Isolated, ruled until last December by an eccentric meglomaniac, Turkmenistan doesn’t seem like an attractive destination for international business. That’s until you consider its natural resources. The Christian Science Monitor reports that Turkmenistan’s reserves of natural gas are the 12th largest in the world, and, if recent claimed discoveries are accurate, possibly the 5th largest. That puts Turkmenistan in the same company as Russia, Iran and Qatar.
So what do we know about this country and its politics? The answer is: not much. In an essay in this week’s New Yorker, Paul Theroux describes a trip through Turkmenistan he took in 2006, in the last months of the Turkmenbashi’s reign.
Turkmenistan, from the time it gained indepencence from the Soviet Union, in 1991, until the end of 2006, was a tyranny, run by a madman, Saparmurat Niyazov. He died of heart failure last December, at the age of sixty-six, but while he lived he was one of the wealthiest and most powerful lunatics on earth. He treated Turkmenistan as his private kingdom, a land in which everything belonged to him, including the country’s plentiful natural gas…
It’s too early to tell how Niyazov’s successor, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, will fare. He’s only been on the job a couple of months. But actual and potential investors should ask themselves the following questions. Will Berdymukhammedov be able to rule in the same autocratic manner? And if the authoritarian government begins to crack, what will replace it?
