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2 SPEAKING
FREELY Danger lurks in
Turkmenistan By Andrei
Tsygankov
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
The death last month
of Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niyazov has all the
potential to transform both security and political
economy in the region, and the implications of the
regime's evolution can hardly be overestimated.
Enormous natural-gas reserves, the
extremely volatile geopolitical
environments in neighboring
Afghanistan, Iran and Uzbekistan, and a very grave
human-rights situation may place Turkmenistan in
the middle of Central Asia's development in the
mid-term perspective. Yet, largely because of the
closed nature of the country's political system,
there is little discussion of alternative paths
available to the regime. A better understanding of
the nature of Niyazov's regime is essential for
having such a discussion.
The Turkmen
regime is best described as sultanist, not
totalitarian or authoritarian. Sultanism, as
German political economist Max Weber defined it,
is an extreme form of patrimonialism, when an
administration and military force "are purely
personal instruments of the master" and domination
"operates primarily on the basis of discretion".
Sultanism therefore combines traditional
domination with what we now call a cult of
personality.
Like totalitarianism, it is
repressive and offers no political space for
opposition similar to what exists under regimes of
an authoritarian nature. Yet unlike
totalitarianism, it is limited to a cult of
personality and does not have an elaborate
ideology to build on. For these reasons, a
sultanist regime has even fewer constraints on its
power than authoritarian and totalitarian regimes,
and it is even more prone to corruption than the
latter regimes.
The power of tradition is
also reduced. Unlike the Middle Eastern
petro-states that are heavily influenced by
networks of royal-family ties, clans and
oligarchies, Turkmenistan's ruler minimized the
role of clans and special-interest groups.
Niyazov's ruling system successfully integrated a
rich supply of energy resources with the former
Soviet structure of power, and - because of energy
needs by all major nations in the region - it
remains practically invulnerable to external
pressures.
The proneness to corruption
that stems from absence of ideology, weakness of
tradition and lack of political opposition has
found its fullest expression in Turkmenistan. A
country that has been as wealthy on a per capita
basis in its natural resources as Kazakhstan, it
has wasted most of its opportunities and now bears
no comparison to Kazakhstan in almost any
dimension of state viability.
Turkmenistan's living standards are the
lowest in the region and continue to decline.
Unemployment is 50-70%. One-third to one-half of
the population under 30 years old - the future of
the country - are drug addicts, partly because of
enormous heroin traffic from neighboring
Afghanistan and Iran and partly because of the
regime's own encouragement of opium users.
The degree of economic diversification
remains low, as is the amount of foreign
investment. The only advantage of Niyazov's
"positive neutrality" or isolationism is the
weakness of terrorist networks operating on
Turkmen territory. This, however, may change with
relaxation of political control in the country and
eagerness of organizations such as the Islamic
Movement of Turkestan and Hisb ut-Tahrir to take
advantage of it.
With mass poverty and
absence of a middle class and a competent elite,
the country is in no shape to move toward
democracy. Yet sultanism is unlikely to survive
for much longer because of its narrow base of
support and because of its key pillar - Niyazov
himself - being removed. Political elites may
simply not want to serve under the sultanist
regime, and will seize the opportunity to prevent
possible future purges by reforming the system.
Other repressive regimes, such as Josef
Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao Zedong's China, have
undergone a similar evolution. In both cases,
elites did not return to a repressive regime but,
instead, introduced a "loyalty in exchange for no
repression" pact.
That pact has been
codified and, in the case of China, legitimized
through Communist Party documents. Turkmenistan's
regime too is likely to evolve, and its possible
development paths - depending on ruling elites'
ability to find a common ground - might be
associated either with the contemporary Kazakhstan
or Afghanistan under the Taliban.
The
Kazakhstan model is the best the regime can hope
for. In this case, the sultanist regime will
gradually devolve into an oligarchic system.
Political elites will agree to settle their
differences in complex, if hidden, negotiations.
The formal authority of the leader will go
unchallenged, but so will the acquired social
privileges of
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