Different Stans

Uzbek Suspects Acquitted in Muslim Cleric's Assassination Attempt Case

I have been hearing for some time that the suspect in the case of the attempted assassination of Obid-kori Nazarov, the Muslim cleric living in exile in Sweden, was a Russian who escaped from Sweden back to Russia via the Baltics, and/or Uzbeks who also managed to escape. I've heard different permutations of the story but not too much detail. I have written about the case in the past.

Now  this week comes the news from RFE/RL and uznews.net that a Swedish court has acquitted two Uzbek suspects, Bakhodyr Pulatov and Nodira Aminova, and they are free to leave Sweden if they wish. Apparently, while the suspects admitted that they told this third person, a Russian and Uzbek citizen, Yury Zhukovsky, where Nazarov could be located, they did this in innocence, i.e. as anyone in a community might do if asked about a public figure.

Hmm, that doesn't convince me, and I've finding some very odd things about the discrepancies between the way RFE/RL is covering this and uznews.net.

It's widely believed that the Uzbek secret police (the MNB) are behind this, and I would tend to agree, but there is no proof, and never would be for things like that. Now it seems the case has ground to a halt, despite the prosecutor's assertions that it was likely the Uzbek secret police.

RFE/RL's correspondent Rikard Jozwiak reports:

However, Nazarov's son, Dovudkhon Nazarov, told RFE/RL by phone that Nazarov's relatives will appeal the court's verdict.

"We are planning to complain against this court decision," he said. "There is no doubt that we are not fully satisfied with the decision. And we want to push the case to higher courts."

But oddly, Jozwiak says that Nazarov "supported the secular opposition" -- which doesn't track with everything we've read from other sources, including uznews.net which has been courageous enough to talk about the critique the secular opposition has of the Muslim clerics who they fear would take away their rights if they came to power. I'm not seeing it.

Further, says Nazarov constituted some sort of rival to President Islam Karimov -- "He was seen in some circles as a potential rival to Uzbek President Islam Karimov". Really? A Muslim cleric? Well, maybe in "some circles" -- but where are they today? I could see that he might be popular, or was popular before he fled into emigration, and might have his following in some regions or towns and some social strata. But it's quite a stretch to say in a post-Soviet country that is fairly secularized as Uzbekistan is that a religious leader could attract enough of a popular following to become president -- assuming there were free conditions. Again, that doesn't track either.

In any event, what's more odd about Rikard Jozwiak's report is what he leaves out -- which we get from uznews.net. And they don't just speculate -- as emigre publications are always accused of doing -- they got the verdict from the prosecutor's office and read it, and summarize it:

The court admitted that the suspects, Pulatov and Aminova, gave confusing and contradicting evidence. For example, they did not manage to explain what brought them from the southern Swedish town of Malmo, where they lived, to the northern town of Stromsund. Their explanation that they got lost and therefore travelled a thousand kilometres to Stromsund where Nazarov lived was not cogent.

I'll say. Truly, why were they 1,000 miles away and just happen to be in this community and just happened to know where Nazarov was?! It's a quiet Swedish town.

There's more:

According to the prosecutor’s office, the attempt on Nazarov’s life was organised by the National Security Service (SNB) of Uzbekistan. A man who shot at the imam is Yuriy Zhukovskiy, a citizen of Uzbekistan and Russia. He was in Stromsund on the day of attempted murder.

The detained couple assisted Zhukovskiy by renting a car for him, booking a hotel room and a flat. After shooting at the imam, Zhukovskiy visited the married couple in Malmo, and then moved to another hotel and left for Russia shortly.

The prosecutor’s office paid attention to big amounts of money that had been transferred to the couple’s accounts in Malmo. Nodira Aminova first received $11,000, then $25,000, but after the attempt on of the imam’s life, she received another $43,000.

I suppose there are valid alibis for each of these things, as well as phone calls to Russia also mentioned but...what would they be? This sure sounds pretty suspicious!

