Few Central Asian rulers received as much world attention as Saparmurat Niyazov, the ruthless dictator of Turkmenistan. His formal title was Turkmenbashi, father of all Turkmen and he placed himself at the heart of an obsessive national personality cult.
He was famous for his tyrannical eccentricities, such as ordering the construction of a "Golden Age Lake" in the desert at a projected cost of $6.5 billion, and decreeing that the months and days of the week be named after himself and his family.
It was only toward the end of his life that international concern grew about the consequences of his absolute rule. With no successor, no trusted elite and no civil society, it was widely predicted that on his death the vast, arid but energy-rich Turkmenistan would slide into civil war.
Saparmurat Niyazov was born in 1940 into a working-class family. His father was killed in action in the Second World War, and when he was eight his mother and all his close relatives died in an earthquake that struck the capital, Ashgabat. He lived in an orphanage until he finished school in 1959.
In the early 1960s he went to Leningrad Polytechnic Institute to study power engineering, and worked in a Leningrad factory as a moulder. In 1967 he returned to the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, and started work in Bezmeyskaya Power Station, near Ashgabat.
He had joined the Communist Party in 1962 and worked as an instructor with the Trade Union Organisation of Mineral Prospecting Works in Turkmenistan. By 1984 he had risen to head of section and first secretary of the Ashgabat City Committee of the Turkmenistan Communist Party.
In December 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Niyazov as First Secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee of Turkmenistan. On January 13, 1990, he was elected chairman of the Turkmen SSR Supreme Soviet and when, barely six months later, the mainly Muslim Turkmenistan had declared independence from the collapsing Soviet Union, he became its first President.
His position was rubber stamped by a referendum on June 21, 1992, in which he stood unopposed for president and won with 99.5 per cent of the vote. So great was the people’s love for him, that he was also elected Prime Minister too, a post he held concurrently with that of President up to his death.
Turkmenistan in the 1990s was a grim place. It had suffered more than other Central Asian Republics from the quasi-feudal system the command economy encouraged.
In spite of being nearly 80 per cent desert, Turkmenistan produced twice as much cotton per head as its neighbours. The water courses were polluted with nitrates and pesticides, and an irresponsible irrigation system had contributed to the collapse of the Aral Sea area as a viable ecosystem.
Villages closest to the sea suffered infant mortality rates of 64 per 1,000. When, soon after independence, the desperate plight of the population was put to Niyazov at the 24th Party Congress, his only response was silence.
In the 1990s his rule changed from what had been, in the late 1980s, a strictly authoritarian Soviet-style leadership, to a more nationalistic rule based in a concept of Turkmen ethnic supremacy.
In the early 1990s he encouraged foreign investment, introduced the manta as currency, and announced moderate economic reforms. These tentative steps had little effect since Turkmenistan’s economy was mainly a cash-based one, with few international banks and a small, poorly developed financial sector.
There were sporadic cautious approaches to foreign companies and governments, as Niyazov was aware that his regime was supported by the revenues generated from the export of oil and gas.
But he clung to a notion of "neutrality", refusing to accommodate foreign military bases and remaining outside China-centred economic unions such as the Shanghai grouping of Former Soviet Union Central Asian states.
This concept of "neutrality" became a quasi-spiritual one with himself at the heart of a personality cult. Niyazov wrote lengthy speeches on the subject, and had a 12m-high gold statue of himself placed on the Neutrality Arch in Ashgabat, the capital’s tallest building; the statue rotates so that the sun shines constantly on his face.
Complete neutrality was out of the question. Turkmenistan has great strategic importance, significant oil reserves and the fifth-largest natural gas deposits in the world. Niyazov used these resources cautiously and failed to develop the infrastructure that would yield greater income.
Many of the most recent contracts concluded with the Russian company Gazprom included pay deals that split cash with technical assistance, and even joint exploration rights. In April 1998 Niyazov went to Washington to meet President Clinton, and walked away with a $750,000 grant from the US Trade Development Agency to investigate pipeline feasibility studies.
In Clinton’s first term, $34.9 million was allocated in aid to Turkmenistan, $2.6 million of that being military aid. By 2003 that figure had risen to $19.2 million in military aid, in gratitude for the support Turkmenistan had showed to the US operation in Afghanistan — although Niyazov had close dealings with the Taleban, he opened up Turkmen airspace for American troops.
His personality cult was all pervasive. Posters and portraits of him adorned everything from public places to vodka bottles. He controlled all media, and the intervals between his televised speeches was filled with dance and song performances in his honour with such titles as "The Lessons of the Great Saparmurat the Turkmenbashi" or "The XXI Century as the Golden Century for the Turkmen People!".
Like Caligula he named a month after his father, and paraded his mother’s image as that of the divine and eternal feminine. Like Caligula, too, he had a fear of exiles, and persecuted the relatives of all who fled the country.
His Ruhnama (book of the spirit) is mandatory reading in all schools. For much of his rule it stood alongside the only two permitted religions: Russian Orthodox Christianity and Sunni Islam. It was included in driving tests, sent into space on a Russian rocket and written on mosque walls. When imams opposed this sacrilege, they were arrested.
