113th CONGRESS

2d Session 

Printed for the use of the 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

DISAPPEARED IN 

TURKMENISTAN’S PRISONS: ARE 

THEY STILL ALIVE? 

FEBRUARY 20, 2014 

Briefing of the 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

Washington: 2015 


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Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

234 Ford House Office Building 

Washington, DC 20515 

202–225–1901 

csce@mail.house.gov 

http://www.csce.gov 

Legislative Branch Commissioners 

SENATE HOUSE 

BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, MARYLAND, 

Chairman 

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, RHODE ISLAND

TOM UDALL, NEW MEXICO

JEANNE SHAHEEN, New HAMPSHIRE

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, CONNECTICUT

ROGER WICKER, MISSISSIPPI

SAXBY CHAMBLISS, GEORGIA

JOHN BOOZMAN, ARKANSAS

CHRISTOPHER SMITH, NEW JERSEY, 

Co-Chairman 

JOSEPH PITTS, PENNSYLVANIA

ROBERT ADERHOLT, ALABAMA

PHIL GINGREY, GEORGIA

MICHAEL BURGESS, TEXAS

ALCEE HASTINGS, FLORIDA

LOUISE MCINTOSH SLAUGHTER, 

NEW YORK

MIKE MCINTYRE, NORTH CAROLINA

STEVE COHEN, TENNESSEE

(II)


asabaliauskas on DSK5VPTVN1PROD with HEARING
ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION FOR SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

The Helsinki process, formally titled the Conference on Security and Cooperation in 

Europe, traces its origin to the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in Finland on August 

1, 1975, by the leaders of 33 European countries, the United States and Canada. As of 

January 1, 1995, the Helsinki process was renamed the Organization for Security and 

Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The membership of the OSCE has expanded to 56 participating States, reflecting the breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. 

The OSCE Secretariat is in Vienna, Austria, where weekly meetings of the participating States’ permanent representatives are held. In addition, specialized seminars and 

meetings are convened in various locations. Periodic consultations are held among Senior 

Officials, Ministers and Heads of State or Government. 

Although the OSCE continues to engage in standard setting in the fields of military 

security, economic and environmental cooperation, and human rights and humanitarian 

concerns, the Organization is primarily focused on initiatives designed to prevent, manage 

and resolve conflict within and among the participating States. The Organization deploys 

numerous missions and field activities located in Southeastern and Eastern Europe, the 

Caucasus, and Central Asia. The website of the OSCE is: <www.osce.org>. 

ABOUT THE COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki 

Commission, is a U.S. Government agency created in 1976 to monitor and encourage 

compliance by the participating States with their OSCE commitments, with a particular 

emphasis on human rights. 

The Commission consists of nine members from the United States Senate, nine members from the House of Representatives, and one member each from the Departments 

of State, Defense and Commerce. The positions of Chair and Co-Chair rotate between 

the Senate and House every two years, when a new Congress convenes. A professional 

staff assists the Commissioners in their work. 

In fulfilling its mandate, the Commission gathers and disseminates relevant information to the U.S. Congress and the public by convening hearings, issuing reports that 

reflect the views of Members of the Commission and/or its staff, and providing details 

about the activities of the Helsinki process and developments in OSCE participating 

States. 

The Commission also contributes to the formulation and execution of U.S. policy 

regarding the OSCE, including through Member and staff participation on U.S. Delegations to OSCE meetings. Members of the Commission have regular contact with 

parliamentarians, government officials, representatives of non-governmental organizations, and private individuals from participating States. The website of the Commission 

is: <www.csce.gov>. 

(III)


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DISAPPEARED IN TURKMENISTAN’S PRISONS: ARE THEY 

STILL ALIVE? 

—————— 

FEBRUARY 20, 2014 

WITNESSES 

Page 

Rachel Denber, Deputy Director, Europe and Central Asia Division, Human Rights Watch 3 

Catherine Fitzpatrick, Independent Expert on Eurasia ............................................................ 5 

Peter Zalmayev, Director, Eurasia Democracy Initiative .......................................................... 9 

Kate Watters, Executive Director, Crude Accountability .......................................................... 11 

Boris Shikhmuradov, Editor, Gundogar.org ............................................................................... 15 

PARTICIPANT 

Janice Helwig, Policy Advisor, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe ............ 1 

(IV)


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(1) 

DISAPPEARED IN TURKMENISTAN’S PRISONS: ARE THEY 

STILL ALIVE? 

—————— 

February 20, 2014 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

Washington, DC 

The briefing was held from 3:02 to 4:46 p.m. EST in 122 Cannon House Office Building, Washington D.C., Janice Helwig, Policy Advisor, CSCE, presiding. 

Ms. HELWIG. OK, everyone, welcome. I think we’ll go ahead and get started. I’d like 

to welcome you all today on behalf of the Helsinki Commission for this briefing on ‘‘Disappeared in Turkmenistan’s Prisons: Are They still Alive?’’ I think most of you know that 

10 years ago, 10 OSCE countries invoked the Moscow Mechanism against Turkmenistan 

out of concern over hundreds of arrests in the wake of an alleged failed coup attempt. 

These cases were detailed in the resulting report by Moscow Mechanism rapporteur Emmanuel Decaux, who, by the way is now head of the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances. Many of these individuals remain unaccounted for, and other individuals 

imprisoned since then have also been disappeared. The Helsinki Commission has continued, over the years, to raise these cases and to ask for information from the government 

of Turkmenistan on the health and whereabouts of these individuals. Since the Moscow 

Mechanism was invoked, the United States has also raised this issue every year at the 

OSCE Human Dimension Implementation meeting in Warsaw in a special statement. I’d 

just like to also say, on a personal note, that I would very much like to know what has 

happened to former Foreign Minister Batyr Berdyev, who I knew very well when he was 

the Turkmen ambassador to the OSCE in Vienna. I remember him not only as a friend, 

but as a Turkmen official who was devoted to and concerned about his country. I did 

invite today the embassy of Turkmenistan. I don’t think there’s anybody here. Perhaps 

they will come later. So what I will start out with is introducing all of our panelists now, 

and then after they all speak, we’re going to open the floor for comments and questions 

from you all, so you can be thinking about anything you might like to ask or say while 

they’re speaking. 

So first, we’re going to hear from Rachel Denber, who is Deputy Director for Europe 

and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, where she specializes in the countries of the 

former Soviet Union. Previously, she directed Human Rights Watch’s Moscow office and 

did field research and advocacy in Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, 

Uzbekistan, Estonia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. That’s a lot. She has authored 

reports on a wide range of human rights issues throughout the region. She earned a bachVerDate Sep 11 2014 23:56 Sep 01, 2015 Jkt 095597 PO 00000 Frm 00005 Fmt 3191 Sfmt 3191 E:\HR\OC\A597.XXX A597

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elor’s degree from Rutgers University in international relations and a master’s degree 

in political science from Columbia University, where she studied at the Harriman Institute. 

Then we’ll hear from Catherine Fitzpatrick, who is a veteran of the international 

human rights movement and has been active on human rights in Eurasia for 35 years. 

She is a New York-based consultant for a number of nonprofit human rights organizations, 

and has served as a public member on the U.S. delegation to several OSCE human dimension meetings. She has been a regular contributor of news articles and translations to 

a number of websites, including Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and EurasiaNet, and 

is currently a translator and writer for The Interpreter, which covers Russian and related 

regional media. She has followed Turkmenistan since 2005, edited a weekly newspaper 

on Turkmenistan from 2006 through 2012, and currently contributes regularly to Natural 

Gas Europe on developments in Turkmenistan’s oil and gas sector. We’ll hear from Peter 

Zalmayev, who is director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative, an international nonprofit 

organization dedicated to the promotion of democracy and rule of law in post-communist 

transitional societies of Eastern Europe and Central Europe, the Caucasus and Central 

Asia. He received his masters in international affairs from Columbia University’s school 

of international and public affairs with a concentration in post-Soviet Eurasian studies. 

From 2000 to 2006, he managed the Central Asia Caucasus program at the International 

League for Human Rights, and he now provides regular commentary to the U.S. international print and broadcast media on political, social and economic developments in the 

countries of the former Soviet Union. You may have also heard Peter’s name because 

he is the one who directly asked president Berdimuhammedov at Columbia University 

in 2008 about the whereabouts of these individuals and whether they were still alive. 

Kate Watters is cofounder and executive director of Crude Accountability, an environmental and human rights nonprofit organization that works with natural resource-impacted communities in the Caspian and Black Sea regions. She works closely with activists in affected communities to develop strategies and campaigns for environmental and 

human rights protections on the local, national and international levels. She has conducted a wide variety of trainings and workshops, including on human rights awareness, 

popular epidemiology, and community air monitoring. She has also trained local activists 

to understand compliance and accountability mechanisms at the World Bank and other 

international financial institutions. She is the author of numerous reports and articles 

on civil society in Central Asia and the Caspian region and has been interviewed for print 

media, radio and television with regard to environment, oil and gas and human rights 

in the Caspian and Black Sea regions. 

