Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  Geldy told me later he’d never had any intention of teaching. He’d wanted to get involved in the camp because he was deep in debt to the cosmetics company Mary Kay, and the woman who was trying to collect was beginning to scare him. He’d picked up a part-time job selling Mary Kay perfumes, to help pay his bar bills. The problem was, he kept giving away the perfume (to girls he wanted to sleep with), instead of selling it. When I told him about the mini-camp, he saw an opportunity to get himself out of trouble. I told him I needed 2.5 million manat for the camp (about $100). He wrote a grant to Red Crescent for more than twice that amount, gave me the 2.5 million manat I needed, and used the rest to get Mary Kay off his back.

  That kind of corruption was common within Red Crescent and probably at other organizations in Turkmenistan, too. There was a system in place meant to keep it in check; anyone who received a grant was required to submit a spending report once their project was complete, including original receipts for everything purchased with the grant money. However, everyone had a friend in a store who was glad – for a small fee or a future favor – to print up a receipt for any amount. It was common practice to inflate grants, skim a little off the top, and buy receipts to make everything balance out on the final report. By doing so, people paid electric bills, funded New Year’s parties, and bought new clothes.

  * * *

  I was angry at Geldy. He’d used me. But it was hard to blame him. Corruption was a way of life in Turkmenistan at every level. Faced with a corrupt, oppressive, capricious, and marginally legitimate state, people ignored the laws and did whatever they could to get by. True, Geldy’s motives weren’t exactly pure. He didn’t do it to pay for heart medicine for his aging grandmother. He did it so he could maintain his bar-hopping, clothes-shopping lifestyle and pay for his expensive slim cigarettes. Still, how could I expect him to be the only honest man in Turkmenistan?

  Although I understood why Geldy had done what he’d done, the whole affair just added to my growing bitterness, anger, and frustration with my situation, in general. At the dinner table, I would go on long rants about the situation while Olya listened sympathetically.

  “They invited me to come to Turkmenistan,” I would fume. “They asked me to do this job. But everything I try to do, they shut me down. They would be happier if I just sat in my room and did nothing – but I won’t do that. I didn’t come all the way to Turkmenistan to sit and do nothing.”

  I began to wonder why Peace Corps was in Turkmenistan at all. I have never been able to figure it out. American foreign policy in Turkmenistan has always seemed a little bit confused and undirected. When the Soviet Union fell, the U.S.’s first concern was to deal with Russia and Eastern Europe. Relatively little thought was given to Central Asia except to send Peace Corps volunteers there in 1993. Then, in the mid-1990s, Clinton administration officials publicly outlined a policy for the region that focused on economic and political reform, conflict resolution, energy security, and enhancing commercial opportunities for US companies. By the end of the decade, US energy companies were scrambling for opportunities to get in on the production and distribution of Caspian Sea oil and gas and the Clinton administration was doing its best to help them.

  Turkmenistan has some of the largest reserves of natural gas in the world. Energy companies tried to find ways to move the gas to major markets. The Clinton administration opposed north-and south-bound pipeline routes, hoping to curb the regional power of Russia (to the north) and Iran (to the south), by reducing their influence over Turkmen gas exports. That left east-and west-bound routes. Unocal considered a route (immortalized in Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11) that would have gone southeast through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. Other companies worked with the Clinton administration on plans for a pipeline underneath the Caspian Sea and across the Caucasus to Turkey. Meanwhile, the Niyazov regime’s atrocious human rights record was more or less forgotten. After a few years of trying to balance financial considerations, logistical realities, US government policy priorities, and Niyazov’s bizarre and capricious behavior, the big energy companies lost interest and more or less withdrew from Turkmenistan.

