Columbia’s Role in Turkmenistan

It’s been an exciting year and a half for Turkmenistan. In late 2006, president-for-life Sapurmurat Niyazov—known to most of the world as Turkmanbashi, or “father of the Turkmen”—died of a heart attack, and the once-cloistered, resource-rich Central Asian state has been on a veritable charm offensive ever since. For the first time in the country’s history, European and American diplomatic delegations have been a frequent sight in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat. And in March, Turkmenistan’s education ministry will host a delegation of professors from the Harriman Institute, the School of International and Public Affairs’ venerable center for Eurasian studies.

Innocuous enough, except that Turkmenistan is one of most oppressive countries on earth.

Since winning independence from the Soviet Union in the early ’90s, Turkmenistan has been ruled by an isolationist and hyper-nationalist regime whose methods and sheer paranoia bring Joseph Stalin to mind. During his close to 20 years as Turkmenistan’s president, Niyazov passed several arbitrary restrictions on civil liberties—banning opera and ballet, for instance—cracked down on minority groups, and imprisoned hundreds of political opponents on trumped-up or altogether fabricated charges. While poverty and drug addiction racked a country sitting atop of one of the world’s largest deposits of natural gas, Niyazov spent lavishly on statues and monuments to himself, and made his book, the Rukhnama, a cornerstone of the country’s educational system.

His unexpected death saw an ex-dentist and party hack by the name of Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov quietly supplant the constitutionally-appointed acting president. Most of the world has been so overjoyed by the end of Niyazov’s cruel and isolationist regime that it’s happily oblivious to the fact that, in terms of political rights, the regime hasn’t really gone away. In an article I recently had published in the Columbia Current, SIPA professor Rafis Abazov said that the domestic political situation has not changed since Niyazov’s death, an assertion echoed by researchers for both Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Institute’s Turkmenistan Project.

Turkmenistan’s vaunted “openness” has done nothing for human rights, and in a way, it’s made the situation worse—increased contacts with the outside world give countries like the United States hope that the Turkmenistan is on a more or less liberalizing path. However, Turkmenistan is of such potential significance—it borders both Iran and Afghanistan—that the U.S. wouldn’t dare squander this short-term “openness” in the name of human rights.

Indeed, in the ten months after Niyazov’s death, the United States sent over a dozen diplomatic delegations to Turkmenistan in the hope that the country’s new leadership would enter into some kind of a strategic or economic dialogue. Berdimuhamedov’s mere interest in opening his country to the outside world has allowed him to pay lip service to the international community’s apparently minimal liberalizing expectations without having to relinquish his hold on power. It’s classic dictatorial misdirection, with the international community unwittingly serving as Berdimuhamedov’s enabler.

Columbia should not fall victim to this plight. In an interview, Human Rights Watch researcher Maria Lisitsyna supported the Harriman Institute’s trip in principle, but said that the Columbia delegation has to “take control” and “raise issues of human rights” before opting for closer ties to the Turkmen government. According to Barnard professor Alex Cooley, who will be in the Harriman delegation this March, the professors are going to tour Turkmen universities with the ministry of education, and give several academic lectures. While such a trip could expose Turkmen students to outside scholarship while expanding our faculty’s understanding of the country’s situation, it will undoubtedly mean closer institutional ties to a government that scored an abysmal 9.3 out of 10 for human rights in Foreign Policy’s annual Failed States Index.

The Harriman Institute is disturbingly enthusiastic about this—the official announcement on the Institute’s website says that the Education Ministry’s invitation sprang from “conversations with President Berdimuhamedov and Minister of Education Muhammetgeldi Annaamanov” and that the parties will be “exploring opportunities for future collaboration with Columbia University and the Harriman Institute.” When you’re talking about a government as oppressive as Turkmenistan’s, “collaboration” is a very unfortunate choice of words.

Professor Cooley made a strong case for the visit, and explained the past difficulty of even entering Turkmenistan. He compared the country’s new policy of international engagement with neighboring Uzbekistan’s increased seclusion, and also assured me that “no one is being compromised” by the visit.

I don’t think anyone is going to be compromised either, and it is no doubt significant that a country which once fined its citizens almost $50,000 for marrying people other than Turkmen nationals is making overtures to the outside world, and even more so that it is using Columbia University to do it. This trip signals a huge opportunity for the University, and an even bigger opportunity for a long-suppressed people starved for contact with the rest of the world—it’s exciting to think that Columbia could have a small but historic role to play in the possible liberalization of one of the post-Soviet sphere’s last single-party states.

What it should not signal is a cozy relationship with the Turkmen government, and nor should Columbia follow the world’s lead in excusing or ignoring Berdimuhamedov’s abhorrent human rights record. This trip could epitomize the academy’s ability to improve the world rather than passively study it—it should not represent its unforgivable moral deafness.

The author is a student in the School of General Studies. He is the editor of the Commentariat, the blog of the Opinion section.