April 15, 2006
ONE WONDERS what the Chinese leadership thought of Sapurmat Niyazov, the President and self-styled Great Leader of the Turkmens (Turkmenbashi), who made an official visit to Beijing last week.
Of course, China purports not to be interested in the way another country governs itself, and may not be especially concerned by the fact that Niyazov has transformed his country into a vast, kitsch-laden theme park dedicated to himself, or that he has been described as a sort of Central Asian Kim Il-Sung only "a lot weirder".
Turkmenistan, of course, has a lot of natural gas, and its leader, deeply suspicious of the United States, the United Nations and particularly, its neighbour, Russia, has just signed a huge deal to ship the gas to China via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
Niyazov was born in 1940 and had a troubled upbringing. His father died fighting the Nazis, and the rest of his family perished in a devastating earthquake that struck the capital, Ashkhabad, in 1948, leaving him in a state orphanage.
After working his way up the ranks of the local Communist Party, he was appointed leader of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic in 1985 and has been in charge ever since, surviving the small matter of Soviet collapse and making the switch from dedicated apparatchik to nationalist saviour with hardly a misstep.
He has since sought to remove all Russian influences from the country's school system, and has changed the Cyrillic alphabet to a Latin-based script. He has also sought to replace the Bible and the Quran with his own book of teachings, known as the Ruhnama, or "the answer to all your questions", and broadcast on state TV every day.
He subsequently ordered the use of his own title, Turkmenbashi, as the new name for the capital's football stadium, for Turkmenistan's major port, and, bizarrely, for January and Monday. Other months and days have been named, variously, after his mother and after the teachings of Ruhnama.
He has force-fed his own lachrymose sentimentality to the entire population, building massive shrines to himself and his late mother throughout the country. The Triumph Arch in the central square of Ashkhabad features a 220-foot column that supports a solid-gold statue of Niyazov, which rotates once every twenty-four hours so that it constantly faces the sun.
Next to it is a monument to the 1948 earthquake, and the gilded figure of his mother falling into an abyss and holding the golden baby Niyazov aloft. A statue of his mother also holds the scales of justice outside the city's central court.
He is rumoured, in the classic style of the eccentric European prince, to have donned a false beard and taken to the streets in order to ask members of the public what they really thought of him. He did so in his armour-plated presidential Mercedes, and no one was fooled. He also berates his cabinet ministers and forces them to perform craven self-criticisms on live TV .
Curiously, however, Turkmenistan under Niyazov is the only country in the region to have abolished the death penalty.
