Beginning late last week, rumors that the President of Turkmenistan had died began spreading. A narrative from an opposition channel implied that Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov’s death was due to renal failure.
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But information is hard to come by in the central asian nation of 5.7 million, and foriegn observers and Turkmen citizens alike have been attempting to make sense of the situation. A 2018 report by Human Rights Watch puts it bluntly: “Turkmenistan is one of the world’s most isolated and oppressively governed countries. All aspects of public life are controlled by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and his associates.”
When it comes to access to information, an earlier HRW report from 2014 explained that although “parliament adopted a law banning censorship and affirming citizens’ right to freedom of expression and information” in 2012, in reality “there is a total absence of media freedom in Turkmenistan” and it is the state that “controls all print and electronic media, with the exception of one newspaper founded by an individual close to Berdymukhamedov”.
“Turkmenistan is one of the world’s most isolated and oppressively governed countries. All aspects of public life are controlled by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and his associates.”
This grim reality makes access to information, and reliable methods of verifying such information, extremely difficult even for citizens. It also “makes foregin media coverage very difficult” the 2014 report continued..
This week's rumors regarding Berdimuhamedov’s death have therefore stuck, and are difficult to verify one way or the other even if the reliability of the rumors is shaky. Al Bawaba reached out to Oxford International Relations researcher Nicole Grajewski, a specialist in Central Asian affairs, who explained that “the latest round of rumors about Berdymukhamedov appears to have originated with a Sweden-based opposition YouTube Channel Erkin.” The channel has just over 20,000 subscribers at the time of this writing.
In the past three days, it has uploaded 6 videos that imply that Gurbanguly has died. The first two videos posted on Saturday-- one uploaded in Turkmen and the other in Russian -- seem to be where the rumors first began. Although the last six videos have between 90,000 and 320,000 views, the videos probably circulated by other means.
“the latest round of rumors about Berdymukhamedov appears to have originated with a Sweden-based opposition YouTube Channel Erkin.”
As Foreign Policy reports, it is probably the second upload (in Russian) that was passed on in message groups “until it was picked up by smaller, and eventually larger, Russian media outlets.”
That the rumors originated and proliferated on the internet by Turkmen activists based abroad is a key part of the story. According to the 2014 HRW report, “Internet access remains limited and heavily state-controlled” in Turkmenistan. “The country’s only Internet service provider is state-operated, and social media and many websites are blocked, including those of foreign news organizations.” The 2018 report noted that “Berdymukhamedov met a vice president of a German technology firm, from which Turkmenistan had been allegedly seeking technology that could enable the government to monitor and block mobile and satellite communications and internet access.”
Grajewski added that“this wasn't the first time rumors like this have appeared” as “ the closed nature of the Turkmen press obviously makes it difficult to know the state of internal affairs of the country.” But the authorities were clearly concerned with the quickly-disseminating information, and “the Turkmen embassies in Moscow and Bishkek were quick to deny such rumors and sources from inside Turkmenistan said that everything was going on as business as usual, with no increase in security.”
Writing for the BBC, Abdujalil Abdurasulov suggested that especially when it comes to Central Asian countries “gossip usually cannot be totally dismissed until the leader is actually seen by the public alive”. This is the case especially in the aftermath of what happened to Islam Karimov, the former president of Uzbekistan. In 2016, rumors of his death abounded “for almost a week before the official confirmation was made”.
Grajewski noted that the Turkmen President (or his PR team) attempted to respond to exactly such a concern today, by announcing that he had “shared a phone conversation with the president of Uzbekistan with the ostensible purpose of providing proof of life evidence”.
As an official Uzbek outlet put it when reporting on the phone conversation: “Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov congratulated the leader of Uzbekistan on his birthday, wishing well being and prosperity to all the multinational people of Uzbekistan.”
A report from the London-based Foreign Policy Centre published earlier this July claimed that the gas-rich country was “teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
The website also reported that Recep Tayyip Erdogan also called the Uzbek President, the former president of Kazakhstan, and an official from the UAE today -- leaving the Turkmen leader’s phone-call seeming a little less important. One Twitter user even joked that “the Uza.uz website makes it look like today is telephone day in Uzbekistan."
“All of this comes at a time when Turkmen’s natural resource dependent economy is in crisis” Grajewski remarked. A report from the London-based Foreign Policy Centre published earlier this July claimed that the gas-rich country was “teetering on the edge of catastrophe."The latest controversy may be the least of Turkmenistan’s concerns at the moment if the President is indeed still alive. It remains to be seen how the Turkmen authorities will be able to clear up the rumors in the coming days however. That is, if they are indeed only rumors.
