Turkmenbashi Dies: Central Asia on the Brink

The Central Asia-based conflagration that I predict in SILK ROAD TO RUIN began today with the death of the 66-year-old absolute dictator of Turkmenistan, Sapamurat “Turkmenbashi” Niyazov. Niyazov is the first of the generation of Soviet-era Communist Party bosses who ran all of the southern “Stan” republics of Central Asia to die in office since independence in 1991.

Unlike Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, no successor was ever designated and a ferocious power struggle has broken out in Ashkhabat, the Turkmen capital, where the constitutional heir has been arrested by a heretofore unknown deputy prime minister who has seized power as acting president.

Turkmenistan, which borders Iran and Afghanistan and controls the world’s largest reserves of natural gas on earth–as well as key refineries and pipelines that process and carry Kazakh crude oil–is entering a dangerous period of political instability. Long-suppressed tribal rivalries and religious schisms will rise to the fore. Though hardly inevitable, a steady decline and eventual civil war are possible and indeed probable.

Energy futures traders are stunned by the news, and higher energy prices will almost certainly result.

Look for Russia and the United States to vie for control of post-Niyazov Turkmenistan through proxies within and outside of the country, and for possible military in intervention by one, or possibly both nations, during 2007.

Niyazov’s death marks the beginning of the end of the fragile post-Soviet order in
Central Asia, which has been held together by despotism. The future can only go in one of three directions now: Western military occupation, failed statehood, or–least likely–radical Islamism. The War on Terror is over. The New Great Game is afoot.

The most comprehensive essay ever written about Niyazov is a chapter titled “The Glory That Is Turkmenbashi” in my recent book SILK ROAD TO RUIN: IS CENTRAL ASIA THE NEW MIDDLE EAST?. The book also contains a detailed overview of Turkmenistan and its role vis-à-vis American foreign policy.

Here’s a sneak peak at “The Glory That Is Turkmenbashi”:

In a region where no one can imagine a president who isn’t an egotistical tyrant, posters of each country’s beloved benevolent despot festoon every police checkpoint and corruption is merely an economical word to describe business as usual, saying that Turkmenbashi’s Turkmenistan sets the standard for autocracy is selling him short. Not only has the Central Asian dictator created the most elaborate and grotesquely comical personality cult since Ptolemy put the pharaohs out of business two thousand years ago, his unique blending of naked greed and breathtakingly obvious stupidity has elevated autocracy to an art form. He has also reduced one of the world’s intrinsically wealthiest nations into a paragon of despair and near universal poverty.

Wherever you travel in this desolate desert nation nestled between southwest Russia and Iran, Turkmenbashi is there. Giant posters bearing his face and his ubiquitous Nazi-inspired motto “Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi!” (“One Nation, One People, One Leader”) adorn every building, public and private in a country that would otherwise most notable for its meteorological inhospitability to the five million people doomed to have been born there. Signs bearing his quotes and images of the not-so-great dictator’s face are everywhere you turn. Turkmenbashi is on a painting behind the hotel receptionist. He’s on the businessman’s lapel pin, hanging from the taxi driver’s rearview mirror, even on a pendant hanging around the casino prostitute’s neck. He’s on T-shirts, CDs, DVDs, groceries, mosques, his own line of cologne. No one can get away from Turkmenbashi—not even in the desert.

Turkmenistan one of the few countries on earth to not have a river run through it. Its vast Karakum desert is home to animals—cobras, scorpions, giant monitor lizards and zemzen (“land crocodiles”)—that bite and sting and claw with alarming ferocity and regularity. Temperature readings of more than one hundred fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit in the shade are not uncommon; heat exceeding one hundred is standard. There is, however, no shade in this, the westernmost nation of Central Asia. Water is processed and piped in from the oil-fouled Caspian Sea and the Amu Darya river (Alexander the Great called it the Oxus) running along the eastern border with Uzbekistan. Most Turkmen are nomads similar in culture and tradition to the Bedouin. Outside the capital Ashkhabat and a few outlying provincial capitals, Turkmen set up their yurts wherever a few blades of grass poke out of the sand to feed their camels. City life, secularized by seven decades of Soviet rule, features grim mafia-run discos and thinly-patronized English-style pubs with CNN piped in on a time delay so that news about Turkmenistan and its Central Asian neighbors can be intercepted and blacked out. Even the U.S. embassy is isolated; Turkmenbashi cuts off international telephone and Internet service for weeks at a time. Out in the desert, old traditions live on. Women carry their clan’s savings in clunky silver jewelry hollowed out to hold bank notes; touching, much less robbing, a woman, is just cause for murder. Nomadic hospitality, on the other hand, occasionally prompts men to loan their wives to sate the desires of passing travelers. They would, after all, do the same for them. Sometimes they sell them; the going rate for a tribal wife is two to five thousand dollars depending on age, appearance and personality.
It feels like the end of the world. But in the windblown desert, along remote stretches of road that see less than one vehicle daily, immense billboards have been erected to proclaim the glory that is Turkmenbashi. Halk! Watan! Turkmenbashi!