"Trial truths" aren't the same as the truths that people know intuitively and instinctively. You have to provide evidence in court and you have to prove something "beyond a reasonable doubt"  -- and not everything that seems very suspicious like a phone call or a wire transfer can be proven as such.

Hopefully, with the appeal more will come out.

Meanwhile, sadly, the son described his father's condition as "hopeless."

I wonder if we are seeing these acquittals because Sweden is feeling pressured by the Uzbek government. On the one hand, the prosecutor seems to freely discuss the suspicion that it is the Uzbek security agency behind this; on the other hand, with two suspects that certainly seem to have a lot of relevant clues and a relationship to the alleged murderer being acquitted, maybe Sweden feels they need to get rid of this case for some reason.

 

State Gets a Bit More Starchy on Turkmenistan

Dragon Oil rig in Caspian. Photo by Turkmenistan Golden Age 2012.

State Department officials are usually very circumspect when it comes to Turkmenistan, a gas-rich and freedom-poor authoritarian Central Asian nation on the Caspian Sea. Turkmenistan is far more closed than Uzbekistan -- there are hardly any human rights activists or opposition figures there. Hence virtually no one for lonely foreign officials to visit, when they might get a few hours free from their minders, and have nothing to do but rattle around in the huge white marble city in the "dictator chic" genre, with broad avenues and desert-dry air.

So that's why it's news when all of a sudden, in testimony to the US Congress, Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, whose statements are generally as bland as canned pears, suddenly puts the phrases "pipeline" and "human rights" and "transparency" all into one paragraph:

The recent signing of gas sales and purchase agreements between Turkmenistan, Pakistan and India enables the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline to move to the commercial phase. This project is one example of the potential Turkmenistan has to be a leader in the economic prosperity of the region. We encourage Turkmenistan to build clear and transparent mechanisms for investment in its country.

In order to realize its potential, Turkmenistan must make significant steps to fulfill its international obligations on human rights. The United States consistently raises concerns about respect for human rights at every appropriate opportunity and we have offered assistance to help advance space for civil society and building democratic systems.

That's exceptional, because in recent years, the US has been so eager to court the hard-to-get President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and line up some business with him, especially for American oil companies, that they have tended to keep any comments about human rights to carefully-choreographed private discussions. To be sure, this was a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, where officials can expect a little more questioning than usual, but still, the rhetoric seems more edgy than in the past.

So, why is this happening now?

Well, for one, the US has been persisting in trying to work with the Turkmens now for the more than six years Berdymukhamedov has been in power, and has precious little to show for it. If anything, despite finally installing a new ambassador after a five-year hiatus, holding special business exhibitions and promotions, offering help and training and educational opportunities, the Americans have at times been kicked in the teeth. Peace Corps members with visas and air tickets in hand have been suddenly delayed and gradually their numbers whittled down to little or nothing. Students ready to leave at the airport for exchange programs are pulled off programs.  Chevron and others are seemingly promised an offshore drilling permit, then never get any -- and they'd rather be onshore anyway. US officials work overtime trying to fix these situations up, and it's all kind of mysterious. Now why do the Turkmens do that? After all, we are paying them top dollar to use their country as a re-fueling station for planes bound to supply NATO troops in Afghanistan with non-lethal equipment.

What's up? Perhaps the "multi-vector policy" that rotates so widely from China to Iran to Qatar to Austria to Belarus to England and seems so affable with so many other countries with so many high-level meetings has its saw-toothed edge? Nothing shows you're independent like bashing America! The pudgy dictator has had 249 meetings with foreign dignitaries in the last year! Ok, 317. Alright, I don't know how many exactly but -- a lot, and somewhere in the miles of turgid Turkmen wire copy you can find this exact number.

So because they aren't getting anywhere despite being silent on human rights for all this time, perhaps US officials have decided that they should be a little more forward-leaning. It's a shame that human rights could be seen as a club in that respect, but that is how it's done.

