Turkmenistan's natural gas: mixed blessing

Tom Mayne, a campaigner with the anti-corruption advocacy group Global Witness, says Turkmenistan's resource wealth benefited a precious few. "If you look around at the country, you see all these fabulous marble buildings, opulent palaces, mosques," he says. "You kind of get a suggestion of where the money is going. Under Niyazov, it didn't seem to be going to the people."

Part of the problem, Mr. Mayne says, is that state spending is nearly impossible to track. His group's April 2006 report on the Turkmen gas trade estimates that up to 75 percent of government revenue is channeled into a series of opaque reserve funds, many of which are controlled directly by the president.

New finds would put Turkmenistan in Top 5

British Petroleum's Statistical Review of World Energy ranks Turkmenistan's gas reserves as 12th largest in the world, according to 2005 estimates of 2.9 trillion cubic meters (t.c.m.). But those numbers don't include the government's recent finds of reserves totaling 7 t.c.m., unconfirmed by industry analysts. The additional finds would put Turkmenistan's gas reserves among the Top 5 in the world.

Although Russia won the latest skirmish in the battle for Turkmenistan's resources, Niyazov's successor, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, has been careful not to shut the door on the West. After announcing the Russian pipeline deal, the new president said plans for a US-backed pipeline under the Caspian Sea were also feasible.

A close associate of Niyazov, Mr. Berdymukhammedov nonetheless appears ready to reverse some of the worst aspects of Niyazov's rule. He has promised to restore pensions, provide greater Internet access, and reform compulsory education.

But eager as the West may be to see Turkmenistan open up economically, experts warn that the new president's reform initiatives are trivial when compared with the magnitude of the problems sown in the Niyazov era.

"Practically nothing concrete has happened so far," says Farid Tuhbatullin of the Vienna-based Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights. Hopes for a transformation, he says, will be dashed if the international community does not "exert the necessary pressure on the new president to take more real, concrete steps."

Ms. Denber of Human Rights Watch agrees.

"Most [international] actors see an opening now for trying to find ways of bringing Turkmen gas to market without relying on Russia." However, Denber adds, "what should be ... on the international community's agenda for Turkmenistan right now is fundamental change and justice for the abuses of the past. I think that's not happening."

But an elderly Ashgabat intellectual, who has seen more than one dictator come and go, recommends patience.

"We Turkmen have a proverb by which I try to live," he says. "Better than wishing your enemy death is to ask Allah to give you long life."

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