Niyazov intended it as a reinterpretation of the Turkmens’ role in world history, and a re-establishment of their national identity. In reality it is a rambling work, with neither literary merit nor reliable history.
In May 2004 in a speech to a congress of youth groups he defined it as follows: "In order to understand the sacredness of the state, it is necessary to comprehend five values which make up the foundation of patriotic education. The first of these is Ruhnama. Ruhnama is the chief book of the Turkmen people . . . Again and again read Ruhnama . . . because at each stage of life ever greater and greater meaning of this book is discovered."
By foregrounding the Ruhnama in the education system, Niyazov was responsible for the slow smothering of any intellectual life in Turkmenistan, something formalised as policy when he closed the Turkmen Academy of Sciences.
On his order, in 2002, theatres and opera houses have been closed, and recorded music banned, and he was quoted as saying "How can the Turkmen people be encouraged to love ballet if there is no ballet in their blood? I do not understand ballet — what use is it then to me?"
Throughout his rule he made frequent statements about the need to promote the "purity" of the Turkmen people, and the need to purge the state of all those who "dilute" its blood.
His December 2002 televised speech is typical of these statements: "In order to weaken the Turkmen, the blood of the Turkmen was diluted in the past. When the righteous blood of our ancestors was diluted by other blood our national spirit was low . . . Every person has to have a clean origin. Because of that it is necessary to check the origin up to the third generation."
This "Turkmenification"dominated all aspects of public life as Niyazov sought to eradicate was the complex weave of ethnic and religious identities that had become the fabric of life in the area through a series of colonisations dating from 6BC and the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great.
Post-Soviet Turkmenistan was home to Russians, Uzbeks, Azeris, Iranians, Armenians and Baluchis, and it was this ethnic diversity that he sought to suppress by outlawing dual nationality, excluding non-Turkmen (and, later, anyone educated abroad) from public office and introducing his new version of Turkmen (using the Latin rather than the Cyrillic script) as the national language.
Although Turkmenistan was signatory to all UN treaties regarding human rights, Niyazov displayed a singular disregard for all but the rhetoric of these agreements. When required to submit reports to international organisations regarding the human-rights situation in Turkmenistan, his officials sent documents detailing, among other affairs, the successes of the textile industry.
He abolished the death penalty but defined treason as "efforts to sow doubt about the domestic and foreign policy conducted by the first President for life of Turkmenistan the Great Saparmurat Turkmenbashi". When his policy to his opponents was queried by foreign journalists, he replied: "You have been misinformed. We have no opposition."
Despite the constitution adopted on independence from the Soviet Union which stipulated the separation of the judicial, legislative and executive powers, there was no independent judiciary in Turkmenistan. After a reported assassination attempt on Niyazov in November 2002, more than 40 people were arrested, tortured, drugged, deprived of all defence counsel and tried in televised show trials.
Niyazov did not, however, accept any criticism of his legal system, and in its defence pointed on one occasion to the fact that in the past five years there had been no acquittal in a criminal case.
A decade into his Presidency for Life in 2003 he stripped the Parliament of its residual powers, and declared the Halk Maslahaty (people’s council) the highest legislative body. Niyazov was also Chairman for Life of that body.
As he was also the leader of the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan (formerly the Communist Party) there was no aspect of political, legal or public life that did not depend on his whims or obsessions. When, for example, he made an informal comment about disliking gold teeth, women throughout the country rushed to the dentist rather than risk his wrath.
The health problems inherited from Soviet times were compounded by decades of under-investment. Foreign grants in the 1990s destined for the ailing health sector were misappropriated.
Niyazov himself was looked after by five German doctors. When they advised him to stop smoking, after heart surgery in 1997, he banned tobacco (he continued, however, to advise the nation of the health benefits of opium).
Many medical professionals fled abroad as working conditions and lack of basic medical equipment in Turkmenistan became intolerable. Niyazov reacted to the deepening crisis in the health sector by sacking the remaining doctors, replacing them with army conscripts, and subsequently announcing the closure of all medical centres outside the capital.
In remote villages anaemia, malnutrition and respiratory diseases are now widespread, and there are sporadic outbreaks of bubonic plague.
What Niyazov created out of the former Soviet Republic was an absolute monarchy. He saw no distinction between the state budget and his own, and since 2002 there were repeated allegations of his involvement in drug trafficking.
The Stalinesque purges he sporadically initiated crept ever closer to his elite circle, and in the past two years his personal adviser and the former head of the oil industry were arrested, denounced, and stripped of their titles.
In cementing his personal position to such an extreme and tyrannical extent, in uniting the concept of the state with his own person, in squandering his country’s resources on grandiose construction projects and in sowing the seeds of ethnic discord among his ever more impoverished population, Niyazov was largely responsible for turning Turkmenistan into a failed state and contributing to the instability of an already unstable region.
Niyazov is survived by his wife and two children.
Saparmurat Niyazov, President of Turkmenistan, was born on February 19, 1940. He died of heart failure on December 21, 2006, aged 66
