International Women's Day is coming, and as is customary, Turkmenistan’s government will mark the occasion with cash handouts.
The real dollar value of the 60 manat to be given to women on March 8 depends on the exchange rate. According to the official rate, this translates to $17. Black marketeers would offer closer to $3. As Russian state news RIA-Novosti helpfully explains, 60 manat these days will buy a cake and some candy.
At the February 23 Cabinet meeting, President Serdar Berdymukhamedov explained that the gift, a tradition established in the early 2000s, was a just reward for hard-working women “making a worthy contribution to the prosperity of the Fatherland.”
But according to Amsterdam-based Turkmen.news, military personnel are receiving less kind treatment. The outlet reported in a February 25 article that Defense Minister Begench Gundogdyev has canceled a system under which military officers with 10 or more years in the service took ownership of the apartments in which they live.
From now onward, military personnel will be provided accommodation only while they are in the army. In the event of resignation, dismissal or death, the family will be turfed out, Turkmen.news stated, citing a law enforcement source.
This edict has reportedly triggered a flood of resignations.
Since there are few other jobs going around, discharged military personnel may look, like many fellow citizens, abroad for better prospects. As Turkmen.news reported last month, migration service officials have for years at this point been trying to slow this rush for the doors by dragging out the process of issuing passports.
Not that the authorities acknowledge that there is any exodus. Quite the opposite.
On February 22, the former president (and father of the incumbent) National Leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov — his bespoke made-up title essentially makes him a co-president —delivered the rosiest of verdicts on the regime’s policies to the presidium of the Halk Maslahaty, the upper house of parliament, of which he is chair. He reprised, inter alia, the claim that Turkmenistan’s population has grown by 2 million people since 2008 to reach 7 million today.
“Demographic growth was achieved through a significant improvement in the well-being and standard of living of our citizens,” the government website quoted him as conveying.
In spite of global headwinds, gross domestic product growth has averaged over 6 percent since 2009, Berdymukhamedov the elder said, reprising a boast that even the painfully circumspect number-crunchers at the International Monetary Fund have now publicly conceded is almost certainly a lie.
These fantasies are presumably meant to serve in part to whet the appetite of foreign investors — few of whom are prepared to brave the opaque and corrupt conditions of Turkmenistan. Even the Berdymukhamedovs accept the fact that they have failed — not that they would use that verb — to create an appealing proposition for outsiders with money.
Berdymukhamedov senior insisted to his Halk Maslahaty charges that it is a priority for the government to draw up a legislative framework that will “protect and support” investors, combat the laundering of ill-gotten gains, optimize tax collection processes, and provide more robust intellectual property protections. He did not, oddly enough, address why so little of this has been done over the almost two decades in which he and now his son have been running the country.
The only sector that really generates much interest, predictably enough, is energy.
To that point, Ashgabat-based conference organizer Turkmen Forum announced last week that an international forum on attracting investment into Turkmenistan’s energy sector will be held on April 24-25 in Paris. That these kinds of events need to be held in a neutral location like the French capital, because it is so bureaucratically complicated for foreigners to secure visas to get into Turkmenistan in a timely fashion, tells its own story.
In more immediate business-related action, Ashgabat will on March 3-5 host a trade fair of goods from Afghanistan. This event appears to have been one outcome of a February 26 visit to Turkmenistan by Amir Khan Muttaqi, the foreign minister of the Taliban-run government in Kabul. According to the Turkmen Foreign Ministry, Muttaqi’s delegation included representatives of the Afghan Mining and Petroleum Ministry, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat power company, and the Afghanistan Railway Authority, among others.
Conversations inevitably touched upon the trans-Afghan TAPI natural gas pipeline project, which Kabul is exceedingly impatient to get started with.
As India is the I in TAPI, the same topic naturally also came up on February 20, when President Berdymukhamedov accepted the credentials of Delhi’s newly appointed envoy to Ashgabat, Madhumita Hazarika Bhagat. A government website account of this exchange did not suggest anything useful was said, however.
Afghanistan is going to be around the top of Turkmenistan’s foreign policy agenda for some weeks to come in view of the planned fifth meeting of foreign ministers among the neighboring countries of Afghanistan. This format, which was created in the wake of the Taliban seizing power in Kabul, comprises seven countries: China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, all of which directly border Afghanistan, and, curiously enough, Russia, which does not. The last edition of this get-together was in April 2023 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
On February 23, deputy Turkmen Foreign Minister Akhmed Gurbanov met for talks in Ashgabat with China’s special envoy for Afghan affairs, Yue Xiaoyong, to coordinate in advance of the foreign minister confab.
It was stressed at the outset that it is perceived as imperative to maintain a line of dialogue with the Taliban regime in the interests of maintaining stability. This position is an implicit rebuke to the West, which has by and large publicly disdained talking to Kabul.
A further case that Turkmenistan is eager to advance in this multilateral format is that “the peace-building process in Afghanistan [must involve the] country in regional economic integration processes through the implementation of large infrastructure projects.”
In other words, if China is serious about Afghanistan’s future as a stable country, it is duty-bound to provide funding for, say, TAPI or the parallel TAP high-voltage power line project.
