As you all know that studying abroad a lot of Turkmen citizens. We have compiled a list of the countries where young people learn Turkmen.

1. Ukraine

The main part of the Turkmens come to Ukraine to get a higher education. I do not know how it happened, but the city of Kharkov there names six provinces of Turkmenistan. Why? Because there are very many Turkmens and every year, each student brings along his family and close friends, so a rapid rate increased the number of training. With only one university can be found about 3,000 Turkmen citizens. Kharkiv probably the 1st place in the number of Turkmen students, but also in Kiev is also not enough people learn. Also in Lvov, Odessa, Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk yet. Well, as we know say that studying in Ukraine is easier than where be in another country.

There probably already Turkmens as the local population. In Kharkov already exists 3-4 Turkmen cafes, and that there student travel in cars, ie here is how it feels for his country.

2. Belarus

In Belarus, not too little, but they are mainly in the capital. That and some of the city which is next door. In contrast to Ukraine from there go out of their studies to learn that somewhere in the Ukraine or Russia.

But with the support of the state here quite a few students are sent. In Belarus there are also people who have cars and can even flat.

3. Russia

In Russia, too, is not to say that there is not enough, mainly studying in Moscow or St. Petersburg. But they say that because it is dangerous, afraid to go out and basically not walk the streets. In addition to Moscow and St. Petersburg are still studying in Tula, Astrakhan, Kazan, etc.

4. China

Recently started to go back in China. But now you know that a good relationship with China with the state.

These are the main countries where Turkmen citizens to obtain a higher education. Apart from these countries are still studying in Malaysia, Romania, Cyprus, England in America.

But the country squeezes his people when sending their studies abroad. When leaving nothing to say, but only when it suits come migration questioning, as if they were the perpetrators. This procedure is repeated every year in the summer when the students come to rest. I do not know whether it’s on the right, but perhaps it should be.

Last year in Kharkov killed one Turkman. This event shocked everyone some time. After that, people started to go to the embassy in Ukrainian cities.

In addition to questioning another and each year it is necessary to register themselves at the institute knowledge. And there is already possible to see how many Turkmens studying abroad.

The fact that the Turkmen youth studying abroad the country it has a good life, but every year there are new rumors that scare them, and they hate it. Each year, students who study abroad especially in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine is such information. For example: this year, came up with the problem of passports, ie the people who will be coming in this year, they need a new passport, and the passport is given to a male only instances of military ticket, but this topic is not long for the students in a different way could be heard, that as they thought so, as they will come and they will be picked up by the army, and do not care to study. But the same situation was.

A student who already has a bachelor’s degree and at the time he studied at the graduate school. The student comes to my house for a week for personal reasons, and taking him to the army. But the worst thing he had in a week protection degree. So this guy just lost two years of his life, and the money he spent in order to get education?

These things are even interested in the state, for whatever reason, he can do so that people would not come out abroad. God forbid if you get to the police, let’s say a student was doing nonsense in your area, then the first reason that it would frighten it is a threat that he will be released abroad that end to his studies. But why so scare people, why is it when you ask a question of state employee from them will never hear an answer, so this question remains unanswered.

After studying a diploma that would protect the country need to take exams at the Institute of knowledge. 1st examination in the specialty and who finished 2nd in the book Ruhnama.

NewEurasia received this communiqué, which makes us wonder how many people in Turkmenistan, who were members of other Soviet republics when the Union collapsed and got trapped inside the new Turkmen state, are officially registered with the government as “stateless”? (The photograph of the passport has been anonymized to protect the identity of its owner.)

I am so upset, actually angry. How much do you know about the temporary passports of Turkmenistan non-citizens?

A friend of mineis struggling to get out of country and she finally got a (useless) certificate, after so many years of writing to the President and waiting for a decision to get any sort of document that will allow her to go study abroad, and come back, since she also has her mother living in Turkmenistan.

My friend was not originally a Turkmenistani citizen. During Soviet times, they didn’t have to acquire any sort of special exit passport, just the standard Union common passport, and they were registered with a different SSR. But after independence, they had to give up their other citizenship and apply for the Turkmenistani passport — and they are still waiting for it.

In the meantime, they’ve received a temporary passport for non-citizens. And you know what’s written on it? “Stateless person certificate“.

Perhaps my last letter was too harsh. Turkmenistan does need your money; all of our sectors are so poor — natural gas, textile, fishing, agriculture, water. Still, I have one request when you come here to invest: hire local Turkmen talent, and I don’t just mean as grunts. Don’t import your people for the best jobs; use ours.

