Speaking of a history of ugliness, that lovely man shaking the hands of our Secretary of State is Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the President of the nation of Turkmenistan. This photo was taken on September 21, 2009. At the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. Quite the address.
This gentleman, all decked in what appears to be the uniform of the civilized, modern, accommodating, liberal, peace loving dictators we so love, heads a country that has one of the most heinous record when it comes to human rights and justice. Just a search on the Amnesty International website or the Human Rights Watch website yields just too many reports to actually read! But even a cursory search on the HRW website report reveals the following:
Turkmenistan remains one of the most repressive and authoritarian countries in the world because the government has not altered the institutions of repression that characterized Niazov’s rule. Hundreds of people, perhaps more, languish in Turkmen prisons following unfair trials on what would appear to be politically motivated charges. Draconian restrictions on freedom of expression, association, movement, and religion remain in place. Teaching of the Ruhnama, Niazov’s “book of the soul,” has been cut back, but is still part of the state education curriculum.
Oddly, our Assistant Secretary of State Robert O’ Blake was quick to point out that
…human rights is not as big an issue in Turkmenistan as it is in some of the other Central Asian countries.
Really?
I wonder if it had something to do with this earlier comment he made in the same meeting:
U.S. [oil] companies are already doing a lot of business in Turkmenistan, particularly offshore, and are interested, I think, in doing more work to develop some of the onshore hydrocarbon resources there. And so the Secretary conveyed that interest. The Turkmen president said that he’s going to be meeting – in fact, next – tomorrow – with a lot of the U.S. oil companies to, again, explore what more they can do in Turkmenistan. So that’s certainly a welcome development.
So remind me again, what was it that we had hoped would change with this new administration?
I really can’t remember!
