Looking for Fuel in all the Wrong Places

by Ted Rall

Subjugated for seven years under the iron rule of a vicious totalitarian dictator originally installed by the Soviets, pals with the Islamic Republic of Iran and home to the planet's most inhospitable real estate, this Central Asian hellhole has no economy, no civility and no night life.

Under normal circumstances, Maddy Albright would be busy lobbying for a U.N. trade embargo and a ban on American travel there, perhaps unfavorably comparing its delusional ruler to Saddam Hussein. Drawing analogies between the Iraqi president and Adolf Hitler may have proven a tortured leap of rhetoric, but Turkmenistan's Saparmurad Niyazov conveniently uses the same slogan ("One Country, One People, One Leader") as the late fuhrer.

The difference between outlaw nation and ally, as usual, is oil.

Major players in the Central Asian oil rush include Unocal, which is trying to build a pipeline to transmit Turkmeni oil to Pakistan via Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, as well as Mobil and Exxon.

In the proud traditions of the Gulf War and Vietnam, big oil companies are leaning on Washington to cozy up to an egomaniacal despot who squanders his country's wealth on palaces and monuments while its citizenry lives in staggering poverty. So now we find Niyazov -- who, along with the leaders of China, Nigeria, Cuba, Burma and Indonesia, was just added to the Washington-based Committee to Protect Journalists' "Ten Worst Enemies of the Press" list -- sampling wines with Bill Clinton and Al Gore at the White House on April 23.

The president and the self-styled Turkmenbashy ("Head of All Turkmen") inked a deal under which American taxpayers will spend $750,000 to study a trans-Caspian Sea pipeline to Turkey from Turkmenistan, replacing one completed five months ago to Iran. Gore praised the new American relationship with Turkmenistan for its contribution to "security and stability." Turkmenistan and the United States "need to continue to engage with each other," the veep said. This is always how it starts.

Indeed, security and stability are in short order back home in the Karakum Desert. I spent last summer traveling across the Asian steppe from China to Turkey via Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; everywhere I went I found desperately poor people trying to survive the economic breakdown that began with the demise of the USSR. But in a region where every-man-for-himself serves as the de facto constitution, Turkmenistan's public officials offered a spectacle of corruption and lunacy unmatched anywhere else.

Upon entering the country from Uzbekistan, my companion and I were robbed by Turkmeni border patrolmen at Charzjou -- the train actually made a special stop in the middle of nowhere for the grim ritual -- which set the tone for the remainder of our journey. We were detained for an entire day by policemen trying to shake us down on the Turkmeni side of the border. It's so bad in the capital city of Ashkhabad that the streets empty out whenever a cop appears; everyone is terrified of being robbed of what little money they have left after years of runaway inflation.

It's a universal truth: Where people live in misery, they try to change their leaders. Former Turkmeni foreign minister Avdy Kuliyev made the mistake of trying to do just that. After voicing opposition to Niyazov's cult of personality on Radio Liberty, he was arrested by Niyazov's National Security Committee, formerly the Soviet KGB, on charges of preparing a coup d'etat and for organizing a July 1995 anti-Niyazov demonstration in Ashkhabad. The arrest took place just a week before the White House visit; when asked about suppression of political opponents, Niyazov told American reporters: "We do not have any opposition parties. You are misinformed."

No one, however, makes the case against American involvement with Turkmenistan more effectively than Niyazov himself. In preparation for his American tour, he bought an eight-page spread titled "Turkmenistan: Central Asia's Stable State" in the April 27 issue of Time.

In the usual appeal to international corporations to do business with him is the following telling sentence: "Mr. Niyazov was re-elected in 1992, and in 1994 the vast majority of Turkmen people voted in a national referendum to skip the 1997 presidential election and to extend Mr. Niyazov's term of office to 2002." After the Clinton-Niyazov meeting, a communique was issued promising "free and fair elections for parliament and the presidency" in 1999 and 2002, respectively.

It's too bad Turkmenistan is sitting on top of all that fuel. Otherwise it too, like Haiti and Bosnia, would be entitled to Marine-enforced democracy.