  After George W. Bush took office and al-Qaeda struck New York and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001, though, the US needed Niyazov’s help. He was the relatively secular leader of a Muslim nation with a long border with Afghanistan, which the US was planning to invade. Faced with the Bush Administration’s “you’re either with us or against us” ultimatum, Niyazov decided he was with us. He allowed US forces to move humanitarian aid by land through Turkmenistan and into Afghanistan. He permitted US aircraft on humanitarian missions to refuel at the airport in Ashgabat. It has also been suggested that he disregarded Turkmenistan’s official neutrality and allowed US combat forces to operate from within its borders.43 Soon, though, the US began to need Niyazov less and less. The energy companies had given up for the moment, and the military had established major bases in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan.

  As US interests in Turkmenistan began to fade, the Bush administration started pushing Niyazov harder to improve its human rights policies and implement democratizing reforms. Perhaps this was part of the neocons’ efforts to democratize the greater Middle East region. It could also have been in part the result of efforts by evangelical Christians, an important Bush constituency, pressuring the White House to do something about the mistreatment of Protestants in Central Asia in general, and in Turkmenistan in particular. Whatever the reason, Bush began to increase the pressure for human rights reforms. When Niyazov responded to an apparent attempted coup by cracking down on the political opposition and tightening restrictions on citizens even further, the gap between the US and Turkmenistan grew wider. The US sponsored resolutions at the U.N., “expressing concern about” the Niyazov government’s human rights record, and downgraded trade relations slightly between the two countries.

  Despite the chill, Peace Corps Volunteers remained in Turkmenistan, teaching English and health. Why would Niyazov allow a new group of Peace Corps Volunteers to enter his country every year? With his bizarre personality cult and atrocious human rights record, he might have felt that maintaining a Peace Corps presence in his country would give him an extra measure of legitimacy in the international community as a “normal” leader of a developing country. And tight restrictions on the Volunteers once they arrived could keep them from causing too much trouble. He was also concerned about making Turkmen citizens think he was seen on the international stage as a legitimate leader. When the Clinton Administration shunned him during a 1993 visit to Washington, he faked photos of himself at a White House meeting and disseminated them in Turkmenistan.44 Also, while I was in Turkmenistan, the (government-controlled) newspapers often ran letters to Niyazov from world leaders – including Bush – wishing him well on holidays, though I don’t know if they were genuine.

  Why would the US want to maintain a Peace Corps presence in such a country? Didn’t American officials worry that doing so would boost Niyazov’s legitimacy at home and abroad? A US Embassy staffer in Turkmenistan told me that the Peace Corps presence was “a foot in the door,” for the United States. US officials may also have decided that long-term positive effects would offset any short-term negative effects. Future relations between the two countries, after all, would surely be better if Turkmen leaders were people who had formed their opinions about Americans from first-hand experience with Peace Corps Volunteers rather than from the Niyazov regime’s propaganda, the Jerry Springer Show, or the Moscow evening news. And better relations between the two countries could help the US secure Turkmen military and political cooperation when necessary, and move Turkmen natural gas and oil to its preferred markets.

  Whatever the reason for my presence, one thing was becoming clear: I had not been brought to Turkmenistan to be a development worker, to try to improve the standard of living for the people in Abadan. The Turkmen government had no real interest in having me teach health classes – or do anything
else productive. Neither, as far as I could tell, did the US government. I got the impression that both sides wanted me to do as little as possible. I was just a political symbol. Maybe that was an important role, but it was a frustrating one, too. I’d quit my job at the paper in Florida because I wanted to do something. I’d arrived in Turkmenistan to find that I was expected to do nothing.

  14.

  Merv

  Fed up and frustrated with Aman, with Geldy, with everything, when I heard that some Peace Corps Volunteers were planning to go camping for the weekend among the ruins of the ancient Silk Road city of Merv, I jumped at the opportunity to take a vacation from my life. I packed a bag, took a marshrutka to Ashgabat, and found a shared taxi to Mary (“mah-REE”), about five hours east.

  I sat in the back seat, squished between two sweating Turkmen men in suits. We stopped at checkpoint after checkpoint; I began to look forward to them. It was nice to have a few minutes to stretch my legs while the police copied my passport information into their logbook. We followed the railroad along the base of the Kopetdag range, skirting the southern edge of the Karakum desert. We passed through Dushak and Kahka, villages where the British had fought the Bolsheviks in 1918. East of Tejen, the mountains disappeared and the country began to change from desolate scrub desert into farmland. We were entering the vast Murgab oasis.