Then finally, we’ll hear from Mr. Boris Shikhmuradov who is the editor of Gundogar 

News Service, which provides independent news about Turkmenistan. Boris is also the 

son of Boris Shikhmuradov the former foreign minister turned opposition figure who was 

imprisoned in 2002 following an alleged coup attempt to overthrow the government of 

Turkmenistan. Boris Shikhmuradov Senior has been disappeared in Turkmenistan’s prison system since December 2002, and his family has not heard any word about his fate 

since then. Boris and his family have been working to find information about his father 

for the past 12 years, including appealing to international organizations, such as the 

United Nations and the OSCE. Boris is in Washington, D.C. today just to participate on 

this panel, and we truly appreciate his taking the time to come and speak with us. So 

with that, Rachel, I will turn it over to you. 


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Ms. DENBER. Hi. Thank you so much. Janice, thank you for inviting me to join this 

really important panel. I thought that we would start by painting kind of a broad picture 

of Turkmenistan, and to help understand why it is that there can be a government that 

allows a situation to happen whereby people just disappear in its prison system and where 

the government denies—refuses to provide any information about their health or their 

whereabouts to the loved ones. 

How could it be that a government would refuse to even acknowledge whether persons in their custody are even dead or alive? I mean, that is—that should be—that is 

an extremely—it’s an atrocity. It should boggle our minds how something like that can 

happen. What kind of government would allow that to happen? So I’d like to just talk 

a little bit about what kind of government the Turkmen government is and to provide 

a context and help you understand how these circumstances could actually be. So I think 

many people have no trouble identifying what kind of government North Korea is. When 

you hear the country name ‘‘North Korea,’’ you automatically identify it as—this is one 

of the most closed, totalitarian governments in the world. It’s one of the most closed countries in the world, one of the most repressive countries in the world. Am I right? When 

I say North Korea, you—everybody automatically knows what you’re talking about. But 

when you say Turkmenistan, most people—even many policymakers who should know 

better just sort of scratch their heads and say, where? Isn’t that the place with the crazy 

dictator who had the statue that went this way and that way, the revolving—most associations people had with Turkmenistan, unfortunately, date from the Niyazov period where 

during the presidency of Saparmurat Niyazov, who had a grotesque personality cult. The 

country was mostly associated with the excesses of his personality cult, with the gold 

statues he built to himself, the renaming of the months after his family members, after 

the renaming of days after his family members. Probably one of the most grotesque personality cults in the modern era. 

After Niyazov died in 2006 and was replaced by Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, 

there was a very brief period when people thought maybe there could be some winds of 

change, but those hopes were very, very quickly dashed, and I think Turkmenistan sort 

of fell into a—kind of a blank space. On the one hand, you have the government under 

Berdimuhammedov seeking more external contact, so you saw Berdimuhammedov go on 

trips abroad, which Niyazov almost never did. 

There was a rotating—a revolving door of diplomats and businessmen going into— 

going into Turkmenistan. It’s a level of contact that I think was not the case during the 

Niyazov period. It seems, to the external world, and I think, especially to policymakers 

who were very eager to reap the benefits of Turkmenistan’s hydrocarbon wealth, it seemed 

like that this was a time of opening and a time of potential engagement. But really, very 

little has changed since Niyazov’s death. If anything, the only thing that’s changed, 

maybe, are the statues and the portraits. Berdimuhammedov has been busy building his 

own cult of personality. Turkmenistan remains one of the—one of the most closed and 

repressive governments in the world. There is increased contact between Turkmenistan 

and the international community, but none of that has to do with human rights. There 

is no change in Turkmenistan’s stature as a country where there is absolutely no independent scrutiny of its human rights situation—none. Ten special—United Nations 

human rights monitors. Ten of them have requested permission to visit the country. All 

10 are waiting for their invitations from the Turkmen government. Human Rights Watch 


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has not been to Turkmenistan since 1999 because the government won’t give us visas 

even when we have left our passports at the embassy for lengthy periods of time. 

It’s closed to external scrutiny; Turkmenistan is also very much closed to internal 

scrutiny. This is a government that does not tolerate even the most mild criticism. Not 

from within its own ranks, certainly not from outside its ranks. There is no freedom of 

expression. There is no free media. The idea of an independent nongovernmental organization is basically unheard of. 

There are a couple of activists who are—who operate very, very much under the radar 

who are able to get information about human rights violations. They do that, really, at 

their own peril. The rare journalists or reporters who are stringers for foreign news outlets 

put their lives and their safety in jeopardy when they do that. About every year we hear 

about a correspondent or a reporter for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, getting arrested, getting detained, getting harassed. Unregistered nongovernmental organization activity is criminalized in Turkmenistan. In order to get a foreign grant an NGO basically 

has to go through five layers of approvals by the Turkmen government. Obviously any 

kind of real alternative political parties are out of the question. 

There was a great deal of—a great deal of hullabaloo made when the—when a supposedly alternative political party was created at the end of last year, but this party is 

led by a crony of Berdimuhammedov, so I don’t think that we should read too much into 

that. 

But I think that—I think that too often international actors, particularly international financial institutions and the like, who are trying very hard to see some positive 

movement in Turkmenistan for their own interests, tend to look at these changes like 

the introduction of a new political party or a second political party and a new law on 

the media that was adopted recently as some kind of harbinger of change. But in fact, 

it’s window dressing. It is not real change. 

Turkmenistan is one of the few countries that still retain—that still prevent foreign 

travel abroad absolutely arbitrarily. For several years now the Turkmen migration authorities have prevented people from leaving the country for study abroad, they have prevented relatives, and family circles of inconvenient persons whether they are exiled political opposition people or other people who are just inconvenient to the government. 

They prevent these people from leaving the country. There are every year there seem 

to be students who have difficulty leaving the country to complete their travel abroad 

in various different countries. It’s not at all unheard of to be actually pulled off the airplane by migration officials as you’re trying to leave the country. So if you’re anybody 

who has any kind of connection to suspicious people or if you’re going to suspicious countries, your ability to travel abroad is in question. 

I want to say a couple more words about Berdimuhammedov’s cult of personality 

and the degree to which the country is ruled by—absolutely ruled by him and his cronies. 

Whenever Berdimuhammedov travels to the regions and when—and makes public appearances, the government mobilizes, local authorities mobilize local citizens to come, to attend 

rallies, to praise the government. These can be kind of traumatic experiences. People have 

to come and praise him in unison. Once you’re in the venue, you’re not allowed to leave 

until the president leaves. 

I think one indicator of the degree to which he’s trying to cultivate this image for 

himself and the lack of any kind of media freedom, I think many of you probably heard 


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about an incident last year with Berdimuhammedov. You all know how important horses 

are and horse racing is in Turkmen culture. Berdimuhammedov was participating in a 

hippodrome race. 

Of course, his horse was supposed to win. But as one person joked, his horse was 

afraid of coming over the finish line before he actually did and he fell off the horse. This 

was caught on video, there were many journalists there. Because this was the president 

at the—at the hippodrome. As soon as he fell off the horse, people were stunned. 

Secret service people came out from all around to take away everyone’s video cameras 

because this was not supposed to appear on the news at all. And it was—it was—otherwise 

This is Berdimuhammedov, his appearance would have been all over the Turkmen news. 

One person was able to smuggle out a film. It was quite shocking. 

This is an environment where—and I won’t talk about this because I know Cathy 

Fitzpatrick will, where the government makes use of the criminal justice system to deal 

with inconvenient people, to deal with political rivals. The criminal justice system is used 

in political ways all the time. 

Unfortunately, because human rights organizations can’t operate in an open environment it is extremely difficult to get information about the circumstances under which people are detained, the circumstances under which they’re charged and the circumstances 

under which they are sent for long years to prison. 

The last point I wanted to make is that this is also an environment where there 

is no freedom of religion, or freedom of religion is extremely—is highly curtailed. There 

are—particularly—not only, but particularly for Protestant and Baptist religious confessions where there are numerous instances where they are harassed by their local governments, where they are not only prevented from gathering and worshiping, but where they 

are actively persecuted and threatened. So this is just the big picture of a country where 

people can disappear into the prison system. 

Ms. HELWIG. Thank you, Rachel. So we’ll turn it over to Cathy next. 

Ms. FITZPATRICK. Thank you, Janice. I’m Cathy Fitzpatrick. I’m going to talk about 

the climate of fear that’s created in the government by the constant harassment and bullying of officials and then their disappearance—jailing, disappearance and sometimes reemergence, which keeps everyone off-balance. I sometimes think Turkmenistan is kind 

of like a hologram, that if you break off any piece of it, it will just keep replicating because 

the patterns and the structures of that kind of society are so hard to change. 

