Corruption in Post-Soviet Central Asia is something very familiar to people living in the region. Without bribing, one is destined to see their case be delayed for a long time, very often beyond time limits defined by laws.

Be it application for a new passport, or registration at a new place of living, or even finding a day care for your kid — bribing is the easiest way to get it all done faster and without a hassle.

Transparency International (TI) has released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index 2011 (CPI) that ranks countries/territories based on how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be. According to TI, it is a composite index, a combination of polls, drawing on corruption-related data collected by a variety of reputable institutions. The CPI reflects the views of observers from around the world, including experts living and working in the countries/territories evaluated.

This year Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have proved that they can also have stablility in something — if not positive and progressive, then at least something not really desirable by leaders of developed countries. That something is the abuse of public power. Read the full story »

Central Asia: Censorship and Control of the Internet and Other New Media briefing paper has been released by International Partnership for Human Rights, the Netherlands Helsinki Committee, Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights and the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders of Uzbekistan.

The document explores problems of censorship and control of the internet and other new media in Central Asia. It focuses on the situation in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, where the authorities closely monitor and restrict the use of the internet and other communications technologies, filter and block access to undesirable online content, and intimidate and put pressure on websites and internet users who publish or share information that is critical of official policies.

According to the research, the authorities of the three Central Asian countries have sought to justify their repressive approach to the internet and other new media with the fight against ”extremism”, ”destructive” forces and other vaguely defined threats to national “security” and ”stability”. However in reality this fight is used as a pretext for implementing measures to stifle free speech and help preserve the governments’ grip on power. Read the full story »

Sohbet Kasymow was the surprise winner of Turkmenistan's first-ever Eurasia Star contest. Photograph from the Turkmen government. Click on it to see more.

Editor’s note: The Eurasia Star contest has been envisioned by its organizers in Turkey as a Pan-Turkic pop culture spectacle, but it’s been turning out to be a flop in more ways than one. neweurasia’s Annasoltan reports on how in Turkmenistan in particular it’s become a missed opportunity for direct democracy.

Turkish state television station “TRT AVAZ” is running the first-ever “Eurasia Star” song contest that covers much of the Turkic world, including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, and the Turkish part of Cyprus. Each country must select a representative to compete at the big international round later. Several countries have already completed their selection rounds, and as of this past week, Turkmenistan has selected its vocal champion: Sohbet Kasymow.

Who? According to the official government website, Kasymow is a fifth-year student of the Department of Theater Art of the Institute of Culture of Turkmenistan. This came as a surprise to many in my country, as the selection process seemed, I suppose quite ironically, totally without accountability.

A missed opportunity for direct democracy…

On 19 November, the Turkmen people were expected to vote for their favorite contestants. There were three finalists: besides Kasymow, Atajan Berdyev and Nuryagdy Redjepov. However, I think it’s safe to say that the majority of Turkmen had hoped that one of the popular singers Bilbil Orazowa, Bega or Palwan Halmyradow would win. It should be mentioned that only people equipped with satellite antennas, and therefore who were able to receive Turkish television channels, were even directly informed about the competition (and even among these, few can actually access TRT AVAZ); the rest of the country had to hear about it by word of mouth, if they heard about it at all.

The jury was made up of our government’s favorite singer, Annush Myratduryyev, the head of the Turkmen musicians that participate in official musical festivities, Kerim Ylyasow, and Burak Kurt, a TRT art specialist from Turkey. The candidates had to perform in front of them without the aid of instrumental music. The jurists then voted in a rather blithe manner, by saying simply “yes” or “no” to the candidates (by way of comparison, the annual national music competition, “Yaňlan diýarym”, is decided by a jury of ten people who vote according to a score range of 1-10; the audience, by the way, is totally excluded). Consequently, the contestants had no idea how well they performed vis-à-vis each other.

The vote for the victor was open to the public and conducted via sms. TRT AVAZ did not provide very good instructions for how to do this. I contacted them directly, but their personnel were unable to tell me anything, not even when the voting was supposed to take place. Moreover, no one was able to send their vote directly to the channel; the sms votes were instead collected and counted by the state telecom, Altyn Asyr, and the results then passed onto TRT AVAZ (who, when announcing the victor, very briefly mentioned the final tally). Although just for pop music, this was a lost opportunity to experiment with electronic direct democracy. There wasn’t any transparency to this process, i.e., to confirm that our votes were really obeyed — something we’re used to in Turkmenistan (although, funnily enough, sms-voting is also quite obscure even in American Idol).

