Vice Premier Rashid Meredov at UN General Assembly in 2008.
After essentially re-appointing himself in the charade elections this month, Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has re-appointed his cabinet.
And despite the predictions made by some in the past, Rashid Meredov, the foreign minister and vice premier, has been re-appointed to his posts, turkmenistan.ru reported.
Also, in a separate resolution, Meredov has been appointed as chair of the Commission on Caspian Sea Issues (which is supposed to resolve legal conflicts with Azerbaijan about borders and resolve the overall legal status of the Caspian Sea with the other littoral states, particularly Iran and Russia, which don't recognize the concept of bilateral resolutions).
Meredov is the last official to remain in government from past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov's cabinet (Berdymukhamedov himself wasn't in the cabinet).
In 2009, Chary Ishiniyazov, a former Turkmen diplomat who knows the inside story of Turkmenistan wrote an article for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in which he reported the two remaining Niyazov cabinet members -- Meredov and the unfortunate Tachberdy Tagiev, who was once responsible for the oil and gas industry. Tagiev was dismissed in 2010, some say because of something to do with possibly warning foreigners that the gas reserves weren't as vast as claimed, but now he has essentially disappeared, hopefully not into jail.
Meredov represents Turkmenistan when Berdymukhamedov doesn't come to the UN General Assembly (see above). Of course he's plugged into every single foreign relationship, and most of those foreign relationships revolve around oil and gas. So he's a very, very important personage, a personage who has (as we know from WikiLeaks and travellers' accounts) plays the role of liberal to other ministers' role as conservatives and who represents then a certain "stability" for the regime.
Scare quotes, because nothing about tyranny is ever really stable forever.
Berdymukhamedov dismantled the obvious signs of Niyazov's tyranny, the funny names for the days of the week, the stunted years of school and de-staffed health clinics, and some of the obvious trappings -- his face on bills and walls, his cult-book, Ruhnama everywhere.
But the essential Soviet-style totalitarian system inherited and enhanced by Niyazov is still in place and not going anywhere any time soon. Meredov is part of that equation, and while we can take seriously Amb. Ishiniyazov's prediction in 2009 that he might lose his job "soon" (because no job is safe in Turkmenistan's volatile government), it seems he has managed to cling to the apex of power for now.