There could be another reason -- Blake and others may be expecting increased NGO protests as the Asian Bank for Development takes the Turkmen-Afghanistan-Pakistan-Indian (TAPI) pipeline out for its road show this fall to various world capitals, in search of oil majors to help build the project and take on the financing and security headaches that will abound. So pre-emptively, so to speak, State has indicated that they realize there are human rights and "transparency" problems. That's for sure -- no one can really be sure just how much money Berdymukhamedov has his hands on -- and it all seems to come through his hands -- and how much he parts with to try to better his fellow citizens' lot -- as distinct from building lots of white palaces.

Nothing gets NGOs agitated like "the extractive industry" -- it easily exemplifies everything they hate about capitalism and commerce, and even if they are not anti-business, they can get behind concern for the environment which is never misplaced when it comes to drilling and pipelines.

Berdy also seems aware of this protest wave that may crest on his country, and talks up a good story about how pipelines under the sea are less dangerous than those above ground. I don't know how much people want to test those theories in a region that is prone to earthquakes, spills, sabotage (remember the April 2009 explosion?), terrorism and even wars -- and of course those vague "shortcomings in performance of work" for which hundreds of officials have been dismissed in the Era of Revival and now the Era of Happiness and Stability.

Of course, as I'm pointing out, the wrath of NGOs is somewhat misplaced on Turkmenistan, when the American companies which they love best to hate aren't even able to drill an inch into the karakum. China has already spent more than $8 billion building a pipeline out of Turkmenistan to China, and not a single demonstration, newsletter, poster, or even email appeared from the usual Western environmental groups. We have no idea what that very rapidly-build pipeline did to the environment or areas or people in Turkmenistan, and that's not only because it's a closed society, but because nobody cared to chase the Chinese National Petroleum Company -- it just doesn't get the juices flowing like US petroleum corporations. In fact, the major Western environmental organizations tend to ignore Central Asia because it's hard to get information.

The exception is a small adovcacy and research organization called Crude Accountability which has Russian-speakers and a network of colleagues in the region and who have persisted in getting the story of environmental damage and oppression in Central Asian countries. You seldom hear of Greenpeace trying any of its "direct action" protests on ships around Russian and its allies -- maybe that's because when local chapters of Greenpeace simply try to hold a rally to protest against Arctic drilling, 23 people are arrested.

So snarkiness of the predictable adversarial culture really seems misplaced, when a company like Chevron -- which in fact has been there all along and isn't "stealing in like a thief" -- hasn't even got a deal.  And then there's this -- what I always ask people spouting the usual hysteria on forums: what do you cook your breakfast with every morning, firewood? Pipelines exists in a lot of places of the world where protests no longer appear (Alaska) although it might if something goes wrong again (Alaska). We'd all like to live in a world of outdoor solar-powered offices and computers and Burning Man camp-outs like Philip Rosedale, but we're not there yet.

So it's good to start early and often to hammer on the problem of "lack of transparency," but realistically, it's not going to go anywhere in Turkmenistan until the society experiences much greater changes than have been in the offing since 2006 when past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov died. The Turkmens have figured out (from paying attention to NGOs but not allowing them in their own country) to play the transparency game, and have turned the tables on Chevron and others as I've written, sulking about their supposed lack of transparency for not parting with proprietary technological secrets that no company would part with (say, how about more from the Turkmen side regarding those Gaffney, Clines Associates estimates of the reserves, eh?)

Turkmenistan is a very hard nut to crack -- and nut-cracking in general hasn't gone so well for the US in Central Asia. The US ambassador has actually accomplished a fair amount on his watch, quietly getting some political prisoners freed or getting them family visits and trying to solve the students' cases and keep a positive momentum for both educational exchange and business. There's a theory that trade is a tide that raises all boats. I've never seen that happen in any country in the world. It's claimed for China and Kazakhstan, but we only see continued problems with everything from media suppression to environmental hazards to murders -- business doesn't auto-magically install democracy any more than a USAID project does.