Nevertheless, the competition has provided a unique chance for the famous and not-so-famous talents throughout the region. For some of my aspiring countrymen, this has been one of the very few international competitions they’ve been permitted to join, giving them a tantalizing taste of how it would be if Turkmenistan ever ends up participating in the Eurovision contest. And, of course, for everyday people it presented a unique chance for public participation. Perhaps this was all proven illusory, but I nonetheless hope that it will work out better in the future.

…and for Pan-Turkism

Eurasia Star is being organized by Turkey’s largest media group, but undoubtedly it’s proving to be a disappointment as it hasn’t met its target of becoming the Turkic world’s big pop culture event. According to sources within TRT Avaz, it’s been riddled with logistical problems in the arena of information, communication, coordination, and cooperation, not just in Turkmenistan, although our nation’s isolation and official paranoia only complicated matters further.

Turkmenistan’s official news site has been enthusiastic about the competition, and yet, strangely, it’s said not one word about it being organized by TRT Avaz, instead preferring to describe it vaguely as an “international event”. Also odd is the fact that throughout this process so far, there hasn’t been a single joint Turkish-Turkmen television program devoted to the competition. Yet, clips of the candidates were shown on the “Turkmen Owazy” music channel and over the equivalent Turkmen radio channel, while TRT Avaz showed the jury in Turkmenistan selecting the candidates. My own guess is that this was simply bad coordination on both sides’ parts.

As for the rest of the region, TRT AVAZ has not come up with an effective strategy for reaching out to our neighbors, with the exception of Azerbaijan and Cyprus, wherein Turkish TV programs are a normal fixture of media consumption anyway. Although Turkey actually has a lot of experience organizing international competitions, the country’s skills in this arena were not at all evident. The whole thing has been a bungle.

Editor’s note: The Turkmenet may be very small and very young, but it’s certainly developing at a remarkable rate, and not always in ways that can be clearly said to be good or bad. neweurasia’s Annasoltan explores the rise of hacking in this new space and its particularly Turkmen flavor. [The images above are proxy instructions for a Symbian-enabled smartphone from a Turkmen social site. Sensitive information has been removed from them for security reasons.]

Despite the Internet having so little penetration in Turkmenistan – somewhere in the vicinity of 1.6% of the population or 80,400 users according to the World Bank and United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) – already it’s exhibiting many of the hallmarks of a much more mature cyberscape, right down to hackers.

The cyber-attack against the Chronicles of Turkmenistan this past summer, not to mention the related e-mail sent to neweurasia, was quite an eye-opener on the Turkmenet’s rapidly increasing capacities for digital misbehavior (although Schwartz suspects that the hacker from that incident, “0fx0”, was a hired gun). Since then, there have been cyber-attacks against the personal accounts of several prominent Turkmen journalists and human rights activists, including against a close friend of mine.

However, far less dramatic has been the emergence of more “mundane” — but no less dangerous — forms of hacking.

Read the full story »

Esquire-Russian analyzed UN’s World Population Prospects (2010 revision) and The Economist data and came up with a map that shows a forecast of the extinction of various nations based on the so-called net replacement rate – the average number of girls, delivered by an average woman in a lifetime in a particular country and survived until the end of the reproductive period at these levels.

According to the map, countries which has less than millennium to exist are marked in brown. “Light browned” nations will live in the 3000-3299 years period. “Milky” identifies those who live from 3300 to 3999 years more. “Orange” countries will exist from 4000 to 9999, and those countries colored in “gray” will live for 10,000 or more.

All green countries on the map are the luckiest — they will never disappear, the “immortals.” Read the full story »

Turkmen Journalist Dovletmyrat Yazkuliyev (Yazgulyev, Довлетмурад Язгулиев), 43, employed since 2007 with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)’s Turkmen language service Radio Azatlyk, has been sentenced to five years in prison by a court in Kahka (in the Turkmen province Akhal), after only a 2 day hearing.

The reason for his detention?

The journalist was detained on September 27th for supposedly influencing his relative to attempt to commit suicide. He went on trial on October 4th and was just charged with the maximum sentence, under article 106.2 of the criminal code. Family members were forced to sign statements about these false suicide accusations, and when they tried to revoke them in fear of the damage they would do to the detention and trial Dovletmyrat, they were unable to. However, relatives told RFE/RL “…they have “sufficient documents proving that his case is politically motivated.””

