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Turkmenistan: When a twilight-zone nation rejoins the rest of the world

so the turkmenbashi just died of a heart attack. it's gonna be interesting to see this one play out...

quote:

World The Death of an "Alice in Wonderland" Dictator The ruler of Turkmenistan fostered a cult of personality, even renaming the calendar months for himself and his family. The power struggle that follows will not be pretty Posted Thursday, Dec. 21, 2006 Turkmenistan is officially a nation of orphans. Government officials announced Thursday morning that President-For-Life Saparmurat Niyazov, self-proclaimed "Turkmenbashi" � the Father of all the Turkmen � had died overnight of cardiac arrest. The much-feared ruler's death came as a shock to his five million subjects, who for 21 years had been living in near-total international isolation under his Alice-in-Wonderland dictatorship. Niyazov fought AIDS and cholera by simply outlawing any mention of them or other infectious diseases. He banned from employment, public or private, anyone who had received a degree or a diploma from a foreign educational institution over the previous decade, and had most of the domestic school curriculum replaced by studies of his book Rukhnama (Spirituality), the reading of which, he assured, was a ticket straight to Allah's paradise. But there was nothing orthodox about the tightly controlled forms of Islam he allowed: he banned beards and mustaches, as well as long hair. And lest his subjects forget their "father," he renamed days of the week and months of the calendar after himself and members of his family. He even ordered bread renamed by a word derived from his mother's name. Niyazov has gone, but his 46-foot-tall gold-plated statue (one of several hundreds of thousands of his likenesses dotted around the country) which completes a slow rotation every 24 hours atop the 230-foot tower in downtown Ashgabat will watch the resulting struggle over the world's fifth-biggest reserve of natural gas, which Niyazov had controlled as if it were his private property. "This fight is only beginning to unfold," says Alexei Malashenko, Moscow Carnegie Central Asia expert. The only viable political institution left by Niyazov is the all-powerful Secret Police, which keeps files on each claimant to the throne � including Niyazov's son Murat, 39, a Vienna-based businessman. Clans involved with gas, cotton, and other businesses hitherto personally controlled by the Turkmenbashi have power aspirations, too. But the opposition barely exists; those still in the country are in prison, while those based abroad are badly split and insignificant, though they immediately announced their intentions to gather and discuss how they could unite and stake a claim to power... MORE: http://www.time.com/time/world/arti...1572410,00.html

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