Commonly, we think that the problem is that there’s this cult of personality, that 

if we just take out the persona—and he’s not really so personable—Berdimuhammedov, 

that we’ll change the whole system. That was the theory about Niyazov, but it replicates 

because it really isn’t so much the cult of personality as it is the fact that all decisions 

are wired to come to that figure and that office. I mean, everything from whether a gas 

field is sold or leased to a foreign country or company to the pattern on a schoolgirl’s 

uniform, the shape of a box hedge, all of those decisions are coming by serial processing 

to the president. 

It makes it very hard to change the society because there’s no group that can show 

initiative. It reminds me of the Soviet period when, around 1991 I visited. A KGB officer 

told us that people were so afraid of starting perestroika that the KGB itself had to start 

it and pose as businessmen. That, of course, had a terrible effect. If you look for sectors 


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in the society that could bring about change, it’s hard to know where to find them because 

they’ve been kept so terrorized. 

Probably the most insecure job in the country is the national security chief. That 

person has been changed numerous times. The second-most changed officials are in the 

oil and gas sector. Just last month the president issued strict reprimands, as they call 

them in Turkmen—strict reprimands to Yaylym Berdiev, the minister of national security, 

and Dovrangeldy Bayramov, the chairman of the state migration service. He called them 

on the carpet for lax oversight—it’s always the same formula—shortcomings in their work. 

About what? Could it have been related to the issue of Afghanistan and the spillover, 

the issue—when you tie together this—national security and federal migration? Could 

it be related to Iran? We don’t know, and we may never know because they will never 

tell us; they just have these vague televised reprimands and newspaper accounts, and 

then the person disappears. 

It’s often been noted that the foreign minister, Rashid Meredov, is the last man standing from the previous dictator’s Cabinet. Then the question is, why would he still be there? 

I mean, his fate contrasts so much with Shikhmuradov’s fate. It’s almost as if they need 

to have one familiar face, especially for dealing with foreigners, because foreigners would 

really begin to wonder what’s going on with this government if they didn’t have at least 

one person they could orient themselves towards. 

As Rachel was saying, it’s not like North Korea. They’re not executing people on TV. 

But in some ways, it has a more—a long-term worse effect by disappearing people. They’re 

out of view, the public forgets them, but the internal life of the regime is very much terrorized because they know those people are disappeared, and they don’t forget them. 

The whole way that Berdimuhammedov came to power was by—the constitutional 

system was set up that the speaker, so-called speaker of parliament—which is just a rubber-stamp parliament—he was supposed to be the interim leader after the death of 

Niyazov. It’s not much of a democratic structure, but even that pretext of democracy had 

to be trampled by this coup, essentially. So what Berdimuhammedov did was he saw that 

this man had a family tragedy where his son’s wife had committed suicide. They brought 

charges against this man blaming him for the suicide. They also claimed he had abused 

his office. 

As often happens, as Rachel has mentioned, they have the family plan. One person 

is in jail; they bring the whole family, put them in jail too, mainly so that they won’t 

become like the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo or some kind of, you know, relatives group 

that’s going to start to agitate and bring attention to their—to the fate of their loved 

ones and put them in jail too. 

What’s curious is that the speaker of parliament was sentenced to five years, and 

then all of sudden, in March 2012, at the—at the U.N. in New York when there was 

a section of the U.N. Human Rights Committee, the deputy foreign minister announced 

that Atayev and his wife were released and that they had been released for a while. But 

no one had seen them, and we still can’t really confirm what happened to them. We were 

told that this was a kind of gift to the U.N., that this case had been raised many times— 

and it actually shows why it’s important to raise cases because they do eventually act 

on them, but it’s not much a gift if the man isn’t free. 

There are concentric circles around that case because Berdimuhammedov also had 

to dismiss the prosecutor, the prosecutor that he had conspired to set up a tie on the 


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fake charges. That man knew too much; he had to go. Then it’s often in the Stalinist 

mode that first it starts up with those who knew too much, and then the circles of those 

who knew about those who disappeared and those who had reports, and then it goes so 

far that pretty soon, you have the entire system, half of them are in jail. 

I want to mention another figure from the Niyazov regime who was disappeared in 

the first few days after he came to power, and that’s Lieutenant General who was the 

chief of the presidential security service and his son and another associated businessman. 

Usually the way it’s described, that he was some kind of kingmaker, or he was part of 

the sort of palace coup that brought this dentist to power. But it could have just been 

a business dealing. We don’t know. I mean, often there is very mundane reasons for the 

way these governments work; they just have some kind of, caper in Qatar or Turkey or 

something, and somebody has an offshore business and, that’s a part of where they send 

offshore the funds, and the people are arrested because they know too much. That man 

is rumored dead, and no one knows what has happened to him. Another case of concern 

is Gulgedy Annaniyazov. He was arrested and then eventually released, went to Norway, 

got asylum and then had the bad judgment to return to Turkmenistan and be arrested. 

Lot of people have been trying to get him out since, notably Norway itself. The U.N. working group on arbitrary detention has issued an opinion that, you know, his case is a violation of human rights, and let’s hope that that will eventually help to get more information 

about him. No information’s been received since 2009 when he asked for a pair of glasses. 

We don’t know what happened. 

Last year the European parliamentary member Leonidas Donskis together with 23 

colleagues signed a letter to the Turkmen ambassador, and he included Annaniyazov’s 

case and also two—the case of two popular YouTube singers who were—who were arrested 

because their songs seemed a little too much rabble-rousing. They had the word ‘‘awake’’ 

in them—awake, awake, Turkmenistan. That was thought, you know, to be, sort of Orange 

Revolution material. Those two were arrested. That appeal did lead to their release. It 

shows why those kinds of appeals are worth doing. 

I just want to mention one other—two other cases, if I have a minute. One is the 

main interlocutor for all these billion-dollar oil and gas deals. I mean, this is a tremendous 

amount of business of all of these companies of China and Germany that actually have 

deals with Turkmenistan, and U.S. is always trying to get a deal there. Chevron is always 

in talks, but—in the promise that they’re going to get a lease, an oil field that they can 

drill, but they never do. Most of the oil and gas businesses is really now in the hands 

of China and to some extent Malaysia and a little bit of Germany. 

But all those billions of dollars are all—were all in the hands of one fellow named 

Tadgberdy Tagiyev. He was very well-known. He was in every meeting. He was in the— 

in the Czechs’ energy summit in 2009. Then he was last seen going to China, similar 

to Shikhmuradov’s case, where he went to China, tried to ask for more money from the 

Chinese, and then he was apparently arrested and disappeared. That was 2009. Disappeared. 

No one knew where he went. They didn’t know if he was arrested for corruption. 

There were rumors that he was—his arrest was about the Chinese, that he would fail 

to get more money out of the Chinese and had to be punished. Another version of the 

story was that he knew the truth about the real size of the oil—the gas reserves in 

Turkmenistan and knew that the Western assessments of these were in fact based on 


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both Soviet and Turkmen engineering studies that were inflated. That was a bit of a convoluted story. 

I think probably the Chinese story is more likely because Berdimuhammedov solved 

the problem of the Chinese by taking his son-in-law. I mean, the family clan also works 

in the government, where they become so distrusting of officials, even in their own clan, 

even that they’ve spent their whole careers with, that they bring in their own family members and then tie them through blood ties into deals. That son-in-law was able to finish 

to complete the Chinese gas deal. However, he then fell from favor because he got caught 

in some kind of real estate scam in London. 

I mean, these kinds of stories, there is literally hundreds of them, and we can’t even 

track them all, and these reprimands happen practically every week. Someone then disappears from view, and we don’t know what happened to them. 

One final case that just came off the newswires recently was the man who was in 

charge of the horse breeding. Akhal-Tekeis is like the symbol of Turkmen nationhood, 

and it’s also a rare recent breed that was prized. Rachel told us how the president was 

riding on the white horse that was from this breed. 

This man who used to be the director of this horse breeding program, Gelgik Girazov, 

he was arrested on grounds that no one could ever make sense of, and they seemed to 

be trumped up. He was tortured. He was sentenced. He then was released. There was 

a lot of intervention on his behalf from foreign diplomats who knew him and knew the 

farm. One sad aspect of it sometimes it takes animals dying to get people to care. People 

dying doesn’t always work, I find, in this business, but the horses on the farm all died 

after he was arrested, and that caused people to be very concerned about this case, and 

he got a lot of attention. He was released, but now he’s in very poor health. Broke his 

back when he was tortured. He’s not allowed to leave for medical care abroad. 

There you have it. I think it’s important to have businessmen raise these cases, even 

quietly, because, not just for human rights grounds, they should care for practical reasons 

that the people they’re doing business with disappear and take the deal with them. 

One final comment is the WikiLeaks cases. It’s going to be a very short comment 

because I’m not even going to list their names, although there are several cases that I’m 

working on, serious reprisals of people mentioned in WikiLeaks, that either their names 

were redacted or their profiles were such that you could detect who they were. These 

people have been harmed. It’s often said that there’s no harm from WikiLeaks, by the 

supporters, but that’s because the people who have been mentioned in WikiLeaks don’t 

want to get up and paint a target on their back and say, hi, I’ve been mentioned in 

WikiLeaks so hit me again, OK? 

