Nation-Building and Personality Cult in Turkmenistan by Fabio De Leonardis

Author:Fabio De Leonardis [Leonardis, Fabio De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367891855
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1 Much of the ‘outside’ expertise had been produced during the Cold War, and was thus characterized by a deep ideological bias (Tishkov 1997: 295).

2 For example, Edgar (2004: 2–14) and Martin (2002).

3 The term ‘Turkmen’ was first recorded in the tenth century, but it could not be assumed to identify a single ethnic group (Peyrouse 2007b: 63).

4 The first newspaper in Turkmen and Persian had been founded in 1910 (Peyrouse 2007b: 66).

5 Olivier Roy notices that in Soviet times local cadres used to rotate within a single republic, thus substantiating the administrative borders and reinforcing both their national allegiance and regionalist loyalty (Roy 2000: 107), like Latin America’s secular ‘pilgrims’ in Anderson’s account (2006: 52–65).

6 For example, in order to undermine tribalism Soviet power had tried to disrupt Tekke hegemony and to ensure equal treatment of all tribes, which the Tekke resented as an unjust attack on themselves (Kadyrov 2001).

7 For a critical discussion of this paradigm, see Zelkina (2003).

8 Turkmenbashi (Niyazov) Saparmurat Àtamuratovich: oficialnaia biografiia, CentrAsia.ru. Online www.centrasia.ru/person2.php?&st=1014156229. Emphasizing his orphanhood, the Turkmenistani press called him ‘son of the Turkmen people’, which recalled Stalin’s nickname as ‘son of the Georgian people’ (Akbarzadeh 1999: 274).

9 It should be added, though, that despite the country’s relatively low living standards, according to the UN Human Development Index they were still superior to those of many neighbouring non-Soviet countries, including Iraq and Turkey (Abazov 2005: lxxxviii).

10 Members of the movement later formed another organization, the Party for Democratic Development, which was also banned in 1991 (Clark et al. 1997: 357–8).

11 An oppositional party with the same name had been founded by some Turkmen democrats in December 1990, but it was not allowed to register and had subsequently to go underground and change its name into Party of Democratic Development, for the original name had been taken by the pro-government party (Ochs 1997: 326).

12 By self-orientalization I mean the recourse to traditional Western stereotypes about the ‘Orient’ and to ‘a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the “Orient” and […] “the Occident”’ (Said 2003: 2) and their appropriation and use in order to renegotiate one’s identity by ‘othering’ it as ‘Oriental’. Self-orientalization thus internalizes orientalist discourse but limits itself to turning upside down its axiological premises, without questioning its essentialist foundations. Unlike traditional Orientalism, self-orientalizing discourse was used by Niyazov to emphasize Turkmens’ allegedly irreducible difference in order to give legitimacy to an authoritarian political system as the only that fits them.

13 Here a parallel can be drawn with Fascist Italy, where the Mussolini cult was particularly widespread among the rural population, taking root in a long tradition of religious worshipping of divine and supernatural figures (Gentile 1996: 149).

14 Polese and Horák name two of them: Viktor Khramov, ‘so-called advisor of the president’ and Onjyk Musaew, who headed the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan until 2007 (Polese and Horák 2016: 170).

15 In 1994 Kuliev was declared ‘enemy of the people’, arrested and eventually allowed to go into exile to Russia (Bohr 2002: 424).

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