Shrouded realities: Denials of armed coup plot, farming challenges, and dubious charitable ventures.
It is always a sure sign that the government in Turkmenistan is rattled by news coverage when it takes the trouble to issue a denial.
On July 9, Amsterdam-based Turkmen.news reported, citing what it described as credible sources, that more than 20 people had been arrested on suspicion of plotting an armed coup in June.
According to the report, which the website says has been withdrawn temporarily pending clarifications, the mastermind was called Batyr Meredov and was the son of a former Agriculture Minister who died in prison in 2013. Turkmen.news claimed that deputy Interior Minister Akhmet Khodjatov was among the detainees.
It was to prevent any leaks of information about this purported occurrence that the authorities may have throttled the internet last month, the website speculated.
The Turkmen government occasionally issues refutations of some or other story, but it does so rarely. On this occasion, a Foreign Ministry representative was quick to quash this account. The ambassador to Kazakhstan, Batyr Rejepov, told Kazakh news outlet Tengri News that the report did “not correspond to reality,” although he substantiated his case in less than convincing fashion.
“This is not a Turkmen media outlet. This media outlet is not registered in our country and does not operate officially,” Rejepov said.
No media outlets other than those which slavishly ape the government line are allowed to exist in Turkmenistan, while exile-run publications like Turkmen.news have a strong following because they are seen as conveying a more accurate picture of what is happening in the country.
This episode neatly illustrates the conundrum that information black boxes like Turkmenistan create for themselves. Because they allow no proper journalism, speculation and uncertainly sourced news is quickly elevated to the status of hard reality in the eyes of many.
Official bulletins, meanwhile, are often distrusted, presumably even if they are accurate.
On July 7, President Serdar Berdymukhamedov issued a decree to dismiss Annageldi Yazmyradov from his job as the deputy prime minister with the portfolio for agriculture. Yazmyradov himself requested the dismissal, citing unspecified health reasons.
Other causes were likely at play, however.
Agriculture is a hugely important sector in Turkmenistan for the amount of employment it provides in what remains a strongly rural nation. It is, however, bedeviled by mismanagement and ill-conceived priority-setting.
Even President Berdymukhamedov admits that. After listening to one official after another, including Yazmyradov, deliver upbeat reports on expected grain yields and other achievements, Berdymukhamedov complained at a government meeting on July 3 about unspecified shortcomings and said that if agricultural technology was used properly, “it would be possible to achieve higher indicators.”
Wheat is a good case in point. The target for this year is to harvest 1.4 million tons across 690,000 hectares. At the end of July 2022, though, Yazmyradov was able to boast to the president that farmers had harvested 1.5 million tons of wheat. The record wheat harvest in Turkmenistan, achieved in 2016, was 1.6 million tons, but that was across 760,000 hectares.
Leaving to one side the fact that these figures may be severely divorced from reality, they obviously point to a trend that will be frustrating to a national leadership that boasts incessantly of the modern agricultural machinery it has imported. Yazmyradov’s purported illness may well be related to performance.
The reason that wheat is grown over 690,000 hectares, incidentally, is that back in November 2019, the former president (and father of the incumbent), Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, ordered that the wheat quota be reduced and that more cotton be grown. He reasoned at the time that the population was more than fully supplied with flour and bread, which was a flagrant lie attested to by the long lines at government stores.
The cotton yield should, Berdymukhamedov the elder said, be increased from 1 million tons to 1.25 million tons, which he said would serve as a boon to the textile industry.
Another gear-shift was effected in December 2021, when the then- deputy prime minister with the portfolio for agriculture, Esenmyrad Orazgeldiyev, announced that the volume of land being set aside for growing cotton was to be reduced to make more room for potatoes, other vegetables, and melons, as well as for the increased production of silkworm cocoons. Fully 40,000 hectares were to be freed up for those purposes, while 580,000 hectares of agricultural land would still be used for cotton.
That must have meant Turkmenistan would be growing less cotton, right? Well, no, as the Cotton Campaign report on the 2022 harvest notes: “The government did not … reduce the cotton production quota, insisting that a smaller amount of land could grow the same amount of cotton as the previous year by increasing yields.”
Officials may want to attribute their productive abilities to scientific breakthroughs. Local media reported on July 7, for example, that a research institute at the Turkmen Agricultural Institute has devised a new fine-fiber cotton variety called Yoleten-58.
“The yield of the new variety is 33.2 centners (3,320 kilograms) per hectare, which is 2.1 centners more than the standard variety. It ripens a day earlier than standard varieties, and is also resistant to fungi,” Turkmenportal reported.
Yoleten-58 is still in testing phase, however.
Having spent much of his actual tenure variously devising ways to increase the misery of his subjects, Berdymukhamedov the elder, who retired to a job as backseat-president in 2022, is now recasting himself in the mold of uber-philanthropist.
On July 8, he chaired the first-ever meeting of the immodestly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov Charitable Foundation for Assistance to Children in Need of Guardianship. This organization is combining predictable fare – paying for operations for needy children and sending medicine to Afghanistan – with a perhaps less expected sideline in commercial investment.
Berdymukhamedov the elder said that some of the charity’s funds – whose provenance are, naturally, mired in mystery – will be earmarked for the “construction of production facilities as part of the second stage of development of the city of Arkadag.” Building factories is not normally an activity one associates with charitable funds for helping for poor children.
The city of Arkadag, so named after the honorific conferred on Berdymukhamedov, was inaugurated last month, but much more work will be needed before its creators are satisfied that the job is done. The ongoing effort means contracts galore, and the ruling family will be at the front of that line.
Source : EURASIANET
