PART 10
Turkmenbashi,
it's a gas, gas, gas



Part 1: The last frontier: China's far west
Part 2: The king of the steppes
Part 3: In pursuit of the snow leopard
Part 4: Touching base
Part 5: A new learning experience
Part 6: Peaceful jihad
Part 7: The American client
Part 8: The Sufi way
Part 9: The Samarkand circle

"Turkmen! All my love is for you; all the pain is for me." - Turkmen President Saparmurat Nyazov in his book Rukhnama

ASHGABAT - Here, US$1 buys not a bottle of mineral water, but 25 liters of gas: it's the ultimate wet dream of the "Bush-Cheney junta", in the words of Gore Vidal.

In the markets of Turkmenistan, $100 buys a kilo of fresh beluga caviar straight out of the Caspian sea. A camel sells for $200 and a tribal wife between $2,000 and $5,000. This desert oasis - sitting on fabulous natural resources - is kept under the strictest surveillance by a wacky Big Brother, Big Father - "president for life" - Saparmurat Nyazov, the ultimate Asian version of a Sun King. And thanks to the president, Ashgabat, the capital - or at least the city center - is modern and aseptic. The cool desert climate evokes Arizona or Nevada. Indeed, we are in Central Asia's version of Las Vegas - including a strip, Berzengi, with a row of gaudy post-modern hotels, actually government guesthouses, all of them empty. At night, Ashgabat - "the city of love" - looks like it has sprung up from a Hunter Thompson hallucinogenic fantasy.

Nyazov prefers to call himself Turkmenbashi - "the father of all Turkmen". Genghis Khan and Louis XIV would approve the Turkmenbashi way: there is no opposition, secular or Islamic; no political parties; the media is totally controlled; any group meeting of any kind is forbidden; prison torture is rife; and dissent may be punished by death. In this authoritarian presidency, a systemic inheritance from the Soviet Union, coupled with the myth of a strong state, there's no room for ideology. This is radical nationalism embodied by a personality cult that would make any Hollywood - or Washington - spin doctor green with envy. Turkmenbashi, looking like a chubby Mexican soap opera idol, is ubiquitous in statues, portraits, plaques, posters and school books, always smiling, never threatening, like Saddam Hussein used to be.

Turkmenbashi is very fond of parties - Horse Day, Sun Day, Jewel Day, Carpet Day, Melon Day, etc. Water, electricity, gas and salt are subsidized. The average urban monthly salary is the equivalent of $50. An apartment in nouveau Soviet style sells for only $5,000 - the same for a sublime Akhal Teke horse. But international calls cost a fortune, and the Internet is extremely slow: communications are still in the Flintstones era.

And then there is the Rukhnama - subtitled "Reflections on the Spiritual Values of the Turkmen". This is Turkmenbashi's humble version of the Holy Koran. But it's not a religious book, rather "a systematic worldview, the core of all my political, economic and life targets, with civil content and methods of use in different areas of society", according to the certified English translation produced by the State Publishing Service. The Rukhnama is "the only source that will connect Turkmen's present and its past".

Alternating historical exegesis and romantic exaltation, Turkmenbashi enlightens us on several points. He says that according to God, "Turk means core, iman means light. Therefore, Turkiman, namely Turkmen, means 'made from light, whose essence is light'." Turkmen are descendants of the Prophet Noah. Their origin "lies in Oghuz Khan. Twenty-four tribes, 40 families, constitute the essence of the Turkmen nation". This nation "has trace marks as magnificent as those of Great Britain, of the great Indian nation and of the great Chinese nation".

The dining table is the country's "sign of unity ... and the pledge of the Turkmen. When the Turkmen are asked, 'Who is Khan'? they answer 'the dining table'." Bread is invested of almost sacred value. But most important is what the Turkmen nation gave to the world: "Horses, carpets, ornaments, clothing, pure white wheat, and the sarya goyun species of sheep". Feminists will delight on the Valkyrian qualities of Turkmen women - and this is no metaphor: "Pay attention to the jewelry worn by Turkmen girls; the gupba-tuvulga, chekelik-bukav protects the neck from attacks with swords, the gulyaka protects the chest. The bracelet covers the wrist, and various pieces attached on the front and back of dresses prevent injuries from arrows and spears. If the Turkmen girl wears all her jewelry, she becomes like a warrior shielded by her jewelry. Calculations tell us that a woman should be carrying a total of 36 kilos of silver and gold if she wears all her jewelry. The Turkmen praises the woman highly."