If you’re in Turkmenistan and you are mentioned in those cables, you hope maybe 

no one will notice or you don’t want to draw attention to yourself. You can’t publicize 

these cases but they are working their way through. Eventually I think we will see there’s 

a lot more damage than has been reported, because you have to look at not just human 

rights activists but a whole variety of people who brought information from the U.S. Embassy of various kinds, some of them about human rights, some of it about oil and gas, 

all kinds of issues, and what’s happened with them as a result of this publication. Thanks. 

Ms. HELWIG. Thank you, Cathy. 

Peter. 


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Mr. ZALMAYEV. I’m going to talk a little bit about the current potential leverage of 

individual governments with respect to Turkmenistan. 

More than 10 years ago now the Turkmen courts handed down lengthy prison sentences to a group of alleged participants in an alleged assassination attempt on President 

Nizayov’s life. The short trials lasted a few hours at most. To this date the very minimal 

demands of the international community, which Rachel characterized as an atrocity, have 

not been met, and that is to tell anything to the relatives and loved ones and their former 

colleagues about the well-being of these prisoners and to allow the Red Cross to visit 

that group of prisoners at all. The Turkmen officials have never offered voluntary comments as to the status of its prisoners other than a very surprise question that was put 

to the president in 2008 at Columbia University. 

The case of Turkmenistan’s intransigence on issue presents a curious confluence of 

various factors, among them the international institutions’ lack of enforcement mechanisms, the foreign governments’ lack of political will to intervene, the relative obscurity 

of Turkmenistan’s geopolitical position, and finally the apparent interest in maintaining 

the status quo by foreign companies that are present in Turkmenistan. 

There has been much carrot and very little stick in the international approach to 

Turkmenistan, with the exception of a few isolated cases, including the release from prison 

of several activists. The Turkmen government has not budged on any of these. The picture 

is pretty dire. Institutions have been reduced to paying mere lip service to the need to 

abide by international human rights obligations, and there’s very little appetite for the 

few tricks left in the bag to be deployed, and the main one being political pressure, direct 

legal pressure from governments. 

As a consensus-based organization, the OSCE was instrumental 10 years ago in 2003 

when it invoked its investigative Moscow Mechanism, which resulted in a comprehensive 

report prepared by a special appointed rapporteur who was actually barred from visiting 

the country. Since then the organization has been futilely pointing to the document in 

trying to reason with its recalcitrant member, often being found in a very humiliating 

position of lecturing to an empty chair, which Turkmenistan has, for many years now, 

neglected in an apparent show of contempt to send its representative to the OSCE’s annual Human Dimension meetings in Warsaw. 

In a situation where the organization’s very charter cannot be enforced even though 

such a symbolic gesture as, let’s say, its temporary suspension—which is what the Council 

of Europe, for example, did with Belarus in ’97, in Russia in 2000—what mechanisms 

of encouraging good behavior is left? In a situation when the organization’s budget for 

its office in Ashgabat is pretty much unspent and the—its very mission is under de facto 

quarantine by the government, what can one talk about with respect to engagement and 

a dialogue? I’m afraid we can’t, and with each passing day the OSCE is sinking further 

into the pool of irrelevance where it’s been getting mired for quite some time now. 

This pessimistic impression of mine was vividly reconfirmed when I visited last week 

the site of the Moscow Mechanism which took place in Vienna on the sidelines of the 

winter session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. Though I have to say kudos to members of the coalition—proved that they are a live campaign—who organized the event, 

it seemed to be business as usual when you looked around the room at the sleepy lunchroom—lunchtime faces of the OSCE bureaucrats as usual not willing to rock any boats 

and as usual happy to feed on the steady diet of cooperation and dialogue language. 


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The U.N., with its myriad institutions, finds itself in a similarly unenviable position 

of having its frequent attempts at intervention wholly ignored, whether the conclusions 

of its Universal Periodic Review Working Group in Geneva, which works under the auspices of the Human Rights Council, or the special rapporteurs that Rachel has mentioned, 

who have been, each one of them, denied access to the country. 

Turkmenistan’s proclaimed policy of neutrality has allowed its government to play 

off the various sides to manage Russia and China on one end, the EU states and the 

United States on the other, which in effect it has hamstrung the latter in their attempts, 

however feeble, to bring about positive change in Turkmenistan. The EU’s position has 

been that only dialogue and not ostracism can bring about good behavior and has engaged 

the Turkmen government under the interim trade agreement, consistently stopping short 

of signing the full-fledged Cooperation and Partnership Agreement, in large measure due 

to the vocal protests of human rights groups over the years. 

It certainly doesn’t help the cause of democracy in Turkmenistan that the EU considers and continues to consider Turkmenistan as a vital alterative of energy supply bypassing Russia. So while lip service is paid to the need to develop democracy in 

Turkmenistan and to do something about its political prisoners, reflected most recently— 

and I’m using air quotes here—in its 2003 resolution of the European Parliament on the 

human rights situation in Turkmenistan and Central Asia. 

The official position, one that you find on the EU’s website, states that: ‘‘Recent years 

have shown a significant strengthening of the EU-Turkmenistan relations. The European 

Commission, via the overall policy dialogue of the development cooperation instrument, 

has reinforced its bilateral cooperation with Turkmenistan and is supporting the economic, social and institutional sector reforms announced by the Turkmen leadership.’’ 

Finally, in 2008 the new EU Special Representative for Central Asia Patricia Flor 

stated that she did not support setting in concrete benchmarks for progress on human 

rights in Central Asia as a foundation for the EU’s relationships with states like 

Turkmenistan. So whereas the EU’s influence in Turkmenistan is limited, Washington’s 

is probably even smaller and dwindling. Although it presents all the right rhetoric that 

can be found in its annual human rights reports and in the interventions of the institution 

that it hosts, such as the Helsinki Commission, the U.S. has little strategic interest in 

Turkmenistan, and unfortunately little leverage to bring about any meaningful changes. 

What can the EU and the U.S. do? What can they do? What they can do is actually— 

is something that they will be most reluctant to do, and that is to raise the issues including that of the political prisoners, the group we are talking about today, directly in their 

bilateral engagements with the Turkmen government officials all the way up to the president; to exert pressure through companies which do business in Turkmenistan, including 

those taking part in the feeding frenzy of the country’s vast and still underdeveloped gas 

industry; all of that while keeping in mind that introducing any sort of human rights 

benchmarks into dealings of these companies will probably further antagonize the 

Turkmen government and push it closer and make them embrace even more tightly their 

Russian and Chinese competitors, which are already predominant on the ground. 

Likewise, it is important to bring closer scrutiny to the dealings of banks such as 

Deutsche Bank and companies such as Daimler and Caterpillar and John Deere and others, to dissuade them from contributing to the stability of the regime and to its ideology. 

The precedent was set a few years ago when the Deutsche Bank account of the Turkmen 


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government was investigated. It is reported to be under the sole and direct control of 

the president, and it is estimated to be around $20 billion. Also, several companies have 

been publicly exposed in shameful underwriting and translation into their language and 

publication of the former President Niyazov’s spiritual guide Ruhnama. Daimler did that 

a few years ago and had to pay a pretty hefty price when it was the subject of a suit 

brought against it by the U.S. Justice Department. 

But limited sanctions must also be on the table in the form of a visa ban on highlevel officials. With its trade embargo against Cuba still in place in the Magnitsky law, 

would it be that much of a stretch to consider some sort of a symbolic gesture against, 

and at the very least, equally bad human rights violator like Turkmenistan? 

Will these measures work? It’s far from certain and I’m skeptical, to be frank, that 

they will. But it is certain that the current approach has failed and it is time to be— 

to stop paying lip service to—and hiding behind diplomatic language. Maybe it’s time to 

acknowledge reality and to try something new. 

Ms. HELWIG. Thank you. 

Kate. 

Ms. WATTERS. I’m Kate Watters, executive director of Crude Accountability. I’m going 

to take us from the sort of broader description of what Turkmenistan is, and appalling 

human rights situation there, to a very concrete campaign that my organization and 

Human Rights Watch is also involved with. 54 other organizations that are part of a group 

called the Turkmenistan Civic Solidarity Group have begun in the last six months. They’re 

just called Prove They Are Alive. This is an effort—this is a campaign to try to do exactly 

what the title says, prove they are alive, to identify and to understand what the fates 

are of the dozens, maybe hundreds of people who have disappeared inside Turkmenistan’s 

prison system since the 2000s. 

My colleagues have already described the situation so I won’t go into a lot of the 

details, but all of the people who are—who we are researching and trying to identify in 

our campaign are people who have been missing for at least 10 years, they’re people who 

had unfair trials if they had a trial at all. They were arrested and put into the prison 

system and have simply disappeared. Their families have not seen them. They have not 

been able to send them letters or packages. They have no information about their health. 

