Tearing down the statue of a megalomaniac dictator is usually a joy reserved for the citizens of a newly liberated country. But when, last month, President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov of Turkmenistan ordered the removal of his predecessor Saparmurat Niyazov’s Neutrality Arch, he was probably the only Turkman with any illusions of freedom.
For more than ten years this extraordinary monument — a giant, futuristic tripod, topped by a gold figure of Niyazov in a superman cape, which rotates to face the sun — has hovered menacingly above the skyline of the Turkmenistan capital Ashgabat. Niyazov called himself Turkmenbashi, ‘leader of the Turkmen’. The demolition of his monument, of course, will not mean that his people are rid of their chains.
Niyazov’s rule was mind-bendingly weird. He disliked gold teeth, the circus and the opera, so he banned them. He renamed the month of January after himself, and April after his mother, Gurbansoltan eje. He forced his subjects to read The Ruhnama, a ‘holy book’ of his own composition, consisting of myth, autobiography, bad history, moral platitudes and rancid poems.
Orphaned in an earthquake in 1948 at the age of eight, raised in a Soviet children’s home, and educated in Leningrad, Niyazov was appointed First Secretary of Soviet Turkmenistan by Gorbachev in 1985. Over the next years he acquired a reputation as an efficient manager of the Central Asian republic, which had been invented in 1924 by Soviet technocrats, with some assistance from the regional elite.
Nobody could have predicted that, when Turkmenistan achieved independence in 1991, its hitherto servile First Secretary would go berserk, forcing his people to worship him as a god, and throwing opponents into grim desert prisons. Indeed, for a brief period Niyazov seemed poised to challenge Kim Jong Il for the title of supreme loon of global politics.
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