Turkmenistan’s leader Saparmurat Niyazov, who died on Thursday, ruled his Central Asian state for more than 20 years with a relentless personality cult.
Niyazov (66) whose country has the world’s fifth-biggest reserves of natural gas, was an ex-Soviet apparatchik who got rid of elections and declared himself president-for-life, calling himself ”Turkmenbashi” or the chief of the Turkmens.
He named the month of January after himself and April after his mother and banned ballet and gold teeth and recorded music. A planet of the Taurus constellation, a crater on the Moon, a mountain peak were other things named after Turkmenbashi.
Streets, farms, a breed of horse, the longest canal in the world, a city, ships and children were also named in his honour. His chubby face and Elvis-style back-combed dyed black hair also adorn bottles of vodka and cognac and brands of tea and food.
Niyazov’s portraits beam benignly from the walls of official offices and from the front of the cabin walls on Turkmen Airlines’ elderly aircraft. His slogans are everywhere.
In Turkmenistan’s gleaming capital Ashgabat, which rises from the sand like a mini-Dubai, a revolving statue of Niyazov coated in gold leaf rotates to face the sun. Much of the capital in the republic bordering Iran is a monument to his reign.
Like the khans who once ruled this long-nomadic desert land, Niyazov ran Turkmenistan from an office draped with carpets as in a nomad’s tent. When foreign leaders met him he often gave them a horse.
”In the past when we were ruled by khans, they were never changed. They ruled until they died,” Kurban Agaliev, a politburo member of the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan — the only legal party — once said of his rule.
Niyazov was born on February 19 1940 into a poor workers’ family. His father was killed in World War II. During the 1948 Asghabat earthquake he lost the remaining members of his family and grew up in an orphanage.
He followed a career in engineering and at a cement works before becoming Communist Party boss in Turkmenistan in 1985 as the choice of then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
When the Soviet system crumbled, Niyazov held onto power.
The Soviet Union had rewarded Turkmenistan meagrely for an annual gas production of about 80-billion cubic metres. But after independence, all revenues from gas sales cascaded directly into Turkmen coffers.
Niyazov had a passion for jewellery and gems, wearing large rings on his fingers and tie clips decorated with gems.
But most of Turkmenistan’s five million citizens live in poverty and life expectancy among women is the lowest in the former Soviet Union.
Niyazov dispensed money with sweeping gestures, in a style magnanimous and rash.
Such extravagant generosity disappeared in his dealings with the opposition. Dissidents were detained under his rule, which came in for heavy criticism from human rights groups.
”It’s the most repressive country I’ve ever been to,” British conservative Member of the European Parliament Martin Callanan told EU observers earlier this year after a trip to Turkmenistan. ”Human rights standards don’t exist.”
Nyazov was recently ranked number three on a list of the world’s top five dictators by Britain’s New Statesman magazine, just two steps down from North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Turkmenistan the third most censored country in the world, after North Korea and Burma. – Reuters