Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 14 – Under the
totalitarian rule of Gubanguly Berdimuhamedow, there is no opposition in Turkmenistan
at the present time, Turkmen émigré Maksat Saparmuradov says; but there is
something that constitutes a far greater danger the regime: tribalism and the
resentment of other family groups to the Teke tribe the current regime is based
on.
And those tribal divisions, in
combination with general dissatisfaction with the current regime because of
increasing poverty and even hunger, are reducing the oppositions the current
president has to maintain himself and his family and tribe in power into the
future, the opposition leader says (platon.asia/central/turkmenistan-stoit-na-grani-bolshikh-politicheskikh-peremen).
The current president like his
predecessor is a Teke, but “here is it important to understand that the Turkmens
do not have a nationality: this is a Soviet definition. The Turkmens are a
nation of tribes.” Prior to 1917, “each Turkmen
tribe had its own space, its own territory, and violations of the borders of
others occurred only through attacks,” Saparmuradov says.
“With the establishment of
Soviet power,” these geographic borders
began to disappear, but the identities of the members of the tribes did not
lessen, at least in part because Moscow followed the tradition of appointing a
member of one tribe to head the republic and then allowing him to build his power
by using only members of his group. That tradition has continued.
According to the émigré leader, “’the
nation of tribes’ consists of sub-ethnos groups so different from one another
that it is possible to speak about each of them in principle as a small
independent ‘people.’” Preventing them from acting on those identities explains
Ashgabat’s authoritarianism but it also explains why changes will eventually
come and be quite radical.
He
points out that there are “about 30 tribes” which unite within themselves “more
than 5,000 family groups.” The Teke are only one, and because of Ashgabat’s
policies of supporting that tribe, others are angry and want change. The big
question now is whether enough tribes can come together to challenge the Teke
and thus the current regime.
In the worst case, Saparmuradov suggests,
this could lead to even harsher repression to save the current regime, its
replacement by representatives of another tribe prepared to rule in the same
way over all the others, or the disintegration of the country into pre-existing
tribal areas of one kind or another.
But there is also a chance that with the
establishment of a parliamentary form of government, the various tribes could
lead to work together, completing the task of forming a Turkmen nation rather
than freezing the country for another generation into one in which the members
of one tribe rule over all the rest.
Because the situation in Turkmenistan
is so dire that even some members of Berdimuhamedow are worried (russian.eurasianet.org/туркменистан-на-горизонте-еще-более-трудные-времена),
a tribe-driven change in the country may be far closer than many people there
or analysts elsewhere imagine or want.
And the prospects that it could make
the situation worse rather than better at least in the short term are real,
given that, again according to Saparmuradov, Afghan and Islamist groups are
recruiting Turkmen immigrant workers in Turkey who are now without jobs (hronikatm.com/2020/04/labor-migrants-problems/).
At least some of these people may soon
return home and become foot soldiers for one or another tribe in opposition to
the Berdimuhamedov regime, increasing the likelihood of both repression and
collapse in the most closed off country in the post-Soviet space.
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