But maybe I ask for the impossible, not from you, but from us. A foreign employer means only one thing for many of us: not “money”, not “future”, not “adventure” or “opportunity”, but risk, and if there is one thing we have become averse to, it is risk. We even have an expression, puly ýassygyň astynda saklamak, “keeping the money under the pillow”: it means don’t invest, don’t trust institutions.

And with all the abuse and corruption by our country’s institutions, I suppose their distrust is understandable. That includes even our currency: whenever they are paid, many Turkmen immediately buy gold or diamonds, something you could trade in later.

Well, I’m talking about the smart ones; most of us just want luxury (especially the ladies!), unnecessary and ostentatious displays of wealth and status. It is self-defeating thinking, very in-the-moment, no future.

But then, our state ideology is tyrannized by the future — the official media, the statues, the presidential rhetoric, even our institutions, it’s all about our glittering emergence into the world and our glorious rise into tomorrow. Maybe our people are just exhausted by the future. Or maybe they are tired of the rapaciousness of that future, since “future” here really means: government, the official crooks.

Who knows, though? Maybe one day this terrible future shall be the past. And maybe the only way to get there is if you help us here, in the present, to overcome our isolation and fear and short-sightedness…

Sincerely,

A Turkmenistani

In some of my previous posts I have written about different aspects of contemporary national (and nationalistic) discourses and practices in Central Asia that can be easily traced in such things as architecture or food. Today I would like to recapitulate some of the important points from those discussions and to challenge the current mainstream perceptions of the origin, role and function of so-called ‘national values’ in the region.

To start with, I believe that there is no such thing as ‘national values’ for one simple reason that there are no specific human values that are shared exclusively by one nation, whatever it means. If we examine national stereotypes, ascribed to certain nations by the public opinion, e.g. punctual Germans, hospitable Uzbeks, understated English, hierarchical Japanese, polite Thai, practical Americans and boisterous Georgians, we could easily see plenty of opposite examples, e.g. relaxed Germans, unsocial Uzbeks, boastful English and so on. Well, I can hear some people saying, these are exceptions that merely prove the rule. Numerous works have been written to prove that statistically Scandinavians are not worse lovers than Italians and that Americans have a sense of humour, too (I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true nevertheless). The point is that these so-called national qualities and values have been in most cases determined not by the mysterious ‘national soul’ or ‘mentality’ but by a range of contexts, including geographical, historical, economical and other factors which are inherently changeable.

Looking at the history of Central Asian states, one can only wonder at the enthusiasm of their current leaders, firmly ingrained in large parts of their population, to pursue the old bandwagon of the national state while the rest of the world have by and large recognised the impeding collapse of this modern edifice. Without much ado I would like to assert that this nationalistic zeal is both counter-productive and based on false premises and that Central Asians would do much better if they stop worrying about ‘their’ past achievements and claimed identities and move on thinking about the present and the future in a different way.

First, the very concept of ‘nation’ which has been currently recognised in the region, has dual origins and both are alien to the peoples of the region. The first one, rooted in the European history, links the ethnic origin, the native language, the territory and the self-identification of a certain people – but this is also relatively new invention. True, unlike in the Middle East or Central Asia, some forms of national states have been forming in Europe for centuries, giving us such distinct national cultures and states as German, French, Italian, English, Spanish and so on. Yet one should remember that even Germany and Italy with all their rich culture came to existence only in the 19^th century. The delusion that ethnicity is strongly linked to language, popular at that time, has caused immense confusion between purely linguistic identities (e.g. Semitic, Turkic, Roman etc.) and corresponding ethnic types which recent genetic researches have proven to me more than mixed. However, this very concept served the basis of the Soviet nationality construction programme which envisaged the global Communist state emerging only from a conglomeration of fully-fledged national states. This very concept continues to feed the recent passion for a nationalistic reinvention of history spread across the region.

Uzbek poster propaganding the “friendship of nations”
Title: “Uzbekistan – our common home”

Interestingly, current Central Asian leaders have been also forced to adopt a more recent, one can say, ‘American’ definition of a nation as a group of peoples of different origin, religion and even language bound together only by their loyalty to the state. The cult of independence and of presidents, the anti-Soviet sentiment and the unfriendly and unhealthy political relations between different states of the region are symptoms of the strong desire shared by all the leaders of the states to develop in their citizens a strong feeling of affinity and allegiance to the national state and, particularly, to their top leaders.

