Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov was sworn in for a second five-year term on Friday in a ceremony that lauded the former dentist for his purported greatness after he clinched a landslide election victory.
Berdimuhamedov won 97 percent of the vote this week in an election so devoid of competition that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe declined to send observers.
The re-elected leader, 54, swore he would faithfully serve the Turkmen people before reclining in a gilded throne as performers sang: “May your good deeds continue, Arkadag.”
“I pledge faithfully and honestly to serve the people of Turkmenistan ... and to protect the independence and neutrality of Turkmenistan,” he said to rapturous applause.
Berdimuhamedov — also known as Arkadag (patron), by his subjects — listened to a series of eulogies in his honor, as a 3,000-strong audience, that included representatives of international energy companies vying for a share of the world’s joint fourth-largest natural gas reserves, looked on.
They included representatives of Chevron Corp and ExxonMobil Corp. Turkmenistan holds 4 percent of global gas reserves. It also controls significant oilfields in the Caspian Sea.
No foreign heads of state attended the ceremony, which took place amid tight security in the showpiece capital of Ashgabat. The audience was largely made up of Turkmen elders and political leaders who joined foreign diplomats and youth organizations inside the Palace of Congress.
Berdimuhamedov’s word is final in this former Soviet republic of 5.5 million people which borders Iran and Afghanistan and is ranked by rights groups among the world’s most repressive countries.
Anxious to win foreign investment and markets for the country’s gas, Berdimuhamedov has steadily tried to bring Turkmenistan out of the isolation that accompanied the eccentric rule of his predecessor and former Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov, who banned opera, circus, ballet and gold teeth.
Berdimuhamedov came to power in a February 2007 election, weeks after Niyazov’s sudden death, and swiftly set about dismantling the cult of personality that had surrounded -Turkmenistan’s first post-Soviet leader.
Although his absolutist tendencies pale next to those of his predecessor, there are signs that Berdimuhamedov is cultivating his own colorful image.
As performers sang eulogies to the president, video images showed him galloping on the back of a thoroughbred Akhal Teke horse — a national symbol of Turkmenistan — and playing folk melodies on a synthesizer.
Berdimuhamedov will appoint a new government within a month. In his first public comments since winning re-election, he pledged to build a market economy and a multi-party political system, as well as to fight drug trafficking and to relax controls on the media.
“We will create the conditions for a multi-party system in Turkmenistan,” he said in comments broadcast on state television two days before his inauguration.
A law permitting the registration of opposition parties came into force last month, only five days before registration of presidential candidates closed. Any locally-based party would be unlikely to threaten the dominance of the ruling Democratic Party.
Turkmenistan’s exiled opposition did not take part in the election, saying that Berdimuhamedov had not made good on a promise to invite his opponents back home to contest the vote.
Human Rights Watch has criticized “draconian restrictions” on media and religious freedoms in Turkmenistan. Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranked only North Korea and Eritrea below it in the organization’s 179-country press freedom index.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not