The Year in Review
Politics and Society, Turkmenistan3 Comments
IRIN, which is a news agency that provides news and analysis for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, has published its annual report on Turkmenistan. Its opening line pretty much says it all:
There was precious little change in the one-party state of Turkmenistan in 2005
The full list of institutions queueing up to criticise almost every aspect of Turkmen government policy is staggering by any reckoning and includes the following:
Amnesty International
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
UN Commission on Human Rights
UN General Assembly
Forum 18
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition
United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
International League for Human Rights
Open Society Institute’s Turkmenistan Project
Reporters Without Borders
Radio Free Europe
The only faint glimmers on the horizon were provided by the United Nations Children’s Fund, who “welcomed a decision by the Turkmen parliament to pass legislation banning child labour and guaranteeing freedom from economic exploitation as a right of children.”
Also, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Turkmen government completed the first ever registration of all refugees in the country. The results of their findings were that there are 11,000 ethnic Turkmen from Tajikistan and over 500 ethnic Turkmen from Afghanistan. As UNHCR spokesperson Ron Redmond remarked at the time:
“The exercise will now lead to negotiations with the government of the Central Asian nation on finding a durable solution for the registered population. It is a major step toward the resolution of a refugee situation created by the conflicts in nearby Afghanistan and Tajikistan.”
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It’s all copying and pasting. Most “annual reports” of the institutions from this “staggering by any reckoning” and their opening lines are pathetic, just as the list itself. Any Russian student society would have done a better job.
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It’s not terribly clear who you are criticising here. The report on which the post itself is based was not one of the best, but it is a useful resource on the scope of material issued by the various NGOs over the past year. Admittedly, the opening line is not Thomas Hardy, but it does have the commendable merit of being accurate, if trite.
The thorny question remains, however, one of gaining and collating information about a country that is intensely secretive and hard to travel in and write about. That what is written is pathetic, or however else you wish to describe it, is merely a reflection of that, and the fact that most of the world is either uninterested or hasn’t even heard of Turkmenistan is of little help. As it happens, I don’t think that “any Russian student society would have done a better job,” whatever that means, because I don’t think it would even care in the first place. Meanwhile, we work with the little that we have.
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Calm down, will you?
1 - I did not not criticize but stated the facts, which are: (a) that the list is not staggering by any reckoning; (b) that most of the reports are copying and pasting.
2 - I will admit that in addition to stating facts, I have also expressed an opinion that the reports are pathetic - because of No.1b above and because of the little difference thet will ever make.
3 - I have laid out a hypothesis that any Russian student society will do a better job (in summarizing the year) than any of those “institutions”. That’s a hypothesis only, I’d leave it to anyone to agree or disagree.
For the sake of argument, I would end by remarking that your admitting that you don’t know “what that means” and in the same breath expressing an opinion about “what that could care of” sounds Kafkaesque.
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