The problem is that both concepts are fundamentally alien to the whole Muslim and to the Central Asian world in particular, and both are becoming obsolete not only because of the ‘threat’ of globalisation, but mostly under pressure from a more fragmented, fractured and complex world, which is being reorganised with the help of international travelling and the internet along very different and complex lines and borders.

There were no nations in Central Asia, nor were there any national states with their national languages and clear ethnic distinctions before the Russian imperial invasion and subsequent Soviet re-occupation and there was no need for any. People used to think of themselves and organise themselves in completely different ways. However, as (formerly?) in the Balkans, Rwanda and other areas, people grow increasingly aware of their supposedly common ethnic origin and increasingly hostile to those who subscribed to other, equally mythical, national identity. On the other hand, the concept of nation as a state is compromised first, by confusion with the previous definition and second, by extremely hollow and thin cultural identity offered as a replacement to the old ways. One can be forgiven for not being able to love a newly-formed Motherland which is younger than one’s children and which has only one tangible personification of this love – its president.

Yet, while the world is reinventing itself as a complex assembly of multiple, differently organised and overlapping communities, both the authorities and the people of Central Asia continue to get bogged in the business of ‘restoring’ national traditions desperately trying to merge the pre-national heritage with the modern (and already dated ) political realities. One can only hope that the next generation of local leaders will stop insisting that the mausoleum of Ismail Samani is an inseparable part of the Uzbek cultural heritage or that the Ahmad Hoja Yassavi architectural complex belongs to the Kazakh. And that is not because the former was arguably built by the proto-Tajiks and the latter – by the proto-Uzbeks, but because all these monuments belong to the cultures of the past, long gone and transformed into something quite different, which is very much in progress taking place right in front of our eyes. In other words, it’s high time for Central Asians to acknowledge their common cultural heritage and to move on, trying to forge common cultural links with the rest of the world, which at the moment is slowly disappearing over the horizon into the future which we may never see.

Marriage is an industry in our country: wedding facilities to conduct wedding ceremonies and wedding saloons for wedding parties with wedding singers, and even wedding palaces that have all of these functions under one roof. Weddings can also take place in and around cars (quite popular in Turkmenistan and Iran’s Turkmen Sahra) or in schools.

The wedding process goes like this: (1) the owner of the house or the head of the household calls together all of the aksakals, a gathering called “ýaşuly”. Then (2) they all pray to Allah, supplicating for blessings. Next (3) everyone shifts to a feast in front of the house, or to a restaurant. This latter part is really more intended for the young Turkmen, because the aksakals have spent the daylit hours praying and then go home to rest. Needless to say, stage three is when the fun begins — and make no mistake, Turkmen wedding parties are fun.

Although we’re a Muslim country, don’t be surprised to see copious amounts of alcohol at the party. The irony in this is that weddings are supposed to be about bringing people together in the context of a genuine emotional encounter. All that alcohol complicates things, gives a kind of an illusory perception of each other. For this and other reasons, people are becoming more conscientious about serving alcohol, or even having any at all, at their wedding parties.

Actually, in a way, weddings could be kind of like our post-Marxist opiate of the masses, because who doesn’t love to have fun? Certainly not the Turkmen. And as soon as there’s any kind of social hiccup, well, announce a gala wedding, with singers and all! Perhaps that’s why we have been rated one of the world’s happiest countries? But then, when the party’s over and reality sets back in, we quickly slip into our other status as also one of the world’s most miserable countries.

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You might have a Turkish colleague who is trying to convince you to invest in Turkmenistan, but should you believe him?

The picture looks nice. Turkish firms ran 63 projects in 2011 worth ~3.27 billion USD, and in 2010, ~4.5 billion USD. Such numbers at the height of the Great Recession are really amazing. And your Turkish colleague is probably hungry for more: the total business volume of Turkish construction firms in Turkmenistan is over 30 billion USD since 1991, and there are, right now, 1,500 Turkish-run construction projects in Turkmenistan worth 32 billion USD.

But look closer.

Earlier this year, Turkish company Polimeks apparently received a 2.5 billion USD tender for to build a new international airport in Turkmenistan by 2016. This company is also building second phase of an “Olympic village” — without any Olympics. And this same company has been accused in Turkish media of trying to smuggle gold into Turkmenistan!

