Drug Mafia Showdown in Turkmen Capital

16-Sep-08

NBCentralAsia observers believe a prolonged shootout in the Turkmen capital Ashgabat may well have been about the illegal drugs trade, as the authorities have said.

At a September 15 meeting of the country State Security Council, President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov criticised the security forces’ handling of the incident.

Officials say police were involved in a standoff with a drug trafficking gang on September 12 and 13 in Khitrovka, a northern suburb of Ashgabat. A press release issued by the prosecutor general’s office on August two days later said an elite police unit “neutralised” the group, and criminal charges were later brought against its members.

The terse statement did not give any indication of casualty figures. The, opposition website Gundogar reported that 20 policemen were killed, while another site, Turkmenskaya Iskra, said about 30 people died.

According to these émigré websites, the group of armed men seized a local water-bottling plant called Cheshme and a nearby official building, and the security forces deployed armoured vehicles in the operation to dislodge them.

The paucity of information from official sources led to a good deal of speculation in media abroad. One version of events was that the clash involved Islamic extremists; another was that the confrontation was a ruse by some disgruntled figures in the ruling elite hoping to provoke a coup against Berdymuhammedov, elected president last year.

However, observers inside Turkmenistan say the evidence does point towards what officials are saying – that this was a drugs battle.

They explained that major drug kingpins enjoy protection from some senior officials, and engage in turf wars to expand their spheres of influence.

It is significant, they say, that the violence occurred in Khitrovka, the most crime-ridden part of the capital. district of Ashgabat. Illicit narcotics can be bought anywhere in the district, and the incidence of drug-related crime is higher here than anywhere else.

Secondly, analysts recall that in spring, President Berdymuhammedov declared war on the drugs trade. He set up a State Committee for Drug Control and equipped it with powers that formerly belonged to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, MVD, and the National Security Ministry, MNB.

The state committee went on to mount a series of drug raids.

According to one local observer, elements in the security services may have been angered that an assertive new agency was rocking the boat.

“It’s clear that MVD and MNB officers who used to provide ‘protection’ for the drugs trade were unhappy about being tackled by zealous staff at the new committee,” he said.

He backed this up by recalling one recent case where the drug control committee arrested some drug dealers, who proceeded to complain that this was in violation of their high-level protection arrangement.

“They [dealers] couldn’t believe it,” he said. “‘What are you doing?” they said. ‘We’re your partners.’”

An activist with a local group agreed that parts of the two security forces might have instigated the clash, suggesting that the intention may have been to discredit the drugs agency in the president’s eyes. “Then he might eliminate the new institution and give them [MVD and MNB] back their old supervisory functions.”

Commentators note that while Turkmenistan has a 700-kilometre border with Afghanistan, the world’s biggest producer of opium and the derivative heroin, the authorities in Ashgabat did not publicly declare war on drugs until 2006, refused to cooperate with international anti-trafficking efforts, and did not provide information on the subject to major international institutions.

The activist argued that it was this “long silence” that allowed high-level officials to become directly involved in the illicit narcotics business.

(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service is resuming, covering only Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the moment.)