I really don't have a recipe for Turkmenistan other than that more people need to try to go there and report what they see, and more efforts have to be made to get the word out about what happens there, and to pay more attention to those who already get many stories out, such as Chronicles of Turkmenistan. To the extent possible, NGOs should try to follow the TAPI story to see if their interest and efforts to get more information might be some deterrence on the usual bribes and slush funds that abound around things like this.

Yet I'm skeptical that TAPI will start getting built any time soon, or that Western companies will even be involved in it, and the X marked on the map where the backhoes are going to appear may be right at the Turkmen border, not inside Turkmenistan, as Ashgabat continually repeats the refrain that they will "sell their gas at the border," and Europeans and others are taking them more at their word since the collapse of the ambitious Nabucco project.

In any event, the gas-hungry rapidly-developing countries of China and India aren't going to care a whole lot about what Westerners tell them about how they should avoid all the things that Westerners take for granted like gas-guzzling personal cars and invest instead on environmental protection and mass transport. What any environmental campaign has to start with, however, is a newsletter -- a newsletter that nobody is yet able to publish in Ashgabat.

 

 

Taliban Blows up 22 Trucks En Route from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan

AP and Fergana.news have reports this morning that the Taliban has blown up 22 trucks with ammunition and fuel for NATO forces that were bound for Afghanistan en route from Uzbekistan. No casualties were reported.

The incident occurred in Samangan, and the terrorists just used one bomb.

The truckers had spent the night at a gas station. There were also dozens of cars there where drivers were sleeping as well, and the Taliban exploited the situation, placing a magnet mine on one of the fuel trucks, which rapidly touched off a conflagration with the others. Panic ensued and it was hard to get the fire out.

It's hard to imagine no one was hurt in this situation.

I was just hearing a Russian Central Asian expert the other day say how poorly defended these authoritarian countries are, which he noticed again on a recent visit. When people discuss various scenarios for what may happen after 2014 when troops are withdrawn, they tend to talk about the Taliban "spilling over" into the Central Asian countries. Maybe they don't need to "spill," but the IMU may just go home or make a visit. A Mumbai-type scenario seemed more likely than conventional battles or sparking of civil wars, i.e. a series of smaller or even devastating urban terrorist attacks. And they don't have to wait until 2014 to start them.

I find that contrary to the fierce way they can appear, these countries can be quite brittle and fragile, because the corruption factor is always lurking around the corner -- when things are so strict, people constantly find ways to route around and it undermines authority -- and that means security.

Is Kodirov Merely "Interneting While Muslim"?

Robert McKay at the New York Times has a blog posted today that takes the perspective of the lawyer in the case of Ulugbek Kodirov, the Uzbek "student" who was found guilty of plotting to kill President Barack Obama.

The headline says "Alabama Uzbek Who Plotted to Kill Obama Was Victim of Social Media, His Lawyer Says".

The implication is that the young man just surfed the web and stumbled on a lot of jihad stuff, talked to some scary bad guys he didn't really know, but just on the Internet, and then -- because he was being watched by the FBI -- got set up with bombs and guns to look like he was really a terrorist when in fact -- in the words of Registan (which rarely finds a terrorist they believe in), he was "Interneting while Muslim." (That is, arrested for his religious affiliation rather than any actual crime, much the way cops arrest blacks for "driving while black".)

Interestingly, even thought Joshua Foust and Nathan Hamm question everything about terrorism narratives in general, seldom finding them convincing, and don't even seem very persuaded about even the existence of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group put on the list of foreign terrorist organizations by the US government (and rightly so) -- they haven't taken this position on Kodirov. They seem to accept that the charges are serious, the evidence found, even if via a sting, and they have had virtually no comment on the case. That's by sharp contrast with their reams of dubious justifying claims about the case of Jamshid Muhtorov, which they view as a trumped-up case illustrative of the evils of the "war on terrorism".

