report, and an agreement was reached with President Berdymukhamedov.

But this is an old story, where Russians announce things they think they have gotten from Turkmens, in part to try to seal the deal and/or pressure the Turkmens into sealing the deal. It sometimes backfires. All Berdymukhamedov did was note "the broad opportunities for developing mutually profitable cooperation," according to the State News Agency of Turkmenistan, but Yevtushenko is the one saying there were "concrete proposals."

My bet is that Berdymukhamedov cut off the Russian cell phone not merely because he was trying to stick it to all things Russian — Ashgabat is careful to deal with some Russian entities and not others, usually outside Moscow, to get things like tanks and trucks. And the Turkmen dictator is going to Moscow next week apparently to discuss the Customs Union which Putin is trying to put together — which Turkmenistan will not likely join.

No, I think he cut off cell service to prevent MTS from going further with Internet connections that would soon bring the Arab Spring — and perhaps more of relevance — the Russian protests against Putin — to the screens of Turkmens. Turkmenistan lives in an incredible information blockade and closed, Soviet-style society, but still people manage to get news here and there and did a remarkable job as well getting news out, when the explosion in the arms depot happened last July. Obviously, the Turkmen government wants to keep that under control.

A more mundane reason for the break-up was always given by Kommersant and other papers: Turkmenistan demanded a higher percentage of the deal than just 50 percent. With rapid growth and half the population having the service, the Turkmens wanted more out of it for themselves.

What could have changed about all this? Well, the Arab Spring isn't turning out to be so democratic, bringing hardline Islamists to power, and is less attractive than it was. Putin is crushing the street protests and is back in power. So the threat isn't so great. Meanwhile, doing without cell phones is a huge pain, as people just can't get work done or take care of their families. The public protest about this reached such proportions last year that the riot police had to be called in to control a line of customers waiting to try to get refunds or switches to the state service — and that is very rare in Turkmenistan.

Putin may also realize that he can hardly expect Turkmenistan to join the union if it doesn't even allow a Russian cell phone company active in all the other former Soviet nations to do business — it just doesn't look like Turkmenistan is part of the modern world, and he is likely letting Berdymukhamedov know that. For his part, the Turkmen president may find it beneficial to deal with Russia rather than Finland and China on phone business — in part having the deal with Russia offsets his dependency on China for the pipeline. It's diversifying business away from oil and gas and joining the modern age of aps and such. But he wants the piece to be bigger, and Russia may be willing to let it be bigger, given their past losses in Turkmenistan.

No comments on MTS Returning to Turkmenistan?

Turkmenistan
May 13, 2012

Why Doesn’t Nathan Hamm Like the Story of How Authoritarian States Respond to Erosion of Their Information Dominance?

Internet cafe in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, 2010. Photo by aelita.

Registan has been fairly static lately, or as Joshua Foust would describe it, "non-kinetic" and hasn't had as as many regular posts. Curiously, Nathan Hamm, the site co-founder, a defense analyst, who works in one of those secretive boxes somewhere with classified status, has been running a spate of articles about human rights that seem designed to look like they are somehow critical of the rights situation in Uzbekistan.

They aren't really.

Just take a closer look and you'll see they really don't challenge the government of Uzbekistan or even the much-ridiculed Gulnara Karimova. "Uzbekistan’s government rarely budges in meaningful ways," says Hamm — and counsels avoiding a downgrade of Uzbekistan's status under US laws against aid to countries found to engage in trafficking and forced labor, because this would harm the NDN.

So his articles sort of create the appearance of covering human rights critically by actually doing something else that is perfectly blessed activity for the "progressives": they bash Komen, the breast cancer organization for dealing with Karimova's charity.

