46 Sentenced in Alleged Hit on Turkmen Leader
Rights activists decry closed-door trials in what opposition says was a staged coup bid by the authoritarian
president.
"Josef Stalin.
Niyazov, 62, was the
Communist boss of
Turkmenistan in the final
years of the Soviet Union
and has ruled the
country, a largely desert
land of 4.7 million people,
since 1990."
January 26, 2003
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THE WORLD
By David Holley, Times Staff Writer
MOSCOW -- In closed-door trials seen by critics as an effort to crush political
opposition, 46 people have been convicted of trying to assassinate
Turkmenistan's president, Saparmurad A. Niyazov, a Russian news agency
reported Saturday.
The largely secret proceedings followed what the government of the Central
Asian nation says was an attack on Nov. 25 on the presidential motorcade. The
alleged attack did not injure the president-for-life, but four police officers were
wounded, officials have said.
International human
rights organizations have
condemned the trials as
reminiscent of 1930s
purges under Soviet
dictator Josef Stalin.
Niyazov, 62, was the
Communist boss of
Turkmenistan in the final
years of the Soviet Union
and has ruled the
country, a largely desert
land of 4.7 million people,
since 1990.
"Trials were held, and 46
people were sentenced.
There are five or six
other accomplices, but we are not going to look for them now," Niyazov said on
Turkmen television Friday night, the Interfax news agency said Saturday.
"I have no doubt that Niyazov staged this coup attempt himself," Avdy Kuliyev, a former Turkmen foreign
minister who now heads the country's Moscow-based opposition, said in an interview Saturday. "It helped
him to tighten the screws even harder. His regime now is one of the most totalitarian regimes in the
world."
In a December trial that lasted less than a day, Boris Shikhmuradov, another former Turkmen foreign
minister who had joined opponents of Niyazov, was convicted of masterminding the alleged attack and
was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Television news showed Shikhmuradov confessing to terrorist acts and drug use, but he spoke with
difficulty, his face appeared puffy, and his head wobbled.
"He might have been tortured, which broke his will, and he made those wild confessions," Kuliyev said.
Kuliyev added that Shikhmuradov, who was his deputy in the Foreign Ministry in the early 1990s, had
"made a big mistake."
"He spoke openly about the need to violently overthrow the regime by staging a coup," Kuliyev said. "I
argued with him many times that we should legalize the opposition in the country with the help of the
United States and other democratic countries and international institutions, but he wouldn't agree.... He
gave Niyazov a big chance to outsmart him in this game of violence where all the trump cards were in
Niyazov's hand."
Other defendants were convicted this month. These include former parliament speaker Tagandurdy
Halliyev, sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment; businessman Yklym Yklymov, given a life sentence; and
businessman Guvanch Dzhumayev, who was accused of being a key organizer and was also sentenced to
life in prison.
Niyazov has ordered that a book be published about the assassination attempt and the trials to ensure that
those convicted can never again claim innocence, Turkmen media reported last week.
"The task of this publication is to stigmatize once and for all this treachery, which knows no like in our
history and which should never darken our progress again," the official Neutralny Turkmenistan
newspaper said.
Niyazov has sometimes been credited for avoiding the kind of civil war between government forces and
Islamic militants that plagued neighboring Tajikistan after its 1991 independence. U.S. Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld met with Niyazov in April and thanked him for the use of Turkmen airspace by U.S.
forces involved in fighting in Afghanistan.
But the authoritarian leader has gained a reputation for eccentricity. He uses the name Turkmenbashi, or
"Father of all the Turkmen," and last year renamed the months of January, April and September after
himself, his mother and the Ruhnama, a history and spiritual guide that he is said to have written.
A revolving 35-foot golden statue of Niyazov in the capital, Ashgabat, is perched atop the giant Arch of
Neutrality, a symbol of the president's policy of remaining largely isolated to avoid the potentially
dominating influences of Russia, Uzbekistan and Iran. The statue's arms are raised to welcome the sun at
dawn and bid it farewell at dusk.
Shikhmuradov's conviction and sentencing "showed no regard for fundamental due process rights," New
York-based Human Rights Watch said after his trial. The group said Shikhmuradov had been living in
exile since November 2001 but was arrested in Ashgabat in December.
"Shikhmuradov claims he had been in the country since September to plan and lead a civil disobedience
movement," the rights group said.
"Turkmenistan is one of the most repressive countries in the world," said Elizabeth Andersen, executive
director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia division. "We've seen in the past how
dissidents have been tortured and sentenced to long prison terms in show trials.... There is little doubt that
the text of Shikhmuradov's 'confession' was dictated to him."
The court proceedings in Turkmenistan "do not just remind one of the Stalinist trials of the 1930s," Russian
political commentator Alexander Arkhangelsky wrote last week in the daily newspaper Izvestia. "It is
modern Stalinism resurrected from the ashes."
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