So Rukhnama is now "the word" for the 5.5 million descendants of a formidable race of nomadic horseback warriors who dominated the desert sands for centuries - attacking Silk Road caravans and making incursions to Persia, Afghanistan and Russia to capture slaves. Russian generals who had to fight them during the Great Game described them as the most formidable light cavalry in the world. No wonder. Alexander the Great himself rode a purebred Akhal Teke horse. Turkmen may belong to 24 tribes, but the political leadership is a monopoly of the two largest, Teke and Yomut.

After independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkmenbashi vowed this would be "a new Kuwait". Hardly. Roughly 70 percent of the population lives on around $1 a day. The small, wealthy elite, according to a local businessman, consists of "Arabs, the oil and gas people and high officials".

Marriages remain great occasions - the nomadic ways adapted to the big city. At the sprawling Gulustan restaurant, two yurts (tents) are placed outside, close to the row of shashlyk (kebab) grills; women clad with their kilos of jewelry sit and dance separated from the men. Meanwhile, in both of Ashgabat's five-star hotels, Turkmen and Russian freelance sirens go to war convincing a trickle of visiting businessmen to improve the country's foreign exchange balance. European know-how is widely appreciated. French construction giant Bouygues is building a new ministerial complex. Italians are selling textile machines. The presidential cook - also responsible for the restaurant in one of the five-star hotels, owned by Niyazov's son - is also an Italian.

The national currency, the irretrievably unconvertible manat, is a joke. The official exchange rate has always been $1 to 5,200 manat because of the hard currency flowing from oil and gas exports. But the real, black market rate is actually $1 to 22,000 manat. Turkmen citizens cannot buy dollars at the official exchange rate - and there are no exchange offices anyway. A new, highest-denomination 10,000 manat banknote has hit the market - worth less than 50 cents. Banknotes used to be signed by the chairman of the Central Bank and then the Chief Treasurer, but Turkmenbashi condemned the first in absentia for corruption and sent the second to life in prison, so now he signs the banknotes himself. The manat depicts - who else - Turkmenbashi. But there is a slight technical problem: in the new 10,000 note he is portrayed with gray hair, while in all the official iconography across the whole country his hair is shiny black.

Tolkuchka - certainly Central Asia's mother of all bazaars - is a sprawling Silk Road caravanserai in the outskirts of the city, with containers instead of yurts and Russian pop as the soundtrack. This is where many a foreigner comes in search of the perfect Turkmen carpet. Sometimes the perfect Turkmen carpet can be found in Tolkuchka, sold by lovely Turkmen tribal ladies wearing colorful scarves, loaded of course with jewelry and carrying those fabulous rug design patterns in their heads and hands for centuries. But the perfect Turkmen carpet will remain at home: the lady in charge of export licenses at the small office at the back of the carpet museum will not assign any document to any carpet older than 30 years - or she would be hanged by Turkmenbashi himself. Russian residents joke that there are three big export problems: Akhal Teke horses (but Arab money always finds a way around it); ancient carpets (but diplomats can smuggle them in their luggage); and Turkmen girls ("but paying $50,000 to the right person is possible", quips a resident).

Russian businessmen in Ashgabat confirm that Turkmenbashi "was red, then he became green" - a reference to his chameleon-like transfer from Communist Party secretary to pious Muslim. He built a large mosque in his home village - and described it as holding the Turkmen Kaaba, or holy stone. Now he is building what should be the biggest mosque in the world: it looks more like a nuclear power station. Russians agree that instead of building marble palaces, Turkmenbashi should rather instruct his ministers to repave the ghastly main roads from the Uzbek border in the east to the Caspian in the west, and fight rampant police corruption.