A much more respectable Turkish omnicorp, the Çalık Group, has also had strange relations with Turkmenistan. According to a leaked United States diplomatic cable, the Group suspects that Turkmenistan is actually under the control of Russia (still, they haven’t let this stop them from signing a contract to modernize Turkmenistan’s Soviet-era electrical system). Speaking of the Russians, their telecom MTS has had an epic relationship, getting kicked out for two years for no reason, then allowed to return last year only on the condition that they share 30% of their profits with the Turkmen state. In 2011, MTS even warned international investors that Turkmenistan is a risk to all of you.

Yes, Turkmenistan has a lot of growth potential, but no one really understands the inner workings of its government. In its 2012 Corruption Perception Index, Transparency International ranked Turkmenistan 170 out of 174 while the 2012 Heritage Economic Freedom Index ranked Turkmenistan 168 out of 179. The country’s key economies are state owned.

Also, from cultural perspective, it is an investment virgin; it has real lack of familiarity with international business norms. This especially making Western companies feaful to invest and so their major interest remains in the promising oil and gas fields.

So, believe me, resist the temptation to invest here!

Sincerely,

A Turkmenistani

{Photograph by Twitter user Myrat10 (CC-usage).}

These days, state television in Turkmenistan is ablaze with talk of the president’s economic and cultural “commandment” to his country to develop and promote national tourism. The government has recently drawn up new tourist maps of the country (click photograph above).

The center of the buzz, of course, is Avaza, a tourist zone on the Caspian Sea (about which I’ve written here. In the hope of developing a vibrant hotspot of tourism, all manner of plans for new hotels and facilities (such as a water amusement park and a convention center) in the resort area are now hurriedly underway.

Allow the facepalming to begin. EurasiaNet.org’s David Trilling
visited Avaza in 2010. In the port town of nearby Turkmenbashi, he found only intense poverty, and ENVSEC released a map in 2011 showing all of the pollution just south of the Avaza tourist zone in the period 2006-2008, including radioactive waste and abandoned and flooded oil wells. Sounds like a good time on the beach to me.

And don’t get me started about our terrible and embarassing visa regime for foreigners. Lonely Planet calls tourist visas in Turkmenistan “a mixed blessing” in terms of bureaucracy and the difference between what you think you’ll pay at the beginning and what you’ll end up paying at the end, not to mention all the potential restrictions to your movement (depending on who’s acting as your mandatory guide). Besides, after all this, Trilling reports that if you’re lucky enough to eventually get to Avaza, don’t be surprised if your reservation is canceled by ambushing government officials coming out for an impromptu meeting or furlough.

Why should a foreigner go to all the trouble to come here? We may have a rich and vibrant history, delicious traditional food, beautiful natural sites, and several landmarks along the Silk Road, but these and other attractions will be forever ignored by travelers unless the bureaucracy enshrouding tourism in Turkmenistan are first cleared away.

Still, where Avaza does seem to be making some inroads is in the convention industry. In the past two years, Turkmenistan has hosted a series of international conferences and special events. As it is already equipped (however feebly) to accommodate travelers, Avaza might better serve as a convention hub of sorts. If our government isn’t willing to bend on regular tourists, perhaps it can engineer a special, rapid-action visa process for conferences and events?

NewEurasia’s Annasoltan has become somewhat well-known in media studies because of her work on Turkmenistan’s mediascape. I’ve been reading some of the things she’s written, like “State of Ambivalence: Turkmenistan in the Digital Age” (which I think ended up being cited by Freedom House) and her really cyberutopian (but very inspiring) post “OtherTube, PseudoBook, and the fate of the world in Turkmenistan”. The Americans always say they want to add their “two cents” to an issue; I want to add my two teňňesi.

It is my belief that, of all the factors which contribute to the development of a country, media is the most important because of its far-reaching impact on society. Specifically, development is aided by a media which is committed to the truth, honest about its subjectivity, advocates on behalf of the public, and supports society’s cultural and scientific advancement. Any media which makes government approval its priority or is closed to the public fails to satisfy these needs. That is because independent, private media and democracy move along parallel tracks.

There’s a German philosopher named Jürgen Habermas who has written about the emergence of the public sphere in the West, which became the basis for democracy and which was fostered by media. In brief, history seems to suggest that countries with developed private media outlets tend to be more democratic than countries without sufficient private media. Public government-owned media, on the other hand, typically shrouds its message in an unfair bias for government agendas. As one reviewer puts it,

“[Cf.] Habermas’s 1963 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, [in which he] examined the rise of public opinion and print culture in the eighteenth century. Habermas recognized that the explosion of the print industry—newspapers, pamphlets, and books—began to exert a powerful influence on political life separate from the traditional ruling agency exerted by the king, the aristocracy, and the parliament. For Habermas, it was not simply the growth of publishing that created the public sphere—it was the simultaneous dawn of a kind of consciousness that the public could be systematically addressed through a pamphlet as if a group of strangers were gathered together in a giant auditorium. Habermas saw this imaginary ‘public sphere’ as a potential democratic utopia where individuals could discuss national issues and come to common consent in public.”