The real reason for his detention?

Yazkuliyev was one of the first journalists to cover the deadly explosion, in an Ashgabat suburb of Abadan this past summer on July 7th, against the will of Turkmen authorities.
Read the full story »

About two weeks ago neweurasia‘s Annasoltan wrote her first-ever post for our old friends and partners, Global Voices Online (GVO): “Turkmenistan: Global Village or Village Behind the Globe?” I’m writing about it now to make sure that it doesn’t just fade into the background.

Annasoltan has become well-known for using digital culture and digital tools to explore Turkmen (and to some extent Turkish) social, cultural and political issues. True to form, her GVO post was prompted by an interesting discussion on social forum Ertir.com about American travelers and Peace Corps volunteers in Turkmen villages. She offers up a bevy of translations, making this post a rich with primary sources on nothing less than the anthropology of nationalism in Turkmenistan.

In turn, Annasoltan’s post prompted a really interesting reflection by a US Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Azerbaijan: “Whispers of the Village: Who Are These Americans?” A lot of the meta-commentary therein really jives with my own experiences, for example:

That these people are expressing distrust and fear isn’t strange. The concept of joining an organization to go live in the largely-forgotten villages of developing countries is a difficult concept for a lot of Americans to understand; even more so for the people we are living with. On my first day here at AccessBank in Lənkəran, one of the loan officers asked if I was FBI or a spy (I informed him that the FBI is domestic). A strong legacy throughout Central Asia and the former Soviet states is an understanding that foreigners are likely spies. You can imagine how this might affect one’s Peace Corps service.

If I ever write a second edition of CyberChaikhana, you can rest assured that this cross-blog conversation shall be included.

While literature in Turkmenistan is being celebrated on one hand, on the other hand, it continues to be unsurprisingly suppressed – granted this is a regime wherein media is completely controlled by the state and where there is a severe lack of freedom of expression via books.

This month, Turkmenistan hosted their fifth annual book fair in Ashgabat, with the motto “The Book – The Way To Cooperation and Progress“, where thousands of titles on science fiction, economy, culture, history and others were said to be found on stand.

A total of 9 dozen organizations and companies from some 25 countries gathered in Turkmenistan for the event. Of the foreign representation at the International Book Forum, the Russian Federation held a leading role.
Read the full story »

Photograph of chalkboard by Flickr user emdot (CC-usage).

Editor’s note: This school year in Turkmenistan is a special occasion, coming as it does 20 years since independence. neweurasia’s Annasoltan talks with a professional teacher in Ashgabat about education’s challenges under the Berdimuhammedow regime, from shifting generational and cultural values to corruption in the schools.

This has been the first full week of the new school year, but this is no ordinary year. Besides the surprise gift of laptops to first-graders, this also happens to be the twentienth anniversary of our nation’s independence. I think few other countries have undergone the kind of education incredible ups and downs that mine has — from centuries of [eriphalization, to Tsarist and Soviet mass literacy and establishment of universities, to the twists and turns of indoctrination and impoverishment since independence.

Curious to hear an insider's track on the situation for education today, I got a hold of Geldimurat from Ashgabat, a professional teacher. We began our conversation about this troubling statistic: every year there are about 100,000 high school graduates, but of these only 4,500 (4.5%) get a change to step in to higher education. Geldimurat remarks,

"Some people may not agree with me. I hear some people saying, 'Somebody eager to learn will find a way to learn, anyway. It’s up to a person’s will.' Therefore, a lot of Turkmen youngsters are participating in educational competitions between schools in order to be recognized, since the brightest learners get a change of being accepted into the country’s four universities.

"True, there is now the opportunity to go abroad to study -- during the Soviet period, the way to Turkey and to the West was closed -- and the numbers [of students doing this] are increasing every year. However, this is only an option for the better-off, not for ordinary people.”

Read the full story »

Before, it was Kyrgyzstan, now it is Tajikistan:

Today I had a chat with a friend of mine and she informed me that the authorities had told her 22-year-old relative that he cannot continue his studies in Tajikistan, otherwise his diploma will not be acknowledged by the Turkmen authorities.

At first I was surprised — are our students banned from Tajikistan of all places?! So, I did some asking around and also checked RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service (their story in Turkmen here). Actually, the surprise didn’t go away, but it was joined by anger.

Read the full story »