The people in the prison systems have had no access to medical care. They’ve had 

no access to legal representation. Although in some of the agreements that family members have from the Turkmen government, there are even stipulations about how many 

times a year they’re supposed to be able to see their family members, in fact they have 

never seen them. 

For some of the family members, they had heard information that a year ago, maybe 

a year-and-a-half ago, that their family members who were nearing the ends of their 

terms, those who were serving shorter terms—10 years, 12 years—they were coming to 

the end of their term and the families were told that they would be getting good news 

soon. They all assumed that their family members would be released. A few months later 

most of those people—many of those people were informed that, in fact, their family member had had a fight with a guard, had done something in the prison system which had 

caused them to be resentenced. In one instance we know a family member was supposed 

to come out and then was resentenced to seven years more. 


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In other instances, at the time when the family member should have heard information about their people, they simply heard nothing. There was this sort of rush of hope 

that maybe after this decade we’re going to see our person, we’re going to find information 

out about them, and then again nothing. This is tantamount to torture, never mind what’s 

happening to the people inside the prison systems. For their family members, for their 

loved ones, for their colleagues even, this amounts to torture. 

Our campaign is not asking the Turkmen government to say that these people are 

political prisoners. We’re not asking for fair trials. We’re not asking them to release these 

people from prison even, although, frankly, all of those three demands would be perfectly 

reasonable in most of these circumstances. What we’re asking for is simply information. 

It’s a pretty low bar. It’s a pretty low standard. We’re asking the international community 

to support us—civil social organizations, governments, international organizations, businesses, people—human beings to stand up and say: Prove they are alive. 

We want to cooperate on the international level with various types of international 

institutions, as I mentioned, but we’re also hoping to get into some kind of dialogue, as 

naı ̈ve as it sounds, with the Turkmen government. We’ve written to the foreign minister 

a letter—you may have seen the materials outside. We’ve written to Minister Meredow. 

We’ve been waiting for almost four months now for a response. Because we haven’t received a response, we have made that letter public. So you can feel free to take that letter, 

read it, send it—show it to people, because we believe that what has worsened this problem over time is the fact that it’s not being spoken about publicly. 

There’s a lot of effort on the diplomatic level, and we acknowledge that effort and 

we are grateful for that effort. We appreciate that effort and we believe that it is what’s 

kept this issue on the table all of these years, but it’s time to speak publicly. It’s time 

to speak out in the world about what’s happening in Turkmenistan. Why is it that we 

know about Korea? Why is it North Korea? Why is it that we know about Myanmar but 

we don’t know about Turkmenistan? 

The disappearances that are happening in Turkmenistan and continue to happen in 

Turkmenistan are very similar to the kinds of disappearances that happened in Argentina 

in the 70s. People know about that. We want people to know about what’s happening 

in Turkmenistan. We’ve invited the Turkmen government into dialogue and we’re hoping 

that they will agree at some point to speak with us or with other intermediaries. 

At about the same time that all of these arrests happened in 2002, 2003, the government also cracked down on civil society. Rachel talked about that. Cathy talked about 

that a little bit. But in 2003, the Turkmen government created a new NGO law, and 

that NGO law essentially required that every organization that had been operating reregister with the government so that they could continue to, you know, do whatever their 

humanitarian work was, their environmental work, their women’s issues work, whatever 

it was, beekeepers—there were beekeepers. 

Everyone was forced to reregister. Not surprisingly, virtually every organization, 

when they went back with their new documents, was denied registration, which automatically made their work illegal. Initially it was a criminal offense to continue to work as 

a civil society organization after that law was changed. The criminal piece was taken 

away but the damage was done. 

Civil society, which had been small but fledgling and growing in Turkmenistan was 

smashed down at just about the same time that all of this repression was happening in 


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the political sphere. It had, as my colleagues have mentioned, the effect of really terrorizing the society, and that terror continues. That unknowing, that disappearing that you 

never know if it’s going to be you or the guy sitting next to you, makes it very, very 

hard to speak out. 

The other piece, which Cathy also talked about, is this collective punishment. In 2002, 

when people were rounded up, they weren’t just the people who were allegedly involved 

in this coup attempt, allegedly tried to assassinate the president. They were their family 

members, their friends, people they went to school with, people who lived near them, people who just happened to be there. They were swept up, taken away, and many of those 

people disappeared as well. 

So the pressure to speak out is enormous, and even for people who are outside of 

the country, if they have family members who are inside, they risk their family members, 

they risk their friends, they risk their schoolmates, they risk their former neighbors’ 

health and safety. And sadly, President Berdimuhamedov has continued this tradition 

of authoritarian rule, of massive human rights violations and suppression of dissent, 

which Niyazov started all those years ago. 

So we believe that it’s time to stop. It’s time to stop this. It’s time for the Turkmen 

government to join the international community of nations abiding by international 

human rights standards. It’s time to stop the suffering of the families of the disappeared 

and it’s time for the government of Turkmenistan to speak the truth about their fates. 

We’ve talked to the OSCE about this issue, both at the human dimensions meeting 

held in Warsaw in October of last year and at the Parliamentary Assembly, as my colleague mentioned, last week, which was held in Vienna. We’ve brought the case of specific 

families to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, and we’re speaking here today with you, asking for international support for our 

campaign. As I mentioned, we’ve also written to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Rasit 

Meredow, and we have yet to hear from him. 

We’ve also been conducting a lot of research, and you see on the wall the faces of 

some of the disappeared. This is not a complete list, and as you can see, we don’t yet 

have even photographs of many of the disappeared, even some of the very well-known 

people. We don’t have a photograph of Batyr Berdyev, for example. It’s very hard to find 

this information. In some cases there is a fair amount of information to be had; for example, the case of Boris Shikhmuradov and even information about Batyr Berdyev and some 

of the others who were connected with the alleged coup attack in 2002. Those cases are 

better documented than some of the others. 

But even in these instances, we have conflicting accounts, difficulty verifying information, and politically motivated information, which makes it challenging to put together 

a reliable narrative. So using these published materials in Russian and English that we’ve 

been able to find, as well as accounts from those who are willing to speak with us, we’ve 

been able to put together some of the stories. The biographies that we have are outside 

on the table, for anybody who’s interested in reading them. Our goal is to document the 

names and the biographies of the disappeared as fully as we can and to publish that 

information. 

We’re also working with various international governments to convince the Turkmen 

officials that speaking out about the disappeared is actually in their interest. We also 


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hope that the international community will recognize its own responsibility and continue 

to push the government of Turkmenistan to honor its international obligations. 

As you’ve heard, Emmanuel Decaux, a professor who is the special rapporteur, issued 

a report in keeping with the Moscow mechanism, which is one of the mechanisms of the 

OSCE which allows for research into cases when there’s been a violation. We believe that 

continuing to push for the information and the questions that were raised in Professor 

Decaux’s report is really important. So in order to continue the efforts of Professor Decaux 

and all of those who have continued year in and year out to raise the questions about 

the disappeared and to push Turkmenistan to speak publicly, we have a few recommendations that are for the OSCE and for other international organizations and the United 

States government with regard to Turkmenistan. 

One is that we believe the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE should consider 

establishing a working group on Turkmenistan. It could also alternatively have a personal 

representative of the chair of the Parliamentary Assembly that would work on the human 

rights situation in Turkmenistan, and that person could be appointed. 

Secondly, the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE should adopt a resolution on 

Turkmenistan at its 2013 summer session or alternatively adopt a resolution on enforced 

disappearances and abductions in the OSCE region specifically referring to cases in 

Turkmenistan along with other countries, perhaps Belarus or, sadly, Ukraine comes to 

mind. 

Members of the Parliamentary Assembly delegations to the OSCE, including the 

United States, should urge their governments to put questions to the government of 

Turkmenistan on the status of the disappeared, the state of the investigation of the cases 

of the enforced disappearances, and they should request visits to see political prisoners. 

In addition, the U.S. government should consider—should continue, excuse me, to raise 

the issue of the disappeared both publicly and privately in the diplomatic engagement 

with Turkmenistan. We know that privately the issue of the disappeared has been raised 

many times in internal discussions, and we know this has gone on for many years. But 

in addition, we believe that discussing the issue publicly is critical to obtaining a statement from the government about the status of the disappeared. 

The U.S. can play this role in its bilateral relationship with Turkmenistan and 

through the various international organizations to which it’s a party, including the United 

Nations, the USCE and other humanitarian and even cultural organizations. UNESCO 

comes to mind, for example. Finally the role of the international financial institutions 

is one that can be used here, and I encourage governments to think about international 

financial institutions as well and to push them to include human rights standards overtly 

in their requirements for financing in Turkmenistan. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has done this by binding Article 1 to lending in Turkmenistan. 

