On 29 February, News Central Asia website edited by the Pakistanis, published Tariq Saeedi’s piece wherein he harshly criticized Internet sites for reprinting the news announced by the Turkmenistan Chronicles. The news concerned alleged mass dismissals from the Turkmen TV, caused by a cockroach that supposedly crawled across the table during the news transmission. Among other things Saeedi writes:

An imaginary cockroach crawled across some unshielded brains recently, killing the cells that perform coherent, clear thinking. The cyber crawl of the cockroach, which was as real as the flying pig, started when a website that liberally mixes fact and fiction reported that 30 TV journalists and other staff had been sacked in Turkmenistan because a cockroach had made his unscheduled appearance at the nine o’clock news show. The story was probably meant to be a masterpiece of the authors’ imagination but it ended up resembling the reeking accident of their dysenteric mental bowels.
[…]
After killing the vital brain cells of all those who swallowed the story hook, line and sinker, the fantasy cockroach became rather ambitious. Instead of killing one brain sector at a time, it went for en masse killing of reputations of all those websites that were sufficiently naïve to recycle the story. Ignorance is no defence in law, and stupidity is no excuse in news business. It takes years to build a reputation in the news business and all it takes to smash this fragile treasure is one invented cockroach; a cockroach that you borrowed mindlessly from some dubious website.
[…]

All those cockroach-loving websites have lost their reputation in a single click and hardly anyone feels sorry for them.

Perhaps the author is right and the cockroach incident never happened. Indeed, it is quite annoying that Turkmenistan’s main claims to fame are funny or preposterous events that the world media pick up gladly (CXW has already brought up this issue on our blog).

Nonetheless, I am going to stand up for the websites criticized by Saeedi. Should this information come from the country other than Turkmenistan, it would in fact be advisable to think twice before publishing it. However, here we go with a state whose president:

- orders to plant trees in the desert;
- decides to hand each woman a US$ 10 note on the occasion of the International Women’s Day;
- humiliates ministers who smoke and punishes them by depriving them of their salaries;
- drives out the ministers to clean the streets or makes them run along a fitness trail outside Ashgabat;
- forbids people to insert dentures with golden teeth or to take DVD films outside the country…

And besides:

- the voter turnout in the elections always equals 99%;
- the education system is based on a book written by a madman, who completely disregards commonsense, his own nation and its history;
- marble and gold palaces worth billions are being built while ordinary people hardly make ends meet;
- lifting the ban on travels across the country and revival of the opera and circus are considered the signs of liberalization;
- not a single independent newspaper, radio or TV station exists, while the news circulating around are based on hearsay and conjecture…

… having said that, people’s dismissals from TV because of a cockroach crawling across the table, do not seem that improbable and unreal.

The Western mainstream media are not exactly known for their comprehensive, well-informed and balanced reporting of events in many parts of the world, and, unsurprisingly, stories from Turkmenistan are no exception; there’s got to be something a little exotic, dare I say even bizarre, for a story to warrant interest (supplying humanitarian aid is just so, well, boring).

In this case, British broadsheet [i.e. "quality"] newspaper the Guardian has turned its attention to events on Turkmen television with an article entitled “And finally… how the march of a lone cockcroach put 30 people out of work”.

It has to be said that readers would be forgiven for thinking that April Fool’s Day has come early:

For the viewers of Turkmenistan’s popular nightly news programme, Vatan, it was another routine bulletin. But as the newsreader began the 9pm broadcast, viewers across the central Asian country spotted something unusual crawling across the studio table: a large brown cockroach.

The cockroach managed to complete a whole lap of the desk, apparently undetected, before disappearing. The programme, complete with cockroach, was repeated at 11pm that night.

It was only at 9am the following day that horrified officials from Turkmenistan’s ministry of culture discovered the cockroach’s guest appearance.

As the author goes on to note, ideally this would have been the end of the matter, with the footage added to a blooper archive to be ferreted out in future years for general amusement over what sometimes goes wrong (probably in the “never work with animals” section of the show).

Not in Turkmenistan though: Read the full story »