This was low-hanging fruit, as Komen was mercilessly savaged by "the Internet" for temporarily witholding funding of Planned Parenthood because it gives referrals to abortions, and it was hoping to avoid controversy with its base, which includes women against abortion as well as those who are "pro-choice." Komen was bullied into restoring the funding to PP, but then blundered into the relationship with Uzbekistan through some overseas "race for the cure" sort of program. So not only Hamm and the rest of the crowd had lots of fun with this for days, Wonkette suddenly woke up and paid attention to Uzbekistan for the first time ever, and wrote some of the most viciously catty articles ever known to the site about Karimova for hooking up with the evil and hated Komen. Gosh, we missed Wonkette when we were picketing Gulnara's fashion show to draw attention to forced child labour. Surely Wonkette likes children?

The whole opportunistic spasm has now passed and Gulnara will be forgotten again — as she was for months after the fashion picket, even though there should be a sustained scrutiny on her and her dictator dad for ever public appearance about everything, not only when she connects with politically-incorrect American non-profits.

But this flurry of faux human rights concern didn't last for long: the Nathan Hamm we recall from all the other RealPolitik posts is back today with this twisted post admonishing a fellow defense analyst to "Focus on the Social in Social Media."

The purpose of a post like this is to make it appear to the casual eye and the typical one-minute website visitor that an article about the importance of citizen journalism is being covered in Registan. And so it is — for about three paragraphs as he references Small Wars Journal, which published an article by Matthew Stein, a research analyst currently working at the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Stein says:

Finally, the significance of these videos is that the people of Zhanaozen were able to get information on the incident out into social media despite the government’s control over access. People using social media to publicize incidents that might not otherwise be noticed is not a new trend, as can be seen from worldwide events in 2011. However, this is the most noteworthy example from Kazakhstan, much less Central Asia, of this happening.

Indeed. Those videos from Zhanaozen were invaluable in completely undermining not only Nazarbayev's narrative that everything was minimal and now under control; they were vital in undermining Joshua Foust's narrative that Zhanaozen was just a minor put- down of labor strikers (and the narrative of some other creepy Registan authors bashing the Russian journalist who reported on more deaths than officially acknowledged, and bashing the workers' lawyer). I would say that the videos of the Abadan explosion were on par with these videos, but as good as they were, they didn't show how many people were affected in Turkmenistan (it was very hard to film the scene as police blocked roads and seized cameras). The Zhanaozen videos did; they had eyewitness reports.

So Stein has reported all this accurately and come to exactly the right conclusion: videos of atrocities undermine the regime's narrative and help claim some space, although limited, for human rights groups and opposition to strengthen.

But then Hamm diggs in to make these contorted points:

o an unnecessary and pedantic claim that the Zhanaozen videos weren't the first from Central Asia, as there were some from Bakiyev's overthrow and the Osh pogroms. So? Stein is talking about Zhanaozen

o a claim that these sorts of videos are exaggerated; "the significance of information going unfiltered into social media and out to a wide audience is overstated". How? Information *did* get out into social media and to a wider audience. There were multiple Zhanaozen videos and they had a fairly big impact in getting the word out to the foreign media and raising some awareness at home, although limited given the Internet blockages and low penetration. Nothing is overstated; this is really important.

Now Hamm objects:

In his final paragraph, Stein points to the emergence of a struggle between state and society to control the narratives around controversial events. There is a story to be told about how these authoritarian states respond to erosion of their information dominance, but in many ways, it is singularly uninteresting. Almost every state tries to shape narratives, and in Central Asia, the state controls the story by keeping political groups, social and religious groups, and the media on a short leash.

Well, yeah, we get it that groups are on a tight leash, and regimes shape narratives, but the amazing thing is that they nevertheless are increasingly getting videos out like this, even from Turkmenistan.

There is a struggle between state and society most definitely! Why does Hamm need to minimize it and even deny it?! Is this part of his narrative that always seeks to support the establishment and the status quo, the Central Asian regimes and the US military that now must back them?

But what is this really all about then, some sort of strange A Team and B Team? The military researcher Stein in Ft. Leavenworth, affirming that videos help challenge the regime's narrative — a fact — and the defense analyst Hamm in…wherever…discounting any significant challenge — a spin? Why?

