Crackdown on Moonlighting Turkmen Doctors

The authorities in Turkmenistan have launched a crackdown on doctors who go on working trips abroad to earn money as traders.

In late September, the Turkmen Human Rights Initiative website, based outside the country, reported that health officials and security service officers were checking doctors’ passports for evidence of foreign travel,

"Many healthcare workers, in addition to their primary activity, have been travelling abroad for ‘shuttle-trading’ business," Khronika Turkmenistana said. "Colleagues make arrangements to change their shifts so that one covers two jobs while the other other goes abroad to buy goods in China, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Turkey, Iran or Kazakstan."

If the inspection reveals a visa or border stamp in a doctor's passport, he or she is forced to repay wages for the whole month in question, not just the shifts that were missed.

An analyst in Turkmenistan says that when similar inspections were carried out last year, some doctors deliberately “lost” or defaced their passports to escape punishment.

An observer in the capital Ashgabat says that occasional shop trips to buy goods for resale on the local market help doctors make up for their low pay, which is slightly above the national average and comes to 200 or 230 US dollars a month, using the fixed official exchange rate. They use their holiday leave for the same purpose.

“Many female doctors have to support their families, given the high unemployment rate in the country,” the observer said. “They go abroad to buy goods not because they’re well-off but because they have to get their children through school, feed them, and provide them with clothing and shoes.”

Doctors say their lives have got worse since President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, a dentist by training, was elected in 2007 and launched reforms of the healthcare system.

Although hundreds of millions of dollars have been earmarked to build new hospitals, doctors have not had a pay rise, and the rising price of health services has driven patients away, they say.

For their part, the authorities are annoyed that doctors are not only insufficiently trained, but are frequently absent from work for trading trips abroad.

A lawyer in Ashgabat, who supports the crackdown, said doctors should not be breaching their code of medical ethics in this manner.

“Imagine a situation where an urgent operation has to be done but there is no doctor,” he said.

Human rights defenders see the passport checks as a violation of the right to freedom of movement. In other areas, the government continues to operate secret blacklists of people who are not allowed to go abroad, and even movement within Turkmenistan is closely watched by the secret service.

The head of a civil society group in the eastern Lebap region said the crackdown probably reflected the government’s dislike of local doctors getting to close to their foreign counterparts, perhaps by using shopping trips as cover for attending health seminars abroad.

He recalled that when the international healthcare aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres was forced to pull out of Turkmenistan last year, many doctors were called in by the authorities and told not to give out any information, otherwise they might be accused of espionage.

This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.