The striking absence of qualified people in the country is due in large part - literally - to an earthquake. Ashgabat suffered two - in 1929 and 1948. Incredible as it may seem today, the last one was simply invisible to the eyes of the world. It razed the whole city to the ground, killing 110,000 people, but Joseph Stalin defied nature and proclaimed that there had been no earthquake. The bulk of the educated Turkmen middle class died in 1948. Niyazov himself suffered the consequences: he was raised in a Soviet orphanage. Turkmenistan still depends to a great extent on Russian intellectual power.

No less than 75 percent of Turkmenistan is desert, as we can easily attest as a rickety 1950s Russian Antonov - carrying an inescapable portrait of Turkmenbashi in the main cabin - flies over the Kara Kum, the "black sand desert", as merciless as the Taklamakan in Chinese Xinjiang. Unlike the mythical Silk Road oasis Merv - once one of the 20 regions of Persian emperor Darius the Great - and Samarkand (a Tajik city, but today part of Uzbekistan), Ashgabat was built only in 1881 after the conquest of the Turkmen by the Russians during the Great Game. But modern Ashgabat lives literally side-by-side with history. Nisa - a fortress from the mighty Parthian empire, which for six centuries ruled over Iran, Iraq and Turkey - is only 15 kilometers away. The ruins of Merv - capital of the fabulous Persian Achaemenid empire - are only 360 kilometers away, near the nondescript "Sovietized" city of Mary. Merv's ruins reveal history in motion: a Greek layer from the 3rd century BC onward; a Sassanid and Western Turk layer from the 3rd to the 7th centuries; an Arab layer from the 8th century onward; and a Seljuk layer from the 12th century onward.

Turkmenbashi knows very well how strategically located Turkmenistan has survived everything - from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan, from Timur to the bloodthirsty emirs of Bukhara, from the Russian protectorate to Stalinism. A few hours away, on the other side of the Kopet Dag mountains, which preside over Ashgabat under the desert sky, is Mashhad, the sacred city of Shi'ite Iran welcoming pilgrims from all over Central Asia visiting the tomb of Imam Reza, the eighth successor of Ali. To the south, the Iran-Afghan border is only eight hours away by Lada. And eight hours away to the west is the Caspian Sea: with its trillion meters of natural gas reserves. Turkmenistan is the third-largest producer and the second-largest exporter of natural gas in the world.

Turkmenbashi is understandably proud of his gas republic. But he also knows that the way out of its landlock and its dependence on Russia is to the south, via Iran. A swap deal is in place through which Iran sells gas extracted from the Persian Gulf in Turkmenistan's name and Ashgabat exports gas to Iran's northeast. Not by accident, Turkmen bazaars are filled with Iranian merchandise - from silk stockings to cola. The Turkmen elite love to go shopping in Tehran - with a stop in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

But Russia constantly keeps up the pressure: Moscow insists that Turkmen gas has to be exported to other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries and eventually to Europe through the Russian pipeline system - and payment is usually a pittance. Most CIS countries are in dire economic straits, and as they keep not paying their bills, Ashgabat is constantly forced to turn off the tap.

Turkmenbashi can diversify by choosing among three main options: a pipeline to Iran, and then to Turkey and Western Europe; a pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and eventually India; and a pipeline to China. A pipeline from Korpedzhe (Turkmenistan) to Kuy (Iran) was opened in December 1997 - and on top of it, Tehran has built a crucial railway connecting Tedzhen in Turkmenistan to Mashhad in Iran: this was in fact the first way out for Central Asia's exports to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

Non-biased oil and gas experts agree that Iran beats the competition hands down as the best route to link Central Asia with the global market, as well as the shortest route for any country to reach Central Asia. The railway distance to China is enormous - as well as the costs of building pipelines. Afghanistan is immersed in permanent political instability. All the existing communication and transportation network - from railways to pipelines - in Central Asia go north via Russia, but the Russian railway system is a crumbling mess.

