After the dramatic arrest of the General Prosecutor Gurbanbiby Atajanova in April, the time of reckoning has also come for another figure close to the Niyazov regime. President Saparmurat Niyazov had signed a decree in June ordering Kakamurad Balliyev’s dismissal from his position as editor as the Ministry of Defence’s official newspaper, Esger, for “serious shortcomings in the course of performing professional duties and committing a criminal offence”. It has now been reported that Balliyev has been handed a stiff prison sentence, as Arkady Dubnov explains in this partially translated article from Russian daily Vremya Novostei:

President Saparmurat Niyazov’s former press secretary Kakamurad Balliyev, it was announced recently, has been sentenced to a 17-year jail sentence. However, unlike the trial of other high-placed officials, nothing has yet been declared by the authorities about Balliyev’s closed trial. It is not even known exactly what charges were levelled against Balliyev.
Balliyev, 53, was arrested at the end of June this year, only a few days after the outbreak of the spy scandal. A few Western diplomats and journalists were then accused of involvement in opposition activities and filming in markets and the demolition of old houses.
Balliyev was a typical representative of the Niyazov elite, instrumental in forging the cult of personality and was believed to be devoted to his leader. The former General Prosecutor, Gurbanbiby Atajanova, who was recently sentenced to 20 years in jail for corruption, was also believed such a person. According to Vremya Novostei’s sources in Ashgabat, rumours had long been circulating about Atajanova and Balliyev’s propensity for greed and corruption some time before their arrest. And if, as unofficial sources have claimed, Balliyev’s charges were related to abuse of authority, it seems that the grounds for his arrest were substantial.

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Balliyev began his journalistic career in Soviet Turkmenistan, and in the mid-1980s he was disciplined by the party for appropriating other writers’ earnings. After that he worked as a radio editor. Balliyev’s career really took off in the mid-1990s. He worked his way up to deputy chairman of the Turkmen State Radio and Television Company, and was later appointed as Niyazov’s press secretary. In August 2002 he was dismissed from this job, but he remained in Niyazov’s circle and became the editor of the Esger (Warrior) newspaper.
As the author of a two-volume novel, The Righteous Path, based on the personal diaries of Niyazov in the 1980s, Balliyev made a name for himself through his other writings. In 2001, he published an article in Neutralniiy Turkmenistan entitled “Prophet Saparmurat”, which became the prototype for Turkmen agit-prop. As he wrote, “Saparmurat Niyazov is a national prophet, sent to the Turkmen people in the third millennium”. This definition raised a huge furore at the time among many Muslims, who found the statement blasphemous, inasmuch as it invited comparisons with a leader sent from God.
He was less successful in proposing that Turkmenistan be renamed Turkmenbashistan. This was mulled over in Niyazov’s circles for some time, but the risk was not taken. He did, however, manage to compel Turkmen journalists to refer to Niyazov as Turkmenbashi in all their articles. One journalist relates how he managed to avoid this diktat until Niyazov officially had this title put in his passport as his family name.
As the editor of the military newspaper, Warrior, Balliyev suggested that all government departments should have an official devoted to the instruction of Niyazov’s Rukhnama life guide. It is likely that it was after this the sitting of an exam on the Rukhnama became mandatory for anybody applying for a driving licence.
On one occasion, Niyazov declared during at a meeting in the Ruhaiyat Palace that “this person sometimes goes too far in eulogising my merits and I should sort him out; but what am I to do, he is a poet”. Balliyev replied that if the “beloved leader would kick me in the behind, I should take it as divine good fortune”. But could the architect have ever predicted that “good fortune” from the “prophet” would come in the form of a 17-year prison sentence?