Here's my response to McKay below, which hasn't been cleared by moderators yet:

Robert,

I don't know why you are uncritically accepting the lawyer's version of this story, and apparently leaning toward the narrative that this kind of case in the US is about "Interneting while Muslim," or seeming to accepting the defense "the Internet made me do it".

First, you need to read some other media on this. As wset.com reported today, Columbia University has no record of this man ever applying to their medical school:

"But Columbia spokesman Doug Levy said Kodirov never was accepted to the university's College of Physicians and Surgeons.

"From the immediately available records we have no knowledge of this individual and no record of him being an accepted student," Levy said."

It's not clear why he moved to Alabama. If you don't speak English well and you discover a plan to go to college isn't working out, the obvious thing to do is to stay in the New York area where there are numerous Russian speakers and service jobs using Russian-speaking networks and where you can find help and friends -- not go to a state where there are far fewer such imigrants. It makes no sense.

I do follow Uzbekistan quite closely, and I've found this story odd from the beginning, and I don't know whether it's some sort of elaborate staged operation on the part of Uzbek intelligence or what it is. In the Russian-language exile press, Kodirov's mother describes him as having fallen under the influence of radical Islamists preaching in US mosques, not "the Internet".

You also seem to imply that because an undercover US agent posing as a jihadist sympathizer supplied Kodirov with weapons, that there is something concocted and contrived about this case, i.e. it wouldn't exist if it weren't for the sting operation. While that could be possible, you don't seem to concede that people can radicalize and sympathize and agree to help radical Islamist organizations all on their own without prompting, and when they supply material support to such organizations, they are then breaking the law.

There just has to be a lot more curious and unbiased reporting on this story, starting with the basics as the reporters did at wnet.com, calling up Columbia and checking the story that the lawyer simply bought and never checked.

***

Now, some further thoughts.

I have to say, it hadn't occured to me to try to check up on the "student" angle of Kodirov's saga in the US -- I just took it at face value. Of course, we should have started with this. I marvel that a court case could get as far as a conviction, with the lawyer having never proved it, and no prosecutor ever doing due diligence on this. Isn't that where you would start?!

I'd go back further, I'd start with the US Embassy in Tashkent. Uzbekistan is a country where you need an exit visa. You don't just leave Uzbekistan. If you get out by circumventing the state-imposed procedures, which many do, you can't count on coming back or not facing problems of surveillance from the Uzbek secret police abroad or harassment of your family members at home. It's a strict authoritarian country with more than 5,000 political prisoners who were arrested for offenses as innocuous as reading the Koran in groups in their homes or having some literature found in their apartments of unauthorized Muslim preachers.

So who set up an American visa for Kodirov? What educational program did he come to the US under? There are established Embassy-run programs for educational exchange which are avidly encouraged as the US is a big believer in trying to educate young people in countries like this as a way of hopefully getting them to become more liberal and democratic in the future -- a laudable and worthy cause. But obviously some ringers slip through, so the question is: what school under what program had accepted him? Can't the State Department tell us that? Is anyone asking these questions anywhere?

Now, it's always possible that Kodirov didn't come through the regular or usual State Department or Embassy-cleared channels. Maybe his brother-in-law's cousin's nephew sold him a tourist visa and a fake school invitation. Or a visa to some third country from which he then got to the US. That happens.

Maybe he got enrolled in something called not "Columbia University School of Physicians" but something like "Colombia Medic Academy", one of the hundreds of fly-by-night educational operations preying on just this kind of person with little English and lack of how the system worked. They are advertised in droves on bus shelters and subways and billboards in New York City and many people pay them money in the hopes of getting a degree -- and more importantly, a job -- when they are hardly likely to do this, even if accredited. Perhaps Kodirov didn't realize he was on track at best to become a "respiratory therapist" or "home health care attendant" which *you, too, can become in as little as 6 months with a down payment of only $99* as a late-night TV ad might claim.

But...we haven't heard the story and I'm speculating how innocently, a young person on a student visa might get caught up.

