As the Turkmenet slowly blossoms, is a new strategy in order?
Media and Internet, Turkmenistan4 Comments
Editor’s note: Recently, there’s been a blossoming of Turkmen social websites and Facebook groups, and the activity therein has been incredible. neweurasia’s Annasoltan thinks she sees the opportunity for a new strategy of engagement with the people of her isolated nation. “The way to engage the Turkmen people and to get them to think critically about their society may [now[ require talking with the population rather than at them," she writes.
The recent weeks have been full of reasons to celebrate, and I don’t mean for the wedding celebrations that are taking place this summer throughout Turkmenistan. There's been a small explosion of new Turkmen social websites and new Facebook groups. Here are some examples:
Turkmen Online (http://www.facebook.com/turkmenonline): A few months ago, three Turkmen students studying information technology in Turkey registered the domain name http://www.tmonline.com to fulfil an academic requirement. At the time, the site's administrator explained to me, rather optimistically, "I don’t see any other way for the Internet in Turkmenistan other than to develop. In six to seven years it will be in every home." Currently, the site is unavailable; the Facebook page is a temporary stand-in, and its co-founder is busy tweeting (@Azadik).
Turkmenkinofilm (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Turkmenkinofilm/184983968221106): This is the umbrella Facebook group for a small alliance of cinematic sites and organizations, apparently the successor(s) to the Soviet-era film studios. These include http://www.turkmenkino.com/ and http://tmfiles.ucoz.com/ where you can download audio and video clips of Turkmen language movies; http://turkmenfilm.com is as-yet unused.
Zehinli Turkmen Yashlary (http://zehinli.ucoz.com/): This is a social networking site. At the moment it's offering basic e-mail and forum services. Its Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/#!/home.php?sk=group_148007175267895) is very active.
Turkmen Dunya (http://www.turkmendunya.com): This site offers chats, events organization, group management and photo uploading. One of the founders declared on his personal site, http://www.sahipanet.com, "We hope that this site will contribute to the enrichment of the Turkmen Internet world." [Ed: As of 05.07.2011, both URLs were inaccessible and no logos were available.]
What is really important about these sites is that they are not blocked in Turkmenistan.* In fact, their accessibility reinforces the flow of Turkmenet users, who would otherwise be disinclined to use tools to bypass censors as IWPR reported back in April.
The Turkmenet is slowly but surely blossoming. For example, http://eyesinden.com, an established e-commerce site along the lines of bestbuy.com, has 50% of its visitors from within Turkmenistan, mainly Ashgabat, according to its administrator; likewise, the technology site http://tilsimat.net/ claims 20%. Meanwhile, http://www.ehabar.com/, an online news site created around two years ago by Turkmen students in Turkey, claims a weekly readership of 2100. The site actively translates from English and Turkish sources, and its Facebook profile (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001179303376) has over 2800 friends.
Some of the sites are quite amateurish, contain trivial content, or are being used just to spread the use of the Turkmen language and to make some money while doing so, yet they are all pulsing with life. My countrymen are cramming every space they can with their thoughts and feelings (and lots of flirting) regardless of what the specific site is actually about. There’s a profound craving for connection in my country.
This makes me think that a new opportunity for engaging my countrymen may be emerging, and with it, perhaps a new strategy needs to be developed. There are two things to think about: (a) Whether we like it or not, for many Turkmenet users, their friends’ opinions are more important than those of unknown journalists, who are often suspected of having “hidden agendas” anyway. (b) Meanwhile, the mere act of posting and responding to opinions is an incredibly empowering experience for the average Turkmen, especially the young and intrepid new generation (another example is the huge rate at which our nation’s Twitter users have also multiplied; a few months ago there were almost none of them).
The way to engage the Turkmen people and to get them to think critically about their society may therefore require talking with the population rather than at them. I don’t mean just getting them to post URLs from RFE/RL, EurasiaNet and neweurasia content, because they probably wouldn’t do that anyway. No, I mean finding ways of introducing new vocabulary and critical political and cultural concepts by way of Facebook status updates and 140-character tweets. We must enter into a conversation with Turkmenistan. If the outside world can get the Turkmenet to engage with ideas rather than just data — i.e., rather than just our data — I think the Turkmens will do a lot the necessary and hard work of debate and reform themselves.
It won’t be easy. The Internet’s suppression within Turkmenistan continues unabated and the government is investing in new filtering and blocking systems. Meanwhile, the cybernetically freest Turkmens remain those abroad, which makes them easily censored — not to mention targeted.
* Specifically, their main URLs are not blocked. Facebook, and with it, Facebook groups/pages/etc., is blocked; only its mobile version is accessible.
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Tuweleme. I wish Turkmenistan all the best.
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I hope all will go well with Turkmenistan.
