Turkmen Rights Activists Brief US Congress Official on Problems

Non-government groups in Turkmenistan had a rare opportunity to air their concerns at a September 1 meeting with an official from the United States Congress.

“I would like to hear your assessment of the current situation in Turkmenistan as civil society leaders,” Brent Woolfork, a staff member  of Congress’s House Foreign Affairs Committee, asked the assembled NGO representatives. “Has it become more difficult or easier for you to work in recent years?”

An activist who attended the meeting said the reply was unanimous. In his words, “It has become much more difficult to work and many people give up, since most of civil society organisations still don’t have [official] registration and cannot work.”

The activist said Woolfork listened carefully over the course of a long meeting.

“We were pleased that our problems were taken seriously,” he said. “It inspires optimism.”

The head of a youth group said after the meeting that the only way things would improve would be if the legislation governing non-government groups was reformed. Currently, the law gives the government absolute control over NGOs’ activities, funding and assets. Few or no new groups are receiving official registration, their applications either rejected or ignored for years.

“The registration procedure needs to be simplified and activists must be given more rights and freedoms,” the youth group leader said.

“Maybe our candid remarks at the meeting...  will help the Turkmen authorities understand our problems better,” she added.

A freelance journalist said the already difficult situation facing the NGO sector got even worse after two US-funded programmes came to a close – Counterpart Consortium’s work to develop civil society groups, and IREX’s computer literacy courses.

A member of a group involved in drug abuse prevention agreed, saying, “At that time, we received information disseminated by Counterpart Consortium. But after their projects closed, we were left stranded as if on an island.”

Officially, there are several hundred “public associations” in Turkmenistan, but many are government-run or pursue commercial aims.

As IWPR/NBCentralAsia reported last year, even the most innocuous groups were consistently denied legal registration such as scientists who wanted to teach farmers about eco-friendly crops, a group that wanted to hold summer camps for children, and attempts to encourage beekeeping and rabbit-farming. Human rights groups, journalistic and environmental associations have little chance of recognition.

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