  Like all of Turkmenistan’s cities except Ashgabat, with its gleaming white marble core, Mary was nothing much to look at. More wide, deserted boulevards, more anonymous concrete apartment buildings, more statues and portraits of Niyazov. I was there for only a few minutes. The taxi driver dropped me at the bus station. I met the other Volunteers, boarded a marshrutka, and moved on. A half-hour later we arrived in Bayramali, the nondescript modern Turkmen town next to Merv. Well, not exactly next to. The two cities – the modern and the ancient – overlapped. Bits of medieval walls stood in the yards of modern apartment buildings. Taxis and marshrutkas waited for customers under ancient ramparts. We convinced a driver to drop us off at our campsite and pick us up the next morning.

  On the way, he took us on a tour of the area. It looked to me like a vast swath of scrub desert – something I could have seen in Nevada – dotted with big mounds of dirt and tumbles of mud bricks. The grandeur of the ancient city can only be found in books these days. Merv was built in the oasis formed by the Murgab River, after it rushes down out of Afghanistan’s Hindukush Mountains and onto Turkmenistan’s scorched plains, spreading out into a broad delta in the desert. People have lived in this oasis since before the Egyptians built the pyramids of Giza. The oasis, however, has moved over time. About 5,000 years ago, people lived in a city within the oasis called Margush. They lived in fired-brick houses, made elaborate pottery, and built an underground water/sewer system.

  As the glaciers melted and the river receded, the delta crept southward toward the river’s source. Over the centuries, humans followed the oasis, abandoning Margush and a trail of other settlements to the desert. The youngest city in this chain is Bayramali. The ruins that are called ancient Merv are the overlapping remains of at least three different walled cities, from different time periods – the oldest of which was built in the 6th Century B.C. – that spread for miles over the desert.45

  We camped near an ancient wall, which rose some 40 feet above the desert floor. There was no real campsite. We just chose a patch of sand shaded by low, shaggy saksaul trees. The wall looked like a mound of earth. In one spot, though, the Soviets had bulldozed a cut through it, revealing that it was a brick fortification with a gallery walkway, arrow slits, and occasional towers. It had just been buried in dirt over the centuries.

  We unpacked our belongings, unrolling carpets to cover the dusty ground, and unpacking the groceries for the night’s feast. I helped other Volunteers gather saksaul branches for a fire. As night fell, I lounged on a carpet, drinking vodka, eating shashlyk and cucumber-and-tomato salad, and listening to two Volunteers play guitars. Abadan and all its frustrations were far away. My belly was full of good food. I was a little drunk, and more relaxed than I’d been since leaving the United States. I grabbed a blanket and climbed an ancient wall to find a place to sleep. On top, a cool wind kept the mosquitoes at bay. In the distance, I could see the walls of the ancient citadel of Erk Gala silhouetted against the starry sky.

  Everyone from the ancient Persians to the ancient Romans had written about this city. When Alexander the Great marched east from Macedonia, conquering Persia on the way, his army seized Erk Gala and the surrounding province of Margiana from the Persians and expanded it into a Greek-style metropolis. It was eventually named Antiochia Margiana, after king Antiochus I, who ruled the Seleucid Empire (which stretched from Turkmenistan to Syria) after Alexander’s death. The new city was nearly square, with walls that measured more than a mile on each side.46 It was one of those walls that I had chosen for my bed.