The configuration, though, evolves all the time. Washington will do anything to block new pipelines through Iran. Russia will do practically anything to block a new pipeline to Turkey. The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) pipeline was officially approved by Nyazov, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan in late 2001, but everybody knows that Karzai is unable "to rule even over his own chair", as they say in Kabul. The American plan is now to seduce Nyazov to provide Turkmen gas to the controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. Russia and Iran will do everything in their power to dissuade Nyazov (more later in this series).

Russia's pressure is above all economic. Last April, a 25-year agreement between Moscow and Ashgabat was signed in Moscow, according to which Turkmenistan will be selling up to 70 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year by 2007. Russia will pay only $44 for every 1,000 cubic meters. And until 2006, only half will be in hard currency, the other half in equipment for Turkmenistan's gas industry. Russians in Ashgabat confirm that as soon as the deal was struck, Nyazov came up with a law preventing Russians living in Turkmenistan from having double nationality: they would have to choose. Moscow applied tremendous pressure and Nyazov finally gave in.

Turkmenbashi's foreign policy is infinitely less wacky than we might infer from the main character's antics. The crux is neutrality - symbolized, most appropriately, by the 75-meter-high white marble Arch of Neutrality which stands in central Ashgabat, with a golden statue of - who else - Turkmenbashi on top, saluting with open arms the mountains and his people. The arch rests on a three-legged base - a Turkmenbashi idea to prove the resilience of the traditional Turkmen cooking pot tripod.

The neutrality policy in theory protects Turkmenistan from heavy Russian interference and meddling by other Central Asian neighbors, but progressively isolates the country even more. It has its merits though. When the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan, Turkmenbashi kept relations with both the Pakistan-backed Taliban and the Russian-and-Iranian-backed Northern Alliance. With this coup, Turkmen political dissidents and agents of radical Islam could not find exile in Afghanistan. Nowadays, there is absolutely no sign of underground radical Islam inside Turkmenistan. And the political opposition is actually exiled in Moscow.

So Turkmenbashi should not be too paranoid about stability. Moreover, with a population 82 percent Turkmen and only 3 percent Russian, this is the most ethnically homogeneous Central Asian republic. Its borders are relatively safe. Which leads us to the free trade problem. The Uzbek border should be the most strategic in the New Silk Road - where merchandise from Turkey and Iran reaches most of Central Asia. But that's not exactly the case.

From an administrative and political point of view, the former USSR identified Central Asia to four republics - Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan - which corresponded to the Persian Transoxiana, and to the Arab "beyond the river" - meaning the two darya (sea, or river, in Persian), the Amu-Darya (the ancient river Oxus) and the Syr-Darya. Political destiny added Kazakhstan to these four republics. In a broader sense, Central Asia is inserted in the Turco-Persian civilization, which was the matrix of cultures and languages from Istanbul to Delhi and from Isfahan to Bukhara. This meant that Turkish emirs, Persian administrators and until the Iranian schism in the early 16th century, Sunni Islam of the Hanafi branch. But from a dialect to another, from dark blue to turquoise ceramic, from a musical mode to a slower variation, there were never absolutely defined borders - until these young nations at the end of the 20th century turned their little differences into a principle of exclusion. Until 1994, the Uzbek-Turkmen border was nothing more than a table and a chair stuck in the wilderness. Now it's a full-fledged border filled with suspicious officials, endless controls and a two kilometer no man's land in between, through which even local people have to walk.

Is there life after Turkmenbashi? Nobody even dares to think about it in Ashgabat. Businessmen risk saying that Niyazov's son is unlikely to inherit the playground. Russians with a Turkmen passport fear ultra-nationalism will drive them away. Zoroastrianism may have been born in Khorezm - the Turkmen region which gave algebra to the world - or in Merv. Mazdeism - Zoroaster's religion - was the official religion of the Sassanid empire until the 8th century Islamic conquests. The Chinese - who came in contact with it travelling the Silk Road - called it a "cult of the celestial God of Fire". Turkmenbashi may not be the holder of divine fire. But his reign may not be the worst of destinies, at least for the moment, for this young gas republic - if only he learned to distribute the fruits of its new wealth. Anyway, if everything goes wrong, one can always find solace by reading the Rukhnama.

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