This has had a very large impact on the way the institution operates in Turkmenistan. 

The World Bank, sadly, is lagging behind, but human rights organizations are pushing 

hard for overt human rights. 

With countries like Turkmenistan, this is really a critical and key piece because we 

know Turkmenistan doesn’t need money from the West. It doesn’t need money. It can 

go to China for money and go elsewhere for money. It has its own money, for heaven’s 

sake. What it needs is political legitimacy. Institutions like the World Bank, institutions 


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like the EBRD, membership in the OSCE, those kinds of things give legitimacy. And that’s 

where the pressure needs to come. 

So I’ll stop with that. Thank you. 

Ms. HELWIG. Thank you, Kate. Boris. 

Mr. SHIKHMURADOV. I will try to be short. I’m asked about my family’s situation many 

times. I’ve been asked the same question, if I thought my father had been dead or alive, 

because we never have heard anything about him since in January 2008. Today here for 

the first time I will say no. I don’t think he’s alive. I say not because I have lost my 

hope, but because unfortunately, I have gained some bitter experience. Actually we all 

know that there’s absolutely no way to bring the leadership to justice for human rights 

violations if it is somehow linked with security. Because they want to continue dialogue 

with Turkmenistan, they get so mad when asked about human rights violations. The 

international community prefers not to so what can be done? What we can do? 

My father is a Russian citizen, so he has a Russian passport. He has always been 

a Russian citizen. What did the Russian government do to provide consular and legal 

assistance to this citizen? Nothing. About 30 letters on Russian minister of foreign affairs 

saying that they unable to obtain information about my father. They ignore its obligations 

and they ignore all OSCE recommendations. They ignore universal human rights declarations and they ignore United Nations General Assembly resolutions that was offered several times, like, I think, two or three times a resolution was adopted with a number of 

recommendations, and none of them was accepted and none of them was implemented. 

So we keep on asking the diplomats, we keep on asking the government officials from 

different countries, we keep asking diplomatic missions to international organizations, and 

we keep asking them for their assistance, but unfortunately, the government of 

Turkmenistan and the president, President Berdimuhammedov and his foreign minister, 

the one whom we talked about many times, they don’t care. They don’t care about what 

people say about that. 

Our family is not the only one. In November 2002, more than 60 people were arrested. 

It was of—that so-called assassination attempt on President Niyazov’s life.I don’t know 

all of them, but universally, I know about, I would say, six or seven families who are 

in absolutely same situation as we are. There are many rumors about some of prisoners 

being dead already, being buried already, being—like, being thrown out of jails like— 

because sometimes they say that they don’t let relatives even have a chance to see their 

fathers and brothers for the last time. Sometimes they just throw bodies out of the gates 

and just let relatives take it. So some of these families are outside, some of them live 

in the U.S. here. I know one family, they stayed in Boston, and I don’t know why, but, 

I think you talked to them, but they did not come here because they have somebody left 

in Turkmenistan. Even being Americans already, people are afraid of talking too much. 

Some of the families are in Turkmenistan. Those are in a very, very difficult situation 

because they don’t know even about their chances, like I have a chance to sit here in 

front of you and talk to you, but those people who are in Turkmenistan, they don’t even 

know about what is happening outside. They don’t even know that somebody cares about 

political prisoners. These people, they definitely—I think that they already lost their hope. 

I don’t know, what can be done to change the situation because all these experts who 

just now reported to us here, they’re absolutely right. Sometimes it is very difficult to 

believe in what they say, but yes, it is—it is definitely right. 


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What they say about the recommendations to national governments, to international 

organizations, this is all right things to do. But will it happen or not? Nobody knows, 

and it depends on how—it very much depends on how the public will react. This is actually 

the answer to that question. What can be done? This situation should be discussed publicly. 

As much information needs to be made public about the situation in Turkmenistan. 

It is difficult to get information from inside the country, but there are some people who 

risk their lives delivering important information about the current situation in the country 

because being outside, like sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening there, 

and we very much rely on those people who deliver information. 

Ms. HELWIG. Thank you. Thank you, Boris. 

Mr. SHIKHMURADOV. Thank you. 

Ms. HELWIG. So I’d like to open it up for comments and questions from the audience. 

When you speak, if you would identify yourself, and please speak up, because I’m afraid 

I don’t have another microphone to pass around. 

QUESTIONER. You made me think about the idea of communication with people in 

Turkmenistan, because as governments do respond, the epicenter of the information comes 

from Turkmenistan, right? People they have no idea. So it means that they can react 

to what’s happening. So by using international organizations, it seems that it doesn’t 

work, or you see actually no results, and it somehow—I wouldn’t say it’s ineffective, but 

maybe we should think about another way how to maybe contact the people who are inside 

by using social science. 

Mr. SHIKHMURADOV. You know, whatever is happening now in Ukraine could never 

happen in Turkmenistan because they would never allow more than two, three people 

to get together. So they just start killing immediately. They don’t let the situation go 

that far. No, so if you mean social networks, social networks are not allowed, even if 

technically it is possible, because now, there are hundreds of technical ways to use social 

network websites, but people are so much afraid that nobody would take that risk. 

Ms. DENBER. I tried to be very brief during my presentation, so I didn’t talk about 

the limits that are put on Internet interaction in Turkmenistan. There are people online 

in Turkmenistan. I don’t want to give the impression that people aren’t online, that it’s 

totally cut off from the Internet community. It’s highly regulated and highly restricted 

in Turkmenistan. Internet connection is quite expensive in Turkmenistan. You have to 

assume that it’s fairly heavily monitored because of the the monopoly provider. Internet 

cafes are also highly from what we understand, are also highly regulated. You have to 

provide your passport, and you have to sign in, provide your passport information, et 

cetera. Websites are blocked—many websites—not all websites, but many websites are 

regularly blocked—I mean key websites. 

But there is still—from what we understand, there is still communication through 

Facebook now from Turkmenistan, through—I think also through Contactia and through 

other, like, Russian-language platforms. One of the reasons why we know that is because—is as you might remember, I mentioned briefly a couple of minutes ago that there 

was a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporter in Turkmenistan who was briefly arrested and then released. When we were trying to understand what it was that led to 

his arrest, because he didn’t write—he didn’t—the stuff that he reported on wasn’t terribly—wasn’t terribly anti-government or critical. You never really know in Turkmenistan 


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why someone gets arrested, but one of the—one of the potential theories was that he 

had written an article having to do with women wearing headdress, wearing Islamist 

headdress, like her scarf, tied this way and not the typical Turkmen way, or the traditional Turkmen way, I mean. 

It was on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s website, and it generated a huge response. Many people were commenting on it, and it seemed that they were from inside 

Turkmenistan. The theory was that this guy’s in trouble. He’s causing trouble because 

he’s getting—he’s getting people involved in a debate. I’m giving you that example just 

to show that people are online, but it’s very difficult. So using soft power is difficult. It’s 

also potentially very dangerous for people who would the recipients of soft power. That 

doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t—I think that does not mean that international organizations, that foreign entities, intergovernmental organizations, it doesn’t mean that they 

should not try to use social networks to spread information about human rights, about 

what’s happening in the outside world. I’m saying that they are—I think we should all 

be aware of what the—what the dangers are for people who are actually inside 

Turkmenistan to using that. 

Ms. FITZPATRICK. The whole issue of the social media and the Internet is something 

I followed quite a bit with Turkmenistan. There’s actually people who check in on Foursquare from Ashgabat, if you can believe it. They usually check it in the TV tower. But 

then they publish Instagram photos of their shopping because they’re the children of the— 

of the officialdom. There are people that publish YouTubes of their classrooms, but they 

can afford the expensive Internet connection. There is people on Twitter. The ambassador 

of the United States started an account on Mail. Ru because that embassy in Ashgabat 

that we have has enormous investment and trying to do social media. He has 8,000 

friends, OK? And now maybe half of them are FSB agents—but a lot of them are 18- 

year-old kids who want to go to school in the United States. 

That’s the problem with this theory of change through the Internet is that a lot of 

what it drives in is the desire to leave, and people do leave. They only get as far as 

Kyrgyzstan, but it’s that much better. They don’t come back. They’re not a force for social 

change. There’s a whole theory of how the middle classes in these countries, as they become more affluent and as they use the Internet, maybe they use it for their cats, but 

eventually they’ll rebel—well, guess what. It doesn’t happen that way in these countries. 

They become a force to prop up the government more, and—unlike some of the Arab 

Spring countries. Berdimuhammedov knows that, and that’s why he hands out 2,000 free 

iPhones to students going to Turkey. They might go on, Facebook or whatever, but they’re 

wired into his regime. We really have to take a second look at that whole theory of trying 

to—I’m all for using it and I do use it, but I think you have to look at what you are 

strengthening when you empower people with social media. It’s not necessarily the factors 

of change that you’d want to see. 

Mr. ZALMAYEV. That’s Evgeny Morozov’s line, right, that he’s kind of been arguing? 

