In Turkmenistan, children now memorize poetry written by President Saparmyrat Niyazov and his deputies kiss his hand when they greet him, experts told a gathering in New York on October 21. Though Niyazov’s cult of personality defines Turkmenistan today, one of the experts at the conference, human rights activist Vitaly Ponomaryov, portrayed the regime as doomed.

"The regime is brittle, it’s not stable," Ponomaryov told the audience at the Open Forum sponsored by the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute, "and it’s quite likely that radical change will take place within a year or a few years."

In addition to Ponomaryov, director of the Central Asian Program at the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, Russian journalist Arkdady Dubnov, former Turkmen Foreign Minister Avdy Kuliev, and a dissident living in Turkmenistan who asked for anonymity spoke on Turkmen domestic political developments. All agreed with Ponomaryov that "radical change" will come to Turkmenistan in the next few years. They discussed how Niyazov had ordered the eviction and demolished the homes of people related to dissidents, and told listeners how Niyazov had demanded cash bribes from multinational oil companies. In addition, Niyazov’s crackdown on free speech, free religion, foreign press and travel made Turkmenistan, in Kuliev’s words, "a sort of enterprise rather than a state." Opinions differed, however, on how – or how peacefully – change would arise.

Ponomaryov noted that Kuliev, a former Foreign Minister living in exile in Moscow, had been more vocal in his opposition during the past twelve months. So has Boris Shikhmuradov, another former Foreign Minister who broke with the mercurial Niyazov in late 2001. This more strident opposition, combined with Turkmenistan’s neutrality toward the antiterrorist coalition against the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, has made more people aware of Niyazov’s record. But Ponomaryov told the group that it was the president’s decision to imprison former leaders of the KNB, the state spy agency, that had "undermined his popularity" and made it possible for international players and domestic dissidents to forge some effort to unseat him. The logic of that effort, though, remains unclear.

Kuliev, while insisting that Turkmenistan could never reform unless Niyazov loses power, stressed the importance of coordinating opposition efforts with the United States. He put hope in House Congressional Resolution 397, a nonbinding statement from the US Congress in 2000 that urged Central Asian presidents to engage in "roundtable" discussions with opposition movements. While Kuliev said he spoke for 4,000 dissidents inside Turkmenistan, Dubnov dismissed the idea of trying to persuade Niyazov to accept any pretext for his ouster. And Ponomaryov, noting that Shikhmuradov has called for Niyazov to step aside without talks, wondered how any orderly succession could take place. "The regime is so brittle that whenever [Niyazov] goes, nobody will be able to assume power the way that he has, and the system would collapse."

In that context, dissidents working within Turkmenistan are trying to draw the world’s attention. The dissident told the audience that several unofficial civil-society groups are trying to create Turkmenistan’s first Helsinki Committee, an organization that would record and protest Niyazov’s failure to abide by an international human rights compact called the United States Helsinki Commission. "We see two main tasks," said the anonymous activist, "which involve monitoring these human rights violations and categorizing them, and providing assistance and advice to others as far as their rights. The people doing this are [incurring] great personal risks, which indicates how much they love their country."

http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/recaps/articles/eav102102.shtml