Turkmenistan Clamps Down on Second Passports

Turkmenistan has long refused to recognise dual nationality, but a recent clear statement reinforcing this position is likely to mean worse times ahead for people with a second, Russian passport.

The Turkmen foreign ministry issued a statement on July 7 saying that the constitution made no provision for dual nationality.

This restatement of the position was necessary, the ministry said, because “in recent days certain media have carried reports about people with so-called ‘dual nationality’ crossing the Turkmen border”.

That in itself was a remarkable admission, since the “certain media” referred to are run by the Turkmen opposition in exile, and are normally treated with a stony silence by the authorities.

Earlier in July, the chrono-tm.org website reported that Turkmenistan nationals who also held Russian citizenship were not being allowed to leave the country, and were being told they must give up one of the two passports.

Turkmenistan maintains the strictest restrictions on movement of any Central Asian state, and citizens on Turkmen passports must apply for permission to leave the country even for a short trip abroad. Permits are limited to a named destination and are valid only for a specified period.

Since 1999, exit visas have been required to visit other former Soviet states, which generally make it easy for their citizens to travel as so many retain family and business connections in other parts of what used to be the USSR.

Local observers say the National Security Committee uses the exit visa system as a way of withholding travel rights from anyone whose loyalty to the regime is deemed suspect.

Russia and Turkmenistan agreed a dual nationality arrangement in 1993, and large numbers of people – of Turkmen as well as Russian ethnicity – availed themselves of second passports.

Turkmenistan withdrew from the agreement unilaterally after a failed assassination attempt in late 2002 prompted the then president Saparmurat Niazov to tighten controls on cross-border travel.

Legal experts say that because Moscow did not cancel it, the bilateral agreement is still valid, and in practice people with dual nationality continued to travel on their Russian passports to avoid having to apply for visas. Possession of a Russian passport not only opens the door to visa-free visits to Russia and its immediate neighbours, but also makes it a lot easier to go to western states.

While there are no official statistics for how many Turkmen nationals hold Russian passports, human rights activists have put the figure at about 100,000.

In 2008, the authorities began issuing new-style biometric passports, and people applying for them soon reported they were being told they must renounce Russian citizenship if they had it.

The latest statement appears to herald a new clampdown on people with dual nationality, and goes against the spirit of pledges of reform and greater openness made by President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov when he succeeded the late Niazov in 2007.

Tajigul Begmedova, head of the Turkmen Helsinki Fund based in Bulgaria, says the new Turkmen passports offer the authorities an opportunity to force everyone into the same system.

“If everyone in the country has only the one citizenship, that immediately eliminates the problem of people who enjoy the relatively privileged position of having a second one, which theoretically allows them to seek protection from Russia,” she said, adding that there had been cases where individuals had sought help from the Russian embassy and subsequently the European Court of Human Rights.

Russian passport-holders in Turkmenistan, she said, were regarded “as law-breakers by junior officials, and as potential opponents of the regime by the security services”.

Vyacheslav Mamedov, head of the Civil Democratic Union, a Turkmen émigré group based in the Netherlands, says dual citizenship arrangements are binding international undertakings that cannot be altered on the whim of one of the states concerned.

Moscow should be doing a lot more to protect its nationals than it is now, since at the moment only its embassy is liaising with Turkmen officials on the issue, he said.

Mamedov suspects President Berdymuhammedov and his entourage are behind the latest restatement of Turkmenistan’s refusal to recognise dual citizenship.

“Their actions are motivated by ill-concealed irritation that some Turkmen citizens are enjoying benefits conferred by international agreements. They take the view that they and they alone should decide on exit rights, and that there can be no exemptions.”

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