Ms. FITZPATRICK. No, that’s not Morozov’s line. Morozov has a whole different line 

he’s soft on the regimes, in the end, because he thinks they’re so powerful that we should 

concede. 

Ms. HELWIG. OK. Cathy. 


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QUESTIONER. Cathy Cosman, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. 

I’m very glad there’s been some discussion of religion. I believe you were referring to hijab, 

not Islamist headdresses, but hijabs which are traditional—— 

Ms. DENBER. Turkmen—typical—traditional Turkmen pattern, but tied under the 

chin. Also, there has been a U.N. special rapporteur who went to Turkmenistan, in 2008, 

also went to Hungary. She wrote, a upbeat report. 

I would also say that the group that most of these countries in Central Asia with 

majority Muslim populations, their religious laws are aimed at the majority population. 

Of course, it affects all religious groups, but if you—if you’re a politician in any country, 

you think of what is the group which can potentially offer political—can be mobilized 

for political resistance. That’s obviously the majority of religion in the majority of the 

cases. So while here we may hear more about problems of conscience, objectively speaking, 

I think it’s true that it’s Muslims who feel the majority of the—who feel the impact of 

the restrictions, the multiple restrictions on religion law. 

I do think it’s also significant that when Berdimuhammedov was on his great charm 

offensive back in 2007, he did release seven political prisoners, including the former grand 

mufti of Turkmenistan, who had been accused of alleged involvement in the alleged assassination plot against Niyazov. We—the commission on which I serve on the staff, we met 

both with Berdimuhammedov and with Ivadullah, the ethnic Uzbek former grand mufti 

of Uzbekistan, and in fact, we participated in a celebratory dinner to mark his release 

from prison. Since then he’s not been allowed to return to his Uzbek majority region bordering Uzbekistan. He now serves, I believe this is still true, as an informal adviser to 

the committee on religious affairs, where he’s still an adviser to that group, which of 

course implements the religion law, such as it is, which is pretty restrictive. 

I wanted to call attention also to one other case of someone who was returned to 

Turkmenistan from Sweden in the—in 2011 under the mistaken belief by the Swedish 

government that all was OK now in Turkmenistan under Berdimuhammedov—namely, 

this 32-year-old son of two correspondents from RFE/RL. His name is Keymir Berdiev. 

He had been living in Russia I guess for 10 years. Maybe he’d lived in other countries 

in Western Europe, and he ended up in Sweden hoping that he was safe there. Unfortunately, he was not. He was forcibly returned. When he received the news that he would 

be forcibly returned, he tried to commit suicide. Nevertheless, he was returned. Some 

of us tried to prevent that unsuccessfully informally. So I just wanted to add to the fact 

that as far as I know, no one has heard anything further from him. I don’t know whether 

anyone is here from RFE/RL, but I would hope that they continue at least to try and 

find out about his situation because both of his parents were prominent correspondents 

from RFE/RL. 

Finally, I did want to also mention that forced labor in cotton in Turkmenistan is 

also a problem, and I would hope that human rights groups pay some attention to that. 

Of course, it’s gotten deserved attention in Uzbekistan and to some extent in Tajikistan, 

but as far as I know, Turkmenistan has been left off the list. 

Ms. DENBER [continuing]. Thanks, Cathy. There are actually a lot of things that I 

would have liked to have talked about in this overall introduction to Turkmenistan that 

I made. 

Forced labor in cotton was certainly one of them. We’re absolutely aware that it’s 

an issue. There’s been good documentation about it, and it’s publicly available now by 


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an—by an NGO. It’s managed to give information out. Another issue that we didn’t get 

to talk about that—but that affects many—the lives of many people in Turkmenistan is 

unfair compensation for house demolitions that are demolitions that are done in order 

to—either for, beautification or urban renewal or just the construction of parks and monuments and such. Actually, Human Rights Watch has documented—we managed a couple 

of years ago to actually interview people whose homes were expropriated from them and 

with very—with very poor levels of compensation and in some cases no compensation at 

all. 

When you have a political system that is utterly unaccountable, it’s no surprise that 

the lives of ordinary people who have nothing to do with politics are impacted, you know, 

because they can’t get any interaction that they have to have with their local government, 

just for everyday things, whether it’s your pension; whether it’s, your house; whether it’s 

demolition; whether it’s, your bills, everything is subject to arbitrary—to the arbitrary 

actions of local officials. 

If that’s the way it is for people in everyday life, you can imagine what it’s like for 

people who have in any way distinguished themselves by having the courage to be critics 

or having the bad luck to be a rival. 

Ms. FITZPATRICK. We probably should have started with this, rather than ended with 

this. I mean, we could endlessly talk about the cases, but I think we really need to cut 

to the heart of why our country does not do anything about Turkmenistan, because it 

can’t. I mean we’re heavily reliant on the access through airspace in Turkmenistan to 

Afghanistan, whether it’s the Northern Distribution Network, which is the passageway 

for all the nonlethal material to go to the troops, the NATO troops, and in Afghanistan 

we pay hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to land, fuel and then take freight into 

Afghanistan. 

Some hope was held out by some officials that we’ve been, raising these cases with 

for many years that things would get better as we withdrew troops and we’d start going 

in the opposite direction and pass through the NDN. 

I think that probably that’s not going to change, at least in the near term, because 

I think that, you know, we will have to keep supplying—we just gave a huge tranche 

to Afghanistan itself. We’re trying to do development work, you know, provide schools 

and food and so on, and arrange electricity transfers in the region and so on. I, that relationship’s going to hold. 

It’s also a listening post on Iran, and one of the big revelations that came from 

WikiLeaks and probably ruined a lot of information channels—when things that, like Iranian truck drivers would drive in across the border, into Turkmenistan, which for them 

was a holiday—I mean, try to imagine your life if that was your holiday—and then they 

would, you know, pump them for information. 

I don’t think this is going to change. What I think you can do with these regimes, 

though, is you could stop conferring legitimacy on them. You can’t always do it by speaking 

out, but you can do simple things, like one of the things that I find really most egregious 

is that Berdimuhammedov’s—one of his most prized possessions is a picture of himself 

with Obama and his wife at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s kind of 

a photo bomb picture, if you will, because Obama didn’t actually meet with 

Berdimuhammedov. 


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He didn’t actually sign any pipeline deals with him. He actually got nothing out of 

him for, all—the whole time he’s been in office. But there was this nice reception where 

there was some Turkmen jewelry on display, very nice Turkmen jewelry. I went myself. 

So that sort of thing, that social milieu that we hope would be transformative, in fact 

is used to legitimize the regime. I mean, you have horrible things like German doctors 

going and performing an operation on a hapless fellow with the dentist in chief there, 

Berdimuhammedov himself, who has a medical degree—operating on a guy. Imagine the 

German medical profession going and taking part in a charade like that. 

These kinds of legitimizing exercises that we can control and we don’t have to do, 

we don’t have to lay these optics on with this regime, and I think my colleagues and 

I disagree about this, and we can debate it, but I think we need to pare down some of 

these human rights festivals that we have in Ashkhabad, where we send Oxford professors 

and, professors from Missouri to go and teach human rights to the same 20 officials that 

have already been in the last zillion sessions. I mean, if I see that woman with the beehive 

hairdo once again getting trained by one of our, I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve 

seen that kind of thing happening. 

We can still engage with them. We can find ways to sort of have, you know, like 

the ABCs, Annual bilaterals. We have those things. Maybe we could cut down on the 

sort of shows. The oil—and the annual oil and gas why do we go to that? We don’t have 

a pipeline. We didn’t get a pipeline out of these people for 15 years. Why do we keep 

going to the conferences? 

But I think we can look for opportunities like that and help undermine their standing 

in the world, which they achieve when—when we—when they can have pictures with us. 

Ms. HELWIG. OK. Maybe we have time for a couple more questions. Is there anybody 

else that would like to ask a question? 

QUESTIONER. My name is Chari. I am a Turkmen native. So I used to work for the 

embassy. I want to talk—when we talk about Afghanistan Turkmen society, I think it’s 

important to mention one way that people at this point it’s a very unengaged society, 

because since Berdimuhammedov came into power. He understood perfectly that yet it 

frankly happened because of economic expansion. Plus because it came from even Afghanistan. The main threat to power is educated people. He understood this perfectly, and from 

his very first day, his policy was, you know, aimed at completely, completely education. 

You know what he did. He changed 10-year education to nine-year. He, basically, all of 

his classes was about but at the same time many teachers was forced out of the country. 

He removed mathematics from the curriculum. So they removed it—totally removed this 

subject. It is not even possible to compare with any other It is completely, completely 

uneducated society. It’s not only that they have economical message. This is the policy 

which completed their mission. This is what going on is. 