As I noted in my reply to McKay, I'm just not getting the Alabama angle, other than to figure that he had some connection there. The US has resettled a number of Uzbeks who fled the Andijan massacre in Arizona and other western states; there are other Uzbeks who have emigrated to the US as part of the large tide of people leaving the Soviet Union and post-Soviet dislocations, often involving ethnic clashes, as occurred against Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan in 2010. So he probably had some contact who promised him a home or a job or something. What was it?

You can debate the sting approach as much as you like, but naturally it's ok to ask why Ulugbek was eager to get these weapons and had acquired so much animosity to Obama.

Given that there was a plea agreement that reduced his sentence, it sounds like Kodirov agreed to inform on others -- and maybe that includes these radical Islamist preachers that may have turned him. I recall reading several poignant pleas from his mother that he was lured to ruin by such persons, despite not being particularly religious when he still lived in Uzbekistan. I will look these up.

The plea doesn't really shed any light on these issues.

I don't know if Robert McKay starts from the same place I do, which is that it's not ok to make common cause with and support terrorist groups on the Internet. He may believe that the "Internet" part of this sanitizes and defangs the "terrorist" part and makes it merely a kind of virtual offense.

Of course, it's just such a crazy long shot -- a deadly pun -- to imagine that this kid with no prior firearms training and not enough money to buy a sniper rifle or ability to make a real plan for how he was going to get near President Obama is really a deadly assassin. Except...such people are, and when we look at the history of people who have shot presidents, we see that -- they can be insane, crazy, vain, vaguely hooked up to political movements but you never really find out why they were working in the Soviet Union -- etc. etc. That's America. So it's ok to prosecute a case like this.

Kodirov was so far gone that he said he didn't care if he got killed in the process, he just wanted to get Obama. So that tells you that he was either psychotic or immersed in a cult -- but I presume he went through psychiatric examination.

You can also see from the plea -- did McKay read it? -- that the hinge in this story isn't the Internet or talking to shadowy people on the Internet, but making a friend who invited him to a mosque and talked to him about jihad and who then gave him the Internet videos to look up on Youtube or other sites.

So you can' say Kodirov is a "victim of social media"; he's the victim of a guy who befriended him and took him to a mosque where he was encouraged to believe that jihad was acceptable -- and encouraged to act on those violent sentiments. THAT is the problem; the Internet only amplifies it.

One thing I really don't like about this complaint, and I wonder why the lawyer let it be put in, is this:

As part of this agreement, the defendant specifically acknowledges and states that the defendant has not been persecuted in, and has no present fear of persecution in, Uzbekistan on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Similarly, the defendant further acknowledges and states that the defendant has not been tortured in, and has no present fear of torture in Uzbekistan.

That's just plain up and down false. Indeed, Kodirov does have a well-founded fear of persecution, especially now that he has become publicly known and has been identified with extreme Islamists and a plot to kill a president. But even before that, merely for being a young Muslim man who studied abroad he could face questioning, attempt to make him into a secret police informant, and torture if he refused to cooperate -- there are existing cases like this and it is common in these countries.

There are thousands of Muslims who have been tortured and imprisoned for activities that are not considered crimes in democratic countries -- joining unauthorized religious groups that aren't even designated as terrorist groups and so on.

I suppose the lawyer had to concede this paragraph to get the plea, but it sure sets back progress for everybody else. There's no question Kodirov faces *now* a very high likelihood of torture if he were returned to Uzbekistan, and even before his arrest, merely for floating around and not going to a scheduled program, he could face at least questioning and an effort to turn him, if not worse. So could his family. The Uzbek secret police are deadly.

Strangely, despite this high likelihood of torture as others have found, Kodirov asks to be returned to Uzbekistan.

Now, that suggests to me that this entire story could indeed be a hoax planned by Uzbek intelligence, either with Kodirov's knowledge, or with Kodirov's general goofiness and possible mental illness exploited by cunning secret police -- and with either his knowledge that he will get out of it all by being brought home and quietly released, or with their knowledge that they will either put him in jail anyway at home or compensate him in some way. The point of this exercise? To let us know there are real terrorists in Uzbekistan and to smear the whole Uzbek emigre community, ultimately, for Americans and Uzbeks.

