Photograph of Niyazov, the former Turkmen dictator, in his "spiritual guidebook", the Ruhnama. Still from the documentary "Shadow of the Holy Book".

Editor’s note: What led top Western companies to finance translations of the Ruhnama, the former Turkmen dictator’s propagandist “spiritual guide”?  neweurasia’s Annasoltan explores in this new post series.  What she finds is a strange world of twisted ethical logic.  “When it comes to doing business with my nation,” she writes, “accountability sounds like a foreign word.”

Germany’s RWE, the sole Western company which was granted offshore gas exploration rights in Turkmenistan, has donated 3,500 German textbooks, compact discs, and equipment to the library of the Turkmen Foreign Ministry’s Institute for International Relations.

I’m critical of Western corporate relations with my nation, but not this time: given the shoddy shape of Turkmenistan’s education system — crumbling infrastructure and propaganda instead of information — RWE’s donation really helps.  Perhaps it can even be an example for other Western companies.

Back when Niyazov was still alive, some Western companies translated and printed several thousand copies of his magnum opus, the Ruhnama, in the hope of currying favor in the competition for Turkmenistan’s mineral resources.  Western corporate “generosity” resulted in the book getting translated into 40 languages.

Perhaps the most notorious Western corporation is Daimler-Chrysler.  In 2005, the car company made headlines when it decided to finance the German edition.  More recently, the United States Department of Justice has charged Daimler of committing large-scale kickbacks and bribes via back alley channels to Turkmen government officials, including a $300,000 armored S-class luxury Mercedes to a high-ranking Turkmen official as a birthday gift. The car company has agreed to pay fines in the amount of $185 million.

Daimler rationalized the bribes as “necessary expenses”, the price of doing business in a closed and authoritarian market like Turkmenistan.  And indeed, when it comes to doing business with my nation, accountability sounds like a foreign word.  The Finnish-American documentary, Shadow of the Holy Book, exposes several Western corporations with illicit and otherwise unethical dealings in Turkmenistan, including Nokia, Siemens, and John Deere.  All three corporations sponsored translations of the Ruhnama.  The film’s director, Arto Halonen, asks the audience,

“What leads international corporations like DaimlerChrysler, Bouygues, Siemens and Caterpillar to finance the propaganda of a dictator?”

Unfortunately, the answer isn’t hard to find.  The film quotes a CEO of a well-known Hungarian company:

“Business is business and human rights are human rights.”

It’s an incredible logical leap.  I don’t believe the two be separated, precisely because without human rights, the free market cannot survive, and without the free market, it’s only so long before even the most powerful of corporations succumbs to political control.  Trying to separate business from human rights is incredible short-sighted from a business point of view.

In my next post I will explore how the corporations’ logic is not only self-defeating, but may be poisoning Western-Turkmen relations in the long-term.