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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Latest ban in Turkmenistan: libraries |
| 2005-04-21 |
| A few days ago, I posted an article from IWPR that put the Iraqi Kurds in a negative light, provoking some criticism here about IWPR's agenda. Whatever their agenda may be, they are no friends of dictators or slaves to political correctness, and they shine a harsh spotlight on the world's most malignant regimes. Case in point... President Saparmurat Niazov has added public libraries to the long list of things banned in Turkmenistan ... Turkmen have grown used to living without opera, ballet, cinemas and even circuses — all forbidden by Niazov — but they say his decision to close all libraries cuts especially deep. His explanation at a meeting of cabinet ministers was simple, "No one goes to libraries and reads books anyway." ... Only the national library appears to have escaped the purge, so, according to Niazov, it can house new Turkmen literature as well as historical texts. The president said any more libraries are unnecessary as most books that Turkmen need — many written by Niazov himself — should already be in homes, workplaces and schools. Those include the Niazov-penned Rukhnama — a spiritual treatise that is the basis of the country's education system - poems written by the president as well biographies of him and his parents. ... "To read all these books it is not necessary to go to the library as all these books should be close at hand for everyone," Niazov said. In the late 1990s, he ordered classics of Turkmen literature ... pulled from the shelves and burned. Crucially, these works contradict Turkmenbashi's own writings, particularly his most important work, the Rukhnama, which denies any influence by civilisation, science or culture on the development of the Turkmen people. It also says the Turkmen invented the wheel and writing. Though universities still have libraries, the supplies of books have not been updated for ten years while many works on history, literature and biology have been removed and destroyed. Bookshops elegantly display the president's works, but no other literature is sold. Bringing books into the country privately has become almost impossible as the government has set high customs duties on the import of printed material. Certain magazines including Cosmopolitan are available from private shops and stalls but since June 2002 subscriptions to foreign periodicals have been prohibited. Access to the web is expensive and limited and as a result most young people have never heard of the internet. I detest the MSM's "aww, ain't he just the wackiest wittle guy?" attitude about Niazov. North Korea is the only society on Earth matching this one for sheer ideology-driven isolation, and Kim's only advantage over this asshole is having more subjects/prisoners to brutalize. Niazov's almost too much of a caricature to really exist, like some computer-generated opponent in a WOT wargame scenario: a Stalinist personality cult with a secular/nationalist veneer, all funded by the random whim of fortuitous oil and gas deposits, without which the regime would collapse ... leaving behind a vulnerable, tribal-based Islamic society ripe for jihadism. |
| Posted by:Rex Rufus |