Except, if he wasn't the avatar of an elaborate sting operation on the part of Uzbek intelligence, he went along with the American sting willingly and that is troublesome.

Given that the complaint also contains an agreement to assist in his removal by the provision of documents, etc., I wonder if we can expect that Kodirov *will* be removed in this case.

I will keep researching the emigre press on this and post more later, but meanwhile, I ask these questions:

o Is this another MNB caper, whereby the Uzbek secret police create a hoax and a case like this to influence public opinion and deter would-be jihadists?

o Did the US FBI and/or CIA collude in this hoax?

o Why didn't anybody research the bona fides of his student visa and educational institution here in the US and at the US Embassy in Tashkent?

 

MTS Back in Turkmenistan -- But Only for Foreigners

Is Russia's mobile company MTS back in Turkmenistan just for foreigners, or for everybody?

Rumours have been floating around for some time, punctuated by upbeat predictions from corporate executives, that MTS was going to get back into Turkmenistan after a protracted hiatus since December 2010, when Turkmen tyrant Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov turfed out the Russian cell company unceremoniously, leaving 2.4 million customers in Turkmenistan without cell phone service -- and that meant Internet access as well for some.

The reason for the expulsion was in one sense straightforward -- a five-year contract had come to an end and negotiations for a renewal had floundered on the Turkmen demand to get a bigger cut. There was also an assumption that with the Arab Spring and all, the Turkmen government just didn't want 3G or 4G and further Internet expansion to come to their country. They do a good job of blocking the Internet, with all of Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites all unavailable. They also have Chinese engineers as experts and their monitoring equipment installed for a song.

Berdymukhamedov said he wanted competition to the sluggish, poorly performing sole state provider, named  Galkynysh (Revival) like every other thing in Turkmenistan that is poorly performing, too. So he invited back the Finnish telecom Nokia Siemens and the Chinese mobile company Huawei and said he wanted to see even three mobile companies compete in Turkmenistan.

Not it's not clear where those deals are going, but maybe that was a ruse and a feint to get MTS back to the table on less favourable terms. Who knows.

It's also been rumoured that the Turkmen government would turn on MTS at first only for foreigners or only for those in the capital or for the "specials".

Sure enough, when an orchestrated media law conference was convened in Ashgabat this week by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the foreigners who came prepared to criticize Turkmenistan even within the confines of such an exercise were then pleasantly surprised that the cell service to which they've become addicted to in their own countries was working.

Ali Navruzov, an avid blogger an activist from Azerbaijan (@ljmaximus) reports "MTS is just back in #Turkmenistan! I was a witness of a historic moment :)" in reply to my query.

He was live-blogging the conference so check out his feed if you would like to see a less-sanitized version of events than you'll get from Turkmenistan: The Golden Age. (Why hasn't *that* been renamed Galkynysh?!)

I naturally asked if MTS was turned on just for the area around the conference with the foreigners, or for everybody all over Turkmenistan, and the next day he replied:

"As I reported yesterday, second cell phone operator in #Turkmenistan #MTS was back - today I learned it could be only for us, for roaming."

All the better to monitor you, my dears!

As Ali reports, Turkmen officials were all for the Internet and all for universal standards, but naturally asked penetrating questions like this: "MP Kurbannov: All schools should get the Internet, but question is what kind of the Internet?"

Indeed!

"What kind of Internet" is a question that Dave Winer asks!

Pete Leonard did a story on the conference but didn't address the all-important mobile issue. Mobile is how the Internet grows by leaps and bounds in these countries.

When asked why Facebook was blocked, Navruzov reports, a Turkmen Foreign Ministry official said he couldn't answer and since the head of Turkmentelekom wasn't present, he would have to wait to ask him. We saw that one coming!