Shame!
I’ll start by quoting news that I read today in the morning on the Turkmenistan.ru website. I must confess that I was dumbfounded after reading it. I didn’t know whether I should start laughing or crying first. Here’s a quote from the article:
President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov was awarded an international order “For Outstanding Achievements in information science. The Turkmen leader received the award and an relevant certificate today from the Head of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the UN Secretariat Alexey Tikhomirov and another UN employee, President of the International Informatization Academy Alexandr Khariton.
Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov was granted the award for achieving considerable progress in reforming national education and science with the impact on implementation of IT technologies. In relation to this, Alexey Tikhomirov expressed a suggestion that a regional IT seminar should be organized in Ashgabat - the press service has informed.
I understand that the UN seeks to establish the best possible relations with Ashgabat in order to be able to carry out humanitarian work in Turkmenistan. I could also speculate if awarding the order to Berdymukhamedov wasn’t by any chance inspired by Russia (judging by the names of the UN officials mentioned in the quotation).
Nevertheless, there is only one word that comes to my mind as a comment to what the United Nations have done: shame. How can one award an order for achievements in the development of informatiology to the president of a country that has practically no access to Internet, where only state-owned media are allowed to function and independent journalists are either in prison or in exile and the only independent source of information is satellite TV ( access to which has recently been limited as well)?
If the UN wants to continue moving in this direction, I have a suggestion: why don’t you award an order for achievements in fighting world famine to Kim Jong Il and one for successful fight against terrorism to Muammar Kadafi!
on February 20th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
A very important topic, well done. As somebody without diret access to Turkmen media, I have a question: can anyone tell me a bit about how this UN praise and order for the Turkmen leader was ‘used’ in the local media? Did they make a big deal out of it or? Any examples/links would be most appreciated.
on February 20th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Of course, this event was broadly covered by the Turkmen media, whose main aim is to inform about the activity of the president. Look e.g. at this link:
http://www.turkmenistan.gov.tm/_en/?idr=1&id=080219g
on February 20th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
This is just shameful. The UN needs to grow some. He has done some liberalization but not nearly enough. Turkmenistan is still largely closed to the outside world.
on February 20th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
The first thought was this was a US move, but they want to help Turkmenistan’s many poor and impoverished. This is not the way to go about it.