Turkmenistan’s Military in Crisis

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 26 – For most of the period since 1991, Turkmenistan lived in a kind of splendid isolation with its repressive government preventing most people from finding out what was taking place there. In the last several years, it has opened up; and problems that Ashgabat had hidden are gaining attention.

            One of the most serious that has now been revealed concerns the situation in the country’s military, a situation that is now so bad that it raises questions about the government’s ability to counter foreign threats from neighboring Afghanistan or even defend itself against a rising by its own hard-pressed population.

            According to a report on the Asia-Today portal, “A surge in suicides among conscripts has compelled the Turkmen military command to restrict personnel’s access to weapons. Units have had keys to armories confiscated, bayonets replaced with batons, and live-fire training exercises cancelled” (asia-today.news/27042026/8132/).

            But the portal continues, “these measures fail to address systemic issues: the army remains plagued by hazing and impunity for violence,” with “the situation further complicated by mass desertion. Servicemen are going AWOL to take on illicit side jobs, leaving themselves without identification documents or any means of leaving the country.”

And it reports, “official complaints regarding service conditions are ignored, while appeals submitted to state agencies are frequently bounced back into the system without ever being reviewed. The crisis has also impacted the military’s personnel pipeline” at all levels.

“Due to the declining prestige of military service,” for example, “military academies are facing a severe shortage of applicants, forcing draft boards to go door-to-door in a desperate search for recruits. This has led to a decline in selection standards and a further deterioration of the country's defense sector.”