Eccentricstan

Posted on 13. Mar, 2008 by Kerry Banks in Travel Blog

A few months ago, I interviewed two guys from Regina named Jason Minvielle and Mike Vaughan, who had just competed in the Mongol Rally, a 16,000-kilometre race for junker cars that starts in London, England and ends in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator. Gamely chugging along in their 1993 Geo Metro, the intrepid duo motored through such remote Asian outposts as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The last of these “Stans” was the definitely the weirdest. The former Soviet republic had been ruled for 21 years by a ruthless, egomaniacal tyrant named Saparmurat Niyazov, who had reshaped the country according to his eccentric whims.

To begin with, Niyazov took the name Turkmenbashi (“leader of all ethnic Turkmen”) and declared himself president for life. He then proceeded to name the country’s main airport, its largest port city and dozens of schools and streets after himself. The president also renamed the month of January after himself, and April after his mother. A planet in the Taurus constellation, a crater on the moon and a mountain peak were named after him. In 1998, when a 330-kilogram meteorite landed in Turkmenistan, scientists named it Turkmenbashi.

His influence permeated every sphere of Turkmen life. When he quit smoking after major heart surgery in 1997, he ordered all his government ministers to do the same and prohibited smoking in public places. He also banned gold tooth caps and gold teeth and suggested that tooth preservation could be more easily accomplished by chewing on bones. “I watched young dogs when I was young. They were given bones to gnaw. Those of you whose teeth have fallen out did not gnaw on bones. This is my advice.”

In 2004, he announced a crackdown on young men wearing beards and long hair, and decreed that newscasters could not wear makeup. Why? Because he said he couldn’t tell the male and female news readers apart and this made him uncomfortable. Opera and ballet were outlawed as “unnecessary.” So too was the Internet, video games, opposition political parties and pensions for the elderly and disabled. Listening to car radios and the playing of recorded music on television and at public events was forbidden. He even ordered a ban on lip-synching at all cultural events and even at private parties, citing “a negative effect on the development of singing and musical art.”

Not known for his modest tastes, Turkemenbashi had a French-designed, $100-million gold-domed palace built for himself in central Ashgabad. Outside the capital, 22 luxury hotels, which he commissioned, now sit empty on a road leading out of the city and bound for nowhere. He also ordered the construction of a palace made of ice to house a lavish skating rink in the Karakorum desert, where temperatures often reach 50 degrees Celsius.

He squandered millions of dollars erecting monuments to himself, including a gold-plated statue atop Ashgabad’s tallest building that rotates to face the sun at all times. His picture appears on the airplanes, on the money and on the national vodka. His image looms over workers in the field, over children in school and over drivers on the road. His face is also used as the logo of all three state-run TV stations, and is legally required to appear on every clock and watch face. When he dyed his hair black, he made it illegal to own watches that showed him with grey hair.

In 2001, Turkmenbashi wrote a 400-page book–a combination of poetry, revisionist history and moral guidelines–called Ruhnama (“Book of the Soul”). It was required to be prominently displayed in all bookstores and government offices, and to be placed next to the Koran in mosques. Memorization of the book is required to graduate from school and to get a state job or even a driver’s license. Schoolchildren must spend one entire day every week reading it. Since all Soviet-era books have been banned, most Turkmen libraries have only the Ruhnama and other books penned by Turkmenbashi. In 2006, he made reading of the Ruhnama a requirement for entry into heaven, which is not likely the place where Turkmenbashi now resides. Despite Turkmenistan’s vast income from natural gas exports, when the despot died in December 2006, he left behind an impoverished, famine-stricken nation of four million where 45 percent of the population lives on less than $2.00 per day and where an estimated 60 percent of the inhabitants are unemployed.

Turkmenbashi was replaced as president by his personal dentist, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, the former deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Several international news agencies have reported that Berdimuhammedov is actually Turkmenbashi’s illegitimate son, a perception bolstered by an uncanny physical resemblance between the two men. Interestingly, one of Berdimuhammedov first acts as president was to change the country’s constitution to prevent the political participation of Turkmenbashi’s legitimate son, Myrat. More murky intrigue is bound to follow.