  After the Seleucid Empire fell, Merv lived on as a part of successive Persian empires. After Arab armies conquered Merv in 652 A.D. and added it to the vast Islamic empire that sprawled across the Middle East, it became one of the empire’s major eastern cities. A Chinese army officer named Du Huan, who was held at Merv in 751-752 A.D., described it: “[Merv] is enclosed from every direction, since all round is shifting sand … The land is fertile; its people are clean. Residences are tall and solid; market quarters are level and neat. Wherever wood is used, it is carved and patterned and plasterwork is painted with designs.” It was an agricultural center that produced grapes and melons, cattle and horses, cotton and silk.47 From 811-818 A.D., it served as the residence of the leader of the Muslim world, Caliph al-Mamun, making it the de facto capital of the Islamic empire.48

  The Oghuz, a tribe of Turkic-speaking nomads that the Turkmen claim as their ancestors, did not arrive in Merv until centuries later. They swept south from the vast Eurasian steppes, perhaps from somewhere near western Mongolia. In the 9th Century, they appeared in what is now southern Turkmenistan, raiding the settlements of the area’s largely Iranian and Arab inhabitants. An alliance led by an Oghuz family named the Seljuks conquered Merv in the 11th Century and extended its power south and west until it ruled huge swaths of Iran, Iraq and parts of Syria, the Caucasus, and Anatolia (modern Turkey). Merv served as one of the Seljuk Empire’s regional capitals and it was during this period that the city reached its “greatest glory,” when “scholars, including Omar Khayyam, flocked to live there, consult its libraries and study at its observatory.”49

  Under the Seljuks, the Turkmen, as they were beginning to be called,50 played an important role on the world stage. In 1058 A.D., the Seljuk leader Toghril and his troops came to the aid of the Caliph, who was ruling from Baghdad at the time and had gotten himself into a tricky spot. Toghril and his army marched into Baghdad and secured the city for the Caliph who, in return, named Toghril “Pillar of the State,” “Partner of the Commander of the Faithful,” and “King of the East and West.” At least one scholar has argued that this incident launched the Islamic tradition of dividing power between a spiritual leader (the caliph) and a secular leader (the sultan).51

  After this moment of glory, though, the Seljuk empire didn’t last long. When the Syrian geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi visited Merv in 1219 A.D., one of the first things he saw was a great blue-tiled dome, “so high as to be visible a day’s march away over the plain.”52 It was the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar, the last of the Great Seljuk rulers, who had died about 60 years earlier. Yaqut lived in the city for three years, working in its libraries, collecting material for a book. The libraries “were very easy to access and I could borrow two hundred volumes without a deposit and take them to my house,” he recalled. He left the city only when he heard Chinggis Khan’s army was on the way.53

  The Mongols reached Merv in 1221 A.D., destroyed the city, and torched its libraries, Yaqut recounted sadly.54 “[They] ordered that, apart from four hundred artisans whom they specified and some children, girls and boys, whom they bore off into captiv
ity, the whole population, including women and children, should be killed…” The Arab historian Ibn al-Athir put the death toll at 700,000. The Mongols then destroyed the walls, the citadel, and the mosque, and burned the head imam.55 By the end of the 14th Century, the city had been more or less rebuilt and Timurlane liked to stay in one of its leafy suburbs when he wasn’t busy conquering central and western Asia.56 By that time, though, the Silk Road’s importance was fading, and with it, Merv’s fortunes.

  Of all this history, little remained by the time I arrived. Most of the city walls had been buried under blowing sands. The ruins melded into the desert, the surrounding villages, and the city of Bayramali. People carried ancient bricks away from the ruins to build outhouses and sheds. The government maintained a small military facility within the ancient walls: a few one-story blockhouses secured with locks, barbed wire, guard dogs and patrolling soldiers. Shepherds grazed their sheep, goats, and camels among the ruins. Turkmen schoolchildren visited on field trips. An occasional busload of German or Japanese tourists meandered through.

  There were still a few impressive monuments left, though. Perhaps the most striking were the kushks, small castles that once served as residences for the city’s elite. About 20 remained, in various stages of ruin.57 The largest was Greater Gyz Kala, which covered more ground than a football field and had corrugated mud-brick walls that reached nearly 40 feet into the sky.

  The mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar had recently been restored and was still quite spectacular, though its dome no longer boasted the striking blue tiles that had attracted Yaqut’s attention nearly 800 years earlier. Scattered among these buildings were assorted fragments of ice houses and cisterns.