The prelude to an international visit is always a busy moment for those involved. Turkmenistan's preparations for a visit by members of the European parliament who visited on 19-23 June 2006 were no different. The country's ruthless secret police had been working overtime compiling "evidence" against seven people they arrested on 16-18 June, the eve of the delegates' arrival.
The detainees are all connected some only by marriage or family with the Turkmenistan Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (THF), an organisation forced to work from a base in Bulgaria but which has also been able to defy the Ashgabat regime and expose local human-rights violations. It is thought they are being held at the capital's interior-ministry headquarters, and there is international concern that they are being tortured.
The lengths to which the authorities are prepared to go can be measured by the fact that one detainee, Annakurban Amanklychev, was found at the time of his arrest on 16 June to be in possession of explosives and guns. The source of these can be readily imagined by any observer with a minimum of knowledge about how the dictatorial regime of Saparmurat Niyazov (the all-seeing, all-powerful "Turkmenbashi") operates. Amanklychev, who had been under surveillance for a year, has since been accused of being a traitor in foreign pay and of working to foment civil unrest in the country.
Also on Turkmenistan in openDemocracy:
Sian Glaessner, "Turkmenistan's hidden travails" (9 May 2006)
Ogulsapar Muradova, a former member of the Helsinki group who now works as a journalist with Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, was detained at her flat on 18 June by two Ashgabat policemen. No warrant for her arrest was produced. Her family was told they were taking her "for a conversation". That night, after midnight, a secret-service officer ordered her daughters Sana and Maral to bring them their mother's computer and fax machine; they refused and were detained the following day, along with their brother Berdy. A colleague who was able to speak on the phone with Muradova reported that: "she seemed to have difficulty speaking. What she said was totally incoherent. We think they gave her psychotropic drugs."
No information has been revealed to the families about the condition of two more detainees arrested on the same day and without a warrant, Elena Ovezova and Sapardy Khadziev. Sapardurdy Khadzhiev, brother-in-law of Tadzhigul Begmedova (who founded the THF) was also arrested.
Europe's flag follows trade
As the European Union representatives prepared for takeoff, the thumbscrews were tightening in Ashgabat. By the time they had landed, Niyazov's torture machine had extracted a confession of "traitor" from one of the arrested.
A statement issued in Annakurban Amanklychev's name and reported by the Turkmen secret police admitted betrayal of the motherland and attested to the involvement of members of three foreign agencies in clandestine activity linked to espionage: a French diplomat (Henri Tomasini) in Ashgabat, two employees (Benjamin Moreau and Dieter Matthi) of the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and a journalist with the BBC.
The first two organisations issued statements rejecting the allegations; the BBC is the exception. Since the initial accusation, the explicit reference to the BBC has been elided in public statements, though the journalist's name (Lucy Ash) and the minimalist description of her as "a British citizen" remains.
International organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, issued immediate and urgent appeals regarding the fate and condition of the arrested. The Turkmen regime has not heeded these calls for information, and all that has emerged regarding those in prison has been a fuller version of Amanklychev's confession. It seems international influence, such as it is, has had little effect.
The European delegates left Ashgabat on Friday 23 June, and are preparing to make a public statement announcing their findings on Wednesday 28 June. In conversation, one was keen to emphasise that they had indeed raised their considerable human-rights concerns with their Turkmen counterparts, and that "real dialogue" had ensued. Whatever its content, the length of the dialogue was "real" enough: a meeting with the foreign minister scheduled to last sixty minutes stretched to six hours.
The European Union parliamentarians were there in the wake of the Turkmen regime's sudden announcement that it was prepared to cut off gas supply to the Russian energy giant Gazprom (on whom the EU is currently dependent for the gas it gets from Turkmenistan), and the negotiations included discussion of a possible direct gas supply to the EU from Turkmenistan, via Turkey.
The visit also follows the approval by the foreign-affairs committee and the trade committee of the European parliament of the interim trade agreement made between the European Union and Turkmenistan. The agreement has yet to be ratified by the parliament in full session, from where it would need approval by the EU's council of ministers.
The interim agreement builds on an extensive foundation of existing trade links. In 2005, the European Union was (after Ukraine and Iran) Turkmenistan's third largest trading partner (367 million), and the largest single source of Turkmenistan's imports (451 million).
So: gas talks tempered with a request for international observers to the local Turkmen elections due in July and December 2006, concerns raised over human rights and religious freedom. It all seems fairly transparent, and could even be presented as honourable. But in a country labelled by Transparency International as among the three most corrupt in the world, things are not so simple.
It is an intriguing fact that the EU-Turkmenistan trade deal has so quickly become an unloved child. Although it passed through the normally sclerotic EU bureaucracy at speed and almost unnoticed, now that it has earned some sceptical media and public attention, few will admit to supporting it.
It is nearly impossible, for example, to find a member of the European parliament keen to speak up for this controversial trade deal; even the special rapporteur responsible for pushing it through is notably reticent on the subject. It is impossible to get a straight answer as to who originated the idea of a deal the parliament points to the commission and vice versa.
It is not hard to see why. On paper the deal looks neither good nor rational. Turkmenistan is so unreliable as a partner that even the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank run minimal operations there. Moreover, Turkmenistan's human-rights record is so appalling that the human-rights clause incorporated into all EU agreements with third countries would require the deal to be suspended as soon as it were signed.
The EU has indeed suspended nearly all contractual relations with countries which have comparable records (North Korea, Zimbabwe and Burma among them). The deal would then be of little practical use to multinationals, which would gain no legal support from a suspended agreement; they may as well take their chances and forge direct links with the regime (as Bouygues indeed do, to their great profit).
Moreover, it is hard to argue a case for this agreement as a route to dialogue or engagement alone, as existing frameworks within the EU could facilitate this (for example, the EU-Turkmenistan joint committee meetings, or the regional dialogue with central Asian countries initiated by the European commission, in which Turkmenistan is free to participate).
Turkmenistan and the world
Thus, it is not the EU which has been isolating Turkmenistan; it is the Turkmen regime which has turned its back on the world, and decided that under the rhetoric of "sacred neutrality" its people should be deprived of all contact with the world beyond its borders. In 2000 the government banned all independent ISPs and as a result all electronic communication apart from satellite link is subject to official scrutiny. In this context, Ashgabat sees the proposed trade deal with the EU as a way of gaining international legitimacy even as it continues to perpetrate systematic domestic human-rights abuse.
Indeed, any deal could not help but be a direct endorsement of the "Turkmenbashi's" relentless internal repression. In Turkmenistan all political parties apart from the president's are banned; Niyazov has sole control over all three main branches of government and all state revenues; informants from the MNB (the KGB's successor organization) infiltrate all levels of society; and peaceful dissent is repressed through torture, arbitrary imprisonment, house arrest, surveillance, employment and travel blacklists, incarceration in psychiatric facilities and the punishment of detainees' relatives.
All this is part of normal life for people in Turkmenistan. The latest arrests indicate that brave Turkmen citizens are prepared to risk it. It is worth asking whether the European Union's conclusion of a trade deal with such a regime compounds the violations already being perpetrated against them.
On 28 June, even if the European parliamentarians' conclusion is that further dealings with Turkmenistan are impractical, investigation into where this initiative came from should continue. Moreover, pressure must continue to be put on the government in Ashgabat, to host not just European politicians, but also the International Committee for the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.