When Turkmenistan became independent, we had only three television channels, all of which were publicly owned by the government. Today, Turkmenistan has a whopping total of seven channels, all of which, again, are owned by the government (*uncomfortable cough). Three broadcast the news; one broadcats reports in seven languages (okay, that’s kind of impressive); one focuses on sports; and one plays music.

Back in 1992, also had, very very briefly, two privately owned news publications, jpegs of which Annasoltan has published here and here. Today, none. The majority of Turkmenistanis have no interest in Turkmen newspapers, which are only read (by force) in classrooms by teachers (especially Mugallym and Nesil) [Ed.: Turkmenistani newspapers also tend to run the same content verbatim]; instead, they turn to Zaman, a Turkish newspaper with branches in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and our country.

Well, officially there is Rysgal, the weekly newspaper of the Turkmenistan Association of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (which, as watchers of our country know, served as the institutional bedrock for our official “second” political party, [Ed.: and which has a creepy resemblance to how Atatürk tried to do the same thing during the Great Depression]). It started coming out in mid September 2010.

The big announcement was what prompted Annasoltan’s posts. That’s because, in the words of the Chronicles of Turkmenistan, “[...] Rysgal cannot be referred to as an independent publication [because] it is a semi-official newspaper and entrepreneurs are not authorized to publish their materials (it says that the editorial board does not respond to and review letters)”. It’s more fake pluralism, fake liberalism, what Annasoltan has called the theatrics of freedom.

Nevertheless, as of 2011 (the last time anyone was paying attention) Rysgal‘s circulation was 5100 copies, and it sold for 1 manat — and, truth be told, it sold well. By the end of 2010, over had been published. But at that moment, the editor-in-chief was replaced by a non-journalist who had worked in the Association in charge of organizing exhibitions, then later doing human resources for them. The Chronicles remarks,

“It does not really matter what the reason was behind the personnel reshuffle:the fact that Rysgal established itself as an acknowledged print media outlet and started generating revenue which sparked the interest of some influential individuals or that the mass media should be controlled by trustworthy, as viewed by the authorities, individuals. The main conclusion is that under the present-day conditions the private newspaper failed to become independent and moreover, was prevented from doing so.”

Private ownership is absolutely crucial to good, healthy media. Again, Habermas (via the book reviewer quoted above):

“[Habermas'] book tells a sad story, however, because it also chronicles the loss of that utopian potential during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when publishing media became consolidated in the hands of a few. Less and less the voice of a democratic public (if it ever was one), press media became largely the instrument of industrial magnates and the ruling class. In the United States, individuals like Randolph Hearst bought up newspapers and controlled public opinion. Presently, when Tom Brokaw addresses the U.S. ‘public’ on the evening news, that news is filtered and arranged by the megacorporations that own the television stations that bang the drum for war on Iraq’s oil. For Habermas, the challenge of the twentieth century is to reclaim the promise of the public sphere for genuine democratic debate.”

It’s now the challenge of the twenty-first century, especially in my nation. Our situation is no different, actually worse. Private ownership of television channels is strictly forbidden by authorities — a clear reluctance of the government to provide its citizenswith truthful, unbiased news regarding the state of the nation. The government knows that a private channel would alert the public to the mistakes and corruptions of the authorities.

In the present situation, the government has absolutely no difficulty keeping the population ignorant with regards to its malpractice and corruption when it owns all of the nation’s media outlets. Moreover, the government criminalizes private media, so that anyone who attempts to spread legitimate information for the benefit of society, if caught, is severely penalized. All information that is allowed is “feel-good” news: of festivals, weddings, social and political improvements — basically, anything that will present the political situation in a favorable light, or at least distract from it. To paraphrase the old Roman expression, it’s nothing but çörek and festivals…

With this cultural virus we are clearly see that if people want to have fun, nothing will stop them. Fighting with Western influence or restrictions on Youtube will not  help the authorities.

Watch out! Central Asia is dancing!
Take a look at our special compilation with best Harlem Shakes from Kazkahstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistam, Turkmenistam and Uzbekistan!