The pension crisis in Turkmenistan has begun to elicit a response since it was publicised in the British press. Writing to the letters page in the Guardian Professor Martin McKee, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, argued that the newspapers description of events is but only the tip of the iceberg in Turkmenistan. He goes on to highlight what he considers the deteriorating health situation in the country, commenting that:

For many Turkmen citizens, healthcare is now unaffordable, child mortality is reported to have risen dramatically (to the extent that observers report a visible increase in the number of graves of young children), nurses are joining the growing number of commercial sex workers and outbreaks of infectious disease, including plague, are being concealed. In stark contrast, President Niyazov’s health is ensured by teams of German doctors flown in at enormous expense each year.

Further, he also criticised Niyazov’s education policy.

The Turkmen government has also effectively dismantled the education system, creating a lost generation whose world view is framed by the Ruhnama, a collection of President Niyazov’s eccentric reflections on the world, that is now compulsory reading. While public services are being cut, millions of dollars are flowing to a few US, French and Turkish companies involved in President Niyazov’s grandiose projects. They should perhaps consider whether they really want to be associated with this regime.

Professor Martin McKee letter to the Guardian can be found here.

RFE/RL have been reporting senior citizen protests in reaction to the pension cuts. They have reported that small-scale protests have been occurring in front of government offices in the Ilyaly and Kunya-Urgench districts of northern Dashoguz province. While another report places a crowd of pensioners holding a protest in the centre of the western port city of Turkmenbashi. Protests of any nature are not a well-known feature of Turkmenistan’s political life. According to the RFE/RL report the recent pension cuts has:

stirred an immediate uproar and caused many elderly people to collapse. Some of them were reportedly hospitalized.

Further the report argues that unemployment is complicating the situation:

The severity of the situation is complicated due to mass unemployment in Turkmenistan. Accurate unemployment figures in the country are hard to come by, but independent groups agree it is exceptionally high. Nongovernmental organizations have reported that labor exchanges in the country cannot adequately cope with the amount of people seeking work. People seeking work at some employment offices can wait in lines for days. And many unemployed are not even registered as being without work because they can’t afford the unemployment services.

The full report can be found here. In many ways it should be no surprise that senior citizens are leading the protests. Apart from the obvious reason that it is their pensions that have been cut it is also worth considering that it is exactly this generation who worked during Brezhnev’s social contract era. The concept of the Brezhnev social contract was not set in terms of Rousseau’s liberalism, but was a somewhat unspoken agreement for the population to be pliant in the face of an authoritarian regime in return for the state to look after and cater for their well being. Many commentators have acknowledged that after the collapse of the Soviet Union Niyazov continued the tradition of the social contract offering free electricity and other such public subsidies. If the pension cut signifies a move away from a loose version of a social contract it could begin to put great pressure on, and endanger, the Niyazov regime.