‘No Rallies, No Speeches, No Posters’

Turkmenistan will hold a presidential election 12 February. Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, who has been president since the country’s last president-for-life died in office in December 2006, will win. The only question is by how much.

It is only Turkmenistan’s third presidential election since it gained independence in 1991. Berdymukhamedov’s predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, won the first contest in 1992 with 99.5 percent of the vote. In February 2007, Berdymukhamedov, who at the time was acting president, took 89 percent of the vote.

A placard lists the eight presidential candidates. No posters show them individually, although the image of incumbent Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is ubiquitous around the country. These photos were taken by an anonymous photographer for neweurasia.

A leading election monitoring group, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, announced in January that it would not monitor the poll. It noted that Turkmenistan places “undue restrictions on the right to stand as a candidate” and lacks laws that provide for the registration of political parties. Independent media amounts to one private newspaper, which was started only recently.

The OSCE will, however, send a team to Turkmenistan to further review election laws and processes.

Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov

Sloboda said Turkmenistan’s leaders “are set to further democratize society and ensure transparency of the election and openness of the election process for international observers.”

Seven candidates are vying for the presidency, in addition to Berdymukhamedov. The following is a blog post about the election from neweurasia, TOL’s sister site, by Annasoltan. Like many of the site’s bloggers, Annasoltan writes under a pseudonym for reasons of personal safety.

For a sham election, trying to keep track of Turkmenistan’s upcoming presidential poll has proved really annoying. For one, in early January of this year, our country’s “Arkadag” (Protector), Berdymukhamedov, declared his intention to establish a multiparty system. One wonders what exactly he has in mind.

It’s my understanding that in February 2011, several Turkmen citizens submitted party registration documents to the Ministry of Justice. Several of those who applied simply met no response. Some of them were subsequently called into the Prosecutor General’s Office, where it was made clear to them that they needed to back off, and, according to Deutsche Welle journalist Durdy Nazarov, at least one apparently was given a prison term for commercial fraud!

Everyone to the election!

Also that month, Berdymukhamedov gave a forceful speech in which he boasted that he does not fear the members of the Turkmen opposition in exile, many of whom are former government officials. Incidentally, neweurasia‘s readers may recall how, shortly after the Abadan explosion and the role played by opposition-in-exile media on getting the word out, Berdymukhamedov invited dissenters back into the country so they could run in the election. The few who tried had the door promptly shut in their face — so much for no fear.

Then, in May, Berdymukhamedov floated the idea of a “Peasant Party,” the purpose of which would be to “explain the essence of the agrarian state policy [and] provide ideological support to the ongoing agriculture reform,” in other words, Berdymukhamedov‘s agricultural reform (whatever that actually is). It sounds a bit like some of the pseudo-parties of “liberals” in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which are drawn mostly from pre-approved members of business or state bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, in the attempt to conjure up candidates for this election, Berdymukhamedov has turned not to his ministers and deputies, who would be seen as real rivals, but to second-rank officials from the country’s five provinces. What’s proved to be a headache is that the number of these candidates has inflated and deflated; it’s now at seven, not including the president himself. And by the way, they are all loyalists, declaring their support for Berdymukhamedov’s policies. The official online news site has praised their candidacy as the “way leading to democracy.”

Originally, three candidates from Lebap and Dashoguz provinces were announced. Later, four more candidates were added from Ahal, Mary, and Balkan provinces, thus having candidates form each province. Then, an additional seven candidates were announced, bringing the total to 15. Later, it was announced that of the 15 candidates seven had not been nominated as candidates by the Central Election Commission because five had not managed to process their application in time and another two had withdrawn their bid to run in the election.

Berdymukhamedov’s nomination came from his Democratic Party of Turkmenistan, the women’s and youth associations, and the labor unions, whereas the other candidates were selected by “initiative groups.” These groups, by the way, seem like mirages: countrymen with whom I’ve talked say they never knew such groups existed until this election, and they appear to be what’s derisively called “government-organized nongovernmental organizations” (GONGOs), which probably means they were created for the sole purpose of manufacturing candidates.

Oddly, these “candidates” have all been announced less than two months before the election. That does not leave them enough time for an election campaign. But then again, the only one really campaigning is Berdymukhamedov. There are no rallies, no speeches, no posters, no advertisements, none of the trappings of a regular democratic election. About the only “pamphleting” going on is the distribution of official voting ballots in the Turkmen language.

I should also note that all of the “candidates” are male. Radio Free Europe reports that a female schoolteacher from Ashgabat had her application rejected. It’s hard to say whether it was because she’s a woman or because her candidacy was supported by the Civil Society Movement, an actual NGO (actual in the sense of not being government-organized and government-sanctioned).

And yet, some of my countrymen fall subject to the illusion, or at least pay lip service to it. I asked one young man from Ashgabat named Ilmyrat what he thought about the election. He replied, “When I see all the unfamiliar names of the other candidates, I would like to give my vote to our president because there is a lot of work to do, and in order to do it, he has to be elected one more time. Besides, our country is not ripe yet for open and democratic elections.”