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I’ve looked at some of these sites as well, and they are interesting as far as they go, but from what I’ve read in the chat, almost every time someone tries to stick their head up to say something, there’s another commenter who counters them — perhaps they already have something like the KGB sock puppets in Belarus or the 50 Cent Party in China — but it’s pretty managed and tame. It may also be the case that some of the Russian-language sites are more tolerated by the authorities on the theory that Turkmens may not use them as much, although it’s hard to tell.
No, a new strategy isn’t in order — you sound a bit like a perestroika liberal trying to make sure glasnost doesn’t get out of hand. And…what would that strategy involve, exactly, trying to shut up journalists who write critically or even caustically about Turkmenistan? Telling emigres their political articles are obsolete and they should talk about popular singers and Nyan cat memes?
As for “their friends’ opinions are more important than those of unknown journalists, who are often suspected of having “hidden agendas” anyway” — well, I don’t know which reporters you — or they — might be implying — but “having an agenda” of course can mean merely reporting on the country critically.
And as you might imagine, journalists look at the opinions of both official and unofficial Turkmens, and they differ, and they take that into account. Frankly, some Turkmens are all too eager to have their news and views get attention for those evil Western journalists, and are in tune with their “agenda” — reporting the real news. Ordinary people might care more about their Facebook friends’ thoughts than high politics, but all you have to do is look at Egypt or even Belarus to realize people can radicalize radically.
Furthermore, I don’t know who you imagine “talks at” the Turkmen people. It wouldn’t be Voice of America or Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, actually, as they don’t hector over the waves that I can see, but in fact report the news, based on the reports people *inside the country* are willing to make great risks to get out to them.
And it wouldn’t be the US Embassy, despite the prejudices one might have, they’ve actually have put an enormous amount of work, in fact, long before some of these local commercial sites were able, to reach out to people using social media tools. They have more than 5,000 “friends” on mail.ru for example
http://my.mail.ru/mail/usembassy-ashgabat/
That’s not to be uncritical of the role the US plays in Turkmenistan, boosting oil and gas companies and muting human rights concerns. But I think you’d actually be hard put to catch them “talking at” the Turkmen people — after all, the human rights issues they occasionally reference are real.
Of course, as I don’t read Turkmen but only Russian, I’ll be the first to say I may be missing something here. But I suspect what you’re trying to do is what some insiders in Central Asia over-protective of fledgling civil society often do — try to carve out an identity under oppressive situations by evoking the notion that both the Central Asian governments and the imperialist West and its craven commercial press are not to be trusted — in the belief this will be “safer” and “more successful”.
The problem with that paradigm is that Turkmens themselves don’t fit into this cautious category as we can see from chrono-tm.org which has numerous people writing in critical reports. And like all the countries of the post-Soviet space, there will be struggles between “the tops, who will not” and “the bottoms, who cannot” and the people in between who play a variety of roles from radical dissident to mildly critical establishment intelligentsia who still get advantages from the regime.
So ultimately, no, I don’t think you can script and impose strategies on people. Play perestroika with the cautious liberals and ordinary people just getting their feet wet on Facebook if you wish, but there are others inside and outside Turkmenistan way past that point, and there’s no need to step on them.
And proof of authenticity isn’t that they retweet EurasiaNet or Neweurasia.net but that they talk increasingly in more bold ways to each other, and you can see that on chrono-tm.org already — and the the fact that the regime blocks the site doesn’t make it irrelevant, as people circumvent the blocks and it finds a way.
As for this notion of yours, “If the outside world can get the Turkmens to engage with ideas rather than just data — i.e., rather than just our data — I think the Turkmens will do a lot the necessary and hard work of debate and reform themselves.”
I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t filter and groom what the Turkmen people will increasingly get from the Internet, and channel it into certain “managed democracy” streams. When people are hungry for news, they go anywhere. Look at sites like fergananews.com and uzmetronom.com with stories that have 8000 or 10000 hits sometimes and furious debates by people inside those countries on these sites banned by those countries. You cannot control this, and these people aren’t looking over their shoulders to see if “journalists with an agenda” are “exploiting” them.
I also don’t see that we have to tip-toe around people in emerging civil societies as if they are children, and I think it’s more than fine to debate them as rigorously as needed. People growing up in the post-Soviet space have a lot of myths, prejudices, propaganda, etc. as their basis for understanding the outside world, and it’s more than fine to challenge them.
Finally, Annasoltan, after all, what is “our data” mainly based on if not *data of people inside the country*? Yes, maybe they’re just not those careful perestroika types you’re boosting now. And of course, there is our own critical reading of the outrages and excesses of the regime. Are we not to squint an eye when a dove lands on Berdymukhamedov’s shoulder?
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