Then in a bit of echo-chambering, Hamm links to a pessimistic new article by that gloom-'n'-doom anthropological duo of Registan, Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce (more on this later):

Central Asian governments have stepped up some restrictions and monitoring of social media. Security services are adept enough at disrupting off-line political activity planned online, and governments are finding ways to convince people to avoid the internet.

So they're adept? So what? People fight back. They get knocked down; they get back up again. The parameters enlarge and shrink and enlarge again. Hamm admits that, saying it's a dynamic situation.

But he wants to make sure that the "correct" Registani line is once again affirmed: authoritarian governments in Central Asian win; people who resist them lose; don't pretend this is the Arab Spring. Of course, nobody has claimed any Arab Spring is actually coming to Central Asia; most people who even compare these regions talk about an influence not an actuality, and talk about how "talking about a spring is a spring itself" of sorts.

I have found expectations of a Central Asian spring in the near term or the assumption that the Arab Spring would have a measurable impact on Central Asia to be based on fundamental misunderstandings of the region. Political culture matters. A lot. Government plays a critical role in nurturing fear, distrust, and political apathy, but their success is aided enormously by their political opponents and the societies they govern perpetuating this culture themselves. And research on Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan suggests that at least in the near term, the internet has exacerbated these problems.

Now I saw what you did there, Nathan. You disparaged the opposition, accusing them of mirroring and perpetuating the culture of the regime with its fear and distrust. Like David Trilling of EurasiaNet, disparaging uznews.net as merely using "the same black PR methods" that the regime in Tashkent uses, although in reality, this is a female secular journalist fighting for the space of media freedom and women's rights not to close, because of Islamists in Uzbekistan or in exile. Why aren't you guys on the right side of this struggle?

The opposition isn't the hopelessly "perpetuated culture" of mistrust that Hamm implies anyway. Every day, there are extraordinary acts. Lawyers putting out reports of terrorist suspects tried after torture in pre-trial detention, behind closed doors. Human rights groups gathering reports of forced sterilization. People trying to keep the record and distribute news. People helping one another. And people getting on the Internet and sharing the news — despite everything.

Then Hamm engages in some real double-talk:

Stein is looking in the wrong place for meaning. The real significance of this documentation and presentation is in how and whether it changes society’s modes and norms for discussing sensitive political, social, and cultural topics and how those changes subsequently change political culture. The state’s reaction is just a continuation of a long-running dynamic.

No, Stein got the meaning right because it was really dirt simple: the regime lies, the regime tries to control the narrative, the opposition and the independent media try to undermine the lies with the alternative story as they find it. It's not about whether more people go click on the link and get on Youtube and change their "modes and norms". Jesus, this is fake. Political culture? These brave people have more political culture than Hamm will ever know what to do with in his "long-running dynamic".

He concludes by warning his fellow defense writer Stein to stay away from looking at the regime and the opposition as a narrative (why?!) and tells him to look more at the "discussions and practices within society".

However, it is absolutely impossible at present to predict how or when the internet will play an appreciably important role. The only thing that is certain is that more clarity on these questions comes from focusing on discussions and practices within society than from monitoring the state-society dynamic.

Why? Society will always have strong currents of reactionaries or conservatives who accept the regime's narrative avidly and aggressively and become part of the regime's tool to bash dissidents — this is par for the course in the post-Soviet Union. The regime can muster sock puppets and even botnets to fill up the Youtube comments with hate and cynicism — or even just let its own aggressive fan base go at it all on their own. So what? The alternative narrative also grows and people walk around the robots.

Er, why can't we monitor the state-society dynamic, Nathan? Why are you warning us away from this?! Is that because it would be just too critical of regimes you're trying to be gingerly with and protect in your RealPolitic framework for the world? Why?

No comments on Why Doesn’t Nathan Hamm Like the Story of How Authoritarian States Respond to Erosion of Their Information Dominance?

Social Media, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan