VZCZCXRO1863
PP RUEHAG RUEHDBU RUEHDF RUEHIK RUEHLN RUEHLZ RUEHROV RUEHVK RUEHYG
DE RUEHAH #0778/01 2180615
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
P 060615Z AUG 07
FM AMEMBASSY ASHGABAT
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 9124
INFO RUCNCIS/CIS COLLECTIVE
RUCNMEM/EU MEMBER STATES COLLECTIVE
RUEHAK/AMEMBASSY ANKARA 2624
RUEHBJ/AMEMBASSY BEIJING 0449
RUEHLM/AMEMBASSY COLOMBO 0484
RUEHKA/AMEMBASSY DHAKA 0506
RUEHIL/AMEMBASSY ISLAMABAD 2194
RUEHBUL/AMEMBASSY KABUL 0943
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RUEHCG/AMCONSUL CHENNAI 0156
RUEHKP/AMCONSUL KARACHI 0205
RUEHCI/AMCONSUL KOLKATA 0127
RUEHLH/AMCONSUL LAHORE 0141
RUEHBI/AMCONSUL MUMBAI 0166
RUEHPW/AMCONSUL PESHAWAR 0479
RHMFIUU/CDR USCENTCOM MACDILL AFB FL//CCJ2/HSE/CCJ5//
RUEAIIA/CIA WASHDC
RHEFDIA/DIA WASHINGTON DC//DHO-2/REA/NMJIC-J2//
RHEHNSC/NSC WASHDC
RUEKJCS/JOINT STAFF WASHDC
RUEKJCS/SECDEF WASHINGTON DC
RHEBAAA/DEPT OF ENERGY WASHDC

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 ASHGABAT 000778 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
STATE FOR P, E, R, SCA, EUR, DRL 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PGOV PREL PHUM ECON EINV KDEM RS TX
SUBJECT: UNDERSTANDING TURKMENISTAN:  DESCENT INTO FANTASY 
-- THE NIYAZOV ERA 
 
ASHGABAT 00000778  001.2 OF 003 
 
 
¶1.  (U) Sensitive but unclassified.  Not for public Internet. 
 
¶2.  (U) This is a two-part series.  This first part reviews 
the Niyazov era and how he dragged his country into 
international disrepute.  The second part suggests policy 
directions for Washington to consider, and reviews current 
constraints that will make Turkmenistan's recovery a 
long-term process. 
 
AN EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY 
 
¶3.  (SBU) Ashgabat-based EU-TACIS Commission Adviser Michael 
Wilson has worked in the former Soviet Union since 1985 and 
in Turkmenistan since its independence in 1991.  In the early 
1990s, the Government of Turkmenistan welcomed him as an 
EU-appointed foreign adviser in the Cabinet of Ministers for 
reform and integration with the West.  While Wilson certainly 
has no love for Niyazov, his historical perspective provides 
a different view of the tragi-comic-book version of reality 
Turkmenistan eventually became under Niyazov. 
 
DESCENT INTO FANTASY 
 
¶4.  (SBU) Wilson maintains Turkmenistan at independence had 
especially good prospects for quickly joining the 
international community.  As a far outpost of the Soviet 
Empire, it had not been especially exploited by, or even had 
very much contact with, the West.  Even as a former Soviet 
colony, it retained much of its pre-Soviet social and 
political culture. 
 
¶5.  (SBU) Wilson insists President Niyazov was very different 
in Turkmenistan's first years of independence from the 
commonly perceived madman he became by the end of his life. 
As an orphan, Niyazov had risen in the Soviet ranks by 
obediently learning his lessons well and keeping his mouth 
shut.  According to Wilson, "Niyazov was a top-of-the-class 
student of Stalin.  He was not a dim-witted functionary.  To 
rise in that system, especially as a non-ethnic Russian, he 
couldn't have been the village idiot." 
 
¶6.  (SBU) In the first several years after independence, 
according to Wilson, Niyazov was a forward-looking and benign 
ruler eager to open to the West.  He allowed his ministers 
and other senior officials to make their own decisions.  "The 
new Western embassies and businesses simply picked up the 
phone and easily made appointments with anyone at all," 
instead of today's onerous system of diplomatic-note requests 
through the Foreign Ministry for even the most minor contact 
with the government.  Unfortunately, Niyazov also empowered 
his early ministers to make contracts with foreign 
businesses, without any system of oversight or control. 
 
¶7.  (U) During the Soviet Empire, the KGB had maintained a 
sort of warped equilibrium within the society and was 
permissive, up to a certain point, about "corruption."  And 
corruption was endemic -- e.g., double book-keeping, minor to 
even flagrant pilfering -- the long-established everyday way 
of surviving in a fundamentally dysfunctional ideological 
system.  When the Soviet Union fell apart, the KGB lost its 
essential role as the governor on the throttle of corruption. 
 
¶8.  (SBU) According to Wilson, Western business people 
 
ASHGABAT 00000778  002.2 OF 003 
 
 
flocked to every newly independent republic, and Turkmenistan 
was no exception.  Some of these people were legitimate, but 
there were also a lot of third-rate fly-by-nighters, 
including Americans, who had no compunction against bribery 
or any other flagrant violation of Western business 
standards, if it meant a few more dollars in their 
hucksterish pockets. 
 
¶9.  (SBU) One of the legitimate businesses in those early 
days was the Argentina-based energy company, Bridas 
Corporation, which got one of the first toe-holds in 
Turkmenistan's world-class hydrocarbon sector.  According to 
Wilson, the first several years of the Bridas-Turkmenistan 
relationship were positive, especially because Bridas 
officials understood, or at least intuited, the Turkmenistani 
cultural need to treat Niyazov as a personal friend.  But 
they had no cultural comprehension of what that "friendship" 
truly entailed.  In the mid-1990s, when Niyazov decided to 
renegotiate the Bridas production sharing agreement more 
toward Turkmenistan's favor, Bridas balked.  Wilson maintains 
that to Niyazov, this was a shattering violation of the 
traditional Turkmenistani value of obligations "between 
friends."  With his narrow Central Asian vision, Niyazov saw 
personal betrayal by Bridas -- and, thus, by the West. 
 
¶10.  (SBU) At the same period, Wilson maintains, Niyazov took 
increasing note that he had a government of wildly corrupt 
ministers enriching themselves beyond his control.  With his 
Soviet Union political  underpinnings gone and the Soviet KGB 
in disarray, Niyazov reverted to the only other thing he knew 
-- the Central Asian historical memory of absolutist khans, 
which happened to mesh well with his Stalinist political 
heritage.  He didn't want to -- and couldn't -- run back to 
Russia, and he believed "the West" had betrayed him.  He 
began to kick out the more minor Western businesses and 
demanded absolute fealty from his minions.  His constant 
railing against corruption in his government was not 
necessarily sheer hypocrisy, because he exiled his own 
shockingly corrupt son to Europe and never let him return 
permanently to Turkmenistan. 
 
¶11.  (SBU) What about Niyazov's own corruption -- his massive 
diamond rings and multi-billion-dollar slush funds in foreign 
bank accounts?  According to Wilson, Niyazov blindly, by our 
standards, didn't see this as corruption but simply his 
"droits de seigneur" because he was by then the khan, the 
Turkmenbashy, the Father of all Turkmen, the apex of the 
pyramid.  In Niyazov's own view, he held the wealth of the 
entire nation in trust for his people.  And, of course, as 
khan, he had the right to dip into that wealth as he pleased. 
 Thus, his white-marble edifice complex that has turned 
Ashgabat into one of the oddest capitals in the world. 
 
¶12.  (SBU) Two other seminal events may have pushed Niyazov 
over the cliff:  the 2002 attempted coup d'etat against him, 
in which his own foreign minister was allegedly implicated; 
and his late 1990s heart by-pass surgery (it's generally 
accepted that such surgery can sometimes negatively affect 
the patient's subsequent mental equilibrium). 
 
¶13.  (SBU) By the end of his life in December 2006, Niyazov 
had become a malevolent buffoon to the international 
community and to many of his own people, and it became common 
 
ASHGABAT 00000778  003.2 OF 003 
 
 
practice to write off Turkmenistan as "Stalin's Disneyland." 
 
¶14.  (U) The second part of this series will attempt to look 
objectively at today's Turkmenistan. 
HOAGLAND