When J.Lo Sang for the Dictator

My Human Rights Watch colleague, Rachel Denber, and I wrote this for The Wall Street Journal, where it appeared on 2 July 2013.

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Many Turkmen citizens are forbidden from doing what the pop star did after her concert: leave the country.

Celebrity and dictatorship have jumped into bed together once more, with American pop singer Jennifer Lopez singing "Happy Birthday" to Turkmenistan's authoritarian ruler this past weekend.

Outside of Central Asia, J.Lo is vastly better-known than President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. World-wide Ms. Lopez has four times as many followers on Twitter as Turkmenistan has citizens.

Yet the attention in this incident's wake should be just as much about Mr. Berdymukhamedov as it is about Ms. Lopez. We're happy, of course, to see the media quoting Human Rights Watch's evaluation of Turkmenistan as "one of the world's most repressive countries." We are as surprised as anyone that J.Lo and her entourage could declare their ignorance of Turkmenistan's appalling human-rights record.

Teetering Turkmenistan?

From my Reuters AlertNet blog, 31 January 2007.

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IWPR just published a good overview report on Turkmenistan as the country faces a presidential election and an uncertain future without the megalomaniacal Saparmurad Niazov, aka Turkmenbashi, at the helm. The death of "the father of all Turkmen" in December not only came as a shock to the Central Asian nation, it also left a gap for those in the international media and NGO world who follow the region.

Though Niazov's reign was unquestionably brutal, the absurd elements of his rule -- the gold statues; the calendars with months renamed after himself and his mother; the obligatory questions about his ludicrous book, the Ruhnama, on the exam for a driver's license -- at least provided freaky factoids to draw the outside world into the story. Without the lunacy, it's going to be a lot harder to sell Turkmenistan to editors. More than one human rights activist and journalist has commented to me in recent weeks, "In a strange way, we're going to miss him."

The EU and the Turkmen "Prophet"

I wrote this piece together with Tanya Cox of Human Rights Watch. It was published in the European Voice on 6 April 2006.

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For years, it has been pretty hard to find anyone with anything nice to say about Turkmenistan's leadership. A widespread consensus developed that the country's leader, president-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov - who styles himself 'Turkmenbashi', or father of all Turkmen - is an autocratic ruler, wrecking his country and oppressing his people.

Criticism of his authoritarian government is not restricted to non-governmental organisations such as Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group. The United Nations and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe have regularly criticised the country's appalling human rights record and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has suspended all public sector engagement with Turkmenistan over such concerns. What everyone seem to agree on is that Turkmenistan is one of the world's most repressive states.

It thus comes as a huge shock that the European Union is moving to break ranks and cosy up to the pariah government.

The Ceausescu Career Path?

Back in 2004, my Crisis Group colleague, David Lewis, and I looked at what might happen when the self-assumed immortal "Turkmenbashi" finally met his inevitable end. This piece appeared in Transition Online on 1 December 2004.

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If you look up “cult of personality” in the dictionary, you might find a picture of Turkmenistan's president, Saparmurat Niazov. And wherever you look inside Turkmenistan, you'll see the same image.

It is not a simple matter of the ubiquitous public murals of your average dictator: Niazov has a golden statue of himself in the capital, Ashgabat, that moves with the sun. On state television, Niazov's portrait revolves continuously on the corner of the screen. His nationalistic, quasi-spiritual tome, the Ruhnama, not only forms the basis for much TV programming but also dominates Turkmenistan's education curriculum. He's renamed the months of the year, with the month of January now replaced by his self-adopted name, “Turkmenbashi” or “father of all Turkmen.”