What is interesting in this—knowing that—keeping that in mind, how is this possible? And the government—you know, there is basically governance. This uneducated 

are taking government? How they can manage to keep it a secret? Where is? It’s an impression somebody from other planet taking care of them. Even though because if the 

culture and society, you cannot hide this stuff, but it’s not and I know that those who 

take care of prison changed in Turkmen society rumors going between. It’s not possible, 

you know, to—you cannot even hear look, I saw him over there. He was there, you know. 

It is not possible in this society. It’s—what is amazing is, who is charge of that is so 


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carefully kept secret. Nobody can know what happened to them and there isn’t—because 

there is no way to learn 

Ms. HELWIG. Anybody want to comment? 

Ms. DENBER. I’d like to make a couple of comments. I think that’s a—that’s an excellent point that—that’s the key question, I think, that you raised, Chari, and that’s how 

can they keep up this charade of pretending they don’t know, because I think that our 

campaign Prove They Are Alive is to make the government acknowledge—is to make it— 

have some kind of official acknowledgement about the fate and whereabouts of these people disappeared. Of course there’s all kinds of information flies around through informal 

networks. I’ve talked to families—at least one family who talked about how she got— 

not from this campaign but from another person who had been imprisoned and who has 

recently died in prison—how they managed to get information out about—how she managed to get—how she managed to get information about her father and what kind of information—who was imprisoned and what other kind of information managed to get out 

about other prisoners in that prison. 

Through informal networks they change the guards very frequently precisely in order 

to prevent information from getting out, precisely to keep people in a state of confusion. 

So there’s a whole elaborated mechanism for keeping information secret, for keeping people in confusion. Despite that system, information still gets out. It gets out informally. 

I would not be surprised if many of the people who are in—who are the—who are featured 

in this campaign—I would be—not be surprised if their families already have a lot of 

information informally. 

But that’s not the point. Of course you can get information informally. The point 

is that the government has to acknowledge it. 

What I think is interesting is how the government avoids the issue. We were talking 

before about how, whenever the subject of the disappeared comes up, the response on 

the part of the government—well, the government—I think you’re right that it’s a bit 

even odd to call it ‘‘government.’’ The response on the part of the authorities, 

Berdimuhammedov and the people who are—and the officials who are under him, they 

get hysterical. They yell. They scream. They say, these people aren’t—they’re not political 

prisoners and they’re not this, they’re not that. You know, they’re criminals, blah, blah, 

blah. 

That’s not the point. The point isn’t who they are or why they’re in jail. The point 

is, are they dead? Are they alive? Where are they? Why can’t they talk to their families? 

They won’t engage. I mean, it’s a game of—kind of like a game of denial and a game 

of mirrors. 

Also, there’s another theory is that if Berdimuhammedov were to acknowledge that 

these prisoners—acknowledge anything about them, it’s like—it’s almost like acknowledging that they were—their own complicity, because if they were if they died and if they 

died under suspicious circumstances, then someone’s head has to roll. Someone’s responsible for that. If they acknowledge—and if they acknowledge that they’ve been basically 

officially disappeared for the past—well, how long has he been in office now? Since 2007? 

So for the past seven years—if they have—if they acknowledge that for the past seven 

years that these people, they were disappeared, we did have information about them but 

didn’t reveal it, well, then they’re complicit in a pretty serious human rights violation. 

Ms. HELWIG. Kate, did you want to comment? 


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Ms. WATTERS. Yeah, I mean, just absolutely I think you’ve hit the issue on the head. 

It’s this combination of systematic destruction of an educational system, which leaves a 

society where you don’t have a lot of people who are engaging in critical thinking in the 

way that we understand it—I think the other issue is fear. 

I think that when the regime, the authorities, the president, whoever it is, when 

they behave so atrociously and the information that we have about the disappeared is 

horrific, the details—the information is horrific, the status of the prisons is horrific, the 

location of the prison is horrific, and some of these people are in Novadan Daipau, which 

is in the middle of a desert, where it’s over 40, 50 degrees Centigrade in the summer 

and freezing cold in the winter, and we don’t know—do they have electricity, do they 

have air conditioning, do they have access to water, do they have access to—I mean, the 

information that is out there is so horrific that the notion that you would then risk speaking about that and risk that—not for yourself, maybe, but for your loved one, whether 

they’re inside the system or could be put into that system, is enough to keep you quiet. 

I think the other piece is the legacy of the Soviet period and the legacy of Stalinism 

and the legacy of all the—the people who are educated, the generations that do have 

those—that educational knowledge base, they remember that. They remember Stalinism. 

They remember the disappeared from before. That makes for a very toxic mix. 

Ms. HELWIG. One final question? 

QUESTIONER. Just maybe a quick reaction. Akma from Freedom Now. The two points 

that—just to continue on the discussion on social networking and why it doesn’t work 

and then the level of literacy, and coming from Uzbekistan, working on Uzbekistan, I 

can compare two countries, perhaps, and I think you don’t have those problems in Uzbekistan. Social networking is still fine. Yes, some of the opposition are blocked, their website 

are blocked but generally can—people use Facebook, YouTube. YouTube has lots of clips 

of people of the government, Karimov, his family and others, and you can watch that. 

And is Facebook—those websites that are blocked in Uzbekistan are posting on Facebook 

as a note, and everyone can see it and read it if he or she wants. 

At the same time, literacy level is relatively better, maybe. Yeah, there is not that 

severe clash on education, though social sciences are dying. It’s known. 

But I think the second factor that Kate brought up is this fear that is more important, 

that keeps people from speaking out. If you recall, everyone who works in this field know 

that at the very early stages of independence of Central Asian countries, scholars were 

saying that the fact that the level of literacy is high gives hope that the level of democratization would be fast, that there will be some good hopes that it will work out, because 

I think the fear of—the fact of fear is really high. I even if a person is very educated, 

he knows from the social networks and information the level of—the atrocious human 

rights violations happening on a daily basis, still people are very, very afraid of speaking 

out and maybe mobilizing against the government because of the persecution. 

Ms. HELWIG. Thank you. 

Would any of our panelists like to say anything in closing? 

Ms. WATTERS. I would like to just thank you all for coming, but I also want to say 

if anyone has any information about disappeared, any information that you think could 

be useful to the campaign, please do contact us at our website, provetheyarealive.org, and 

at an email address, provetheyarealive@gmail.com. Please email us, write us, contact us, 


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call me, take my business card. We’re looking to gather information. So any way that 

you feel you can be useful, we’d be grateful for that. 

Ms. FITZPATRICK. I have, I guess, a question. We were discussing the Magnitsky list 

idea. I’m all for trying to add to the Magnitsky list, which we can now do because of 

other developments, but I wonder if you could make a Magnitsky list for Turkmenistan, 

because the people who did the persecutions themselves, some of them are disappeared, 

like Rejepov, and so on. It’d be interesting to try to make a list of who you think is responsible and then see if you can then add them. But I’m just wondering if that approach 

is useful as the other approaches that focus on the victims rather than the prosecution 

of the perpetrators. It’s just a question of tactics. I—just if you have an opinion on that. 

Mr. SHIKHMURADOV. Well, I just want to say I think that there is a human dimension, 

political dimension and economic dimension. So in the human dimension in Turkmenistan, 

zero—nothing? Political dimension also—it is not the strong point, because, like this poor 

minister of foreign affairs, he is actually the only one who who can speak and represent 

his country. Again, he’s being attacked like everywhere he goes. He has to say that no— 

that foreign diplomats, they don’t speak about human rights and political problems in 

Turkmenistan publicly, but informally of course they try to raise these issues, which 

makes him very nervous, and he—like Peter was there, because—like the—one of the 

most interesting things happened—it was in Brussels or in Geneva where the—— 

Mr. ZALMAYEV. In Maastricht. 

Mr. SHIKHMURADOV [continuing]. Ah, Maastricht, yes, when he saw—when he came 

into the big hall or big conference hall, and he saw two Turkmenistan opposition members, 

and he started shouting that the building is in danger because terrorists are there. So 

he was trying to bring public security officers there. 

So like this is Turkmenistan’s policy—political dimension, nothing. So only economic 

issues that keeps this country alive, this regime alive. I’m not speaking about 

Turkmenistan’s economy itself, because it is corrupted, it is definitely not transparent, 

like transparency level’s zero, but it continues living because of the foreign companies, 

like—including some oil and gas giants and some heavy machinery producers and some 

oil and gas traders and the development—who agree to come to Turkmenistan and to 

work there and to play by the local rules. 

So this is what we should attack. This is what we should target our attention to. 

I think that if Turkmenistan government—they don’t care about what people say about 

them. They accept all this strange and, you know, bizarre, like laws, rules, regulations 

changing months and changing, like—making golden statues of the president and then 

moving it around the city from one place to another. They don’t care. They just do whatever they want to do. 

But why American companies don’t care about what people say about all this, I don’t 

know. the economic regulations keeps this regime alive. 

Ms. HELWIG. OK. Well, I would like to thank everybody very much for coming and 

I think we’ll end on that note. Thank you. 

Æ 


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