The undersigned organizations strongly condemn the plan to close Turkmenistan’s regional hospitals recently announced by President Saparmurat Niyazov, and urge increased international pressure on the President to ease his stifling oppression of the Turkmen people.
Niyazov reportedly made the proposal in a meeting with local officials on February 28, 2005. According to the BBC, Niyazov said: “Why do we need such hospitals? If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat.” Ashgabat is the capital of Turkmenistan, a country twice the size of Britain. About 90 percent of Turkmenistan’s people live outside the capital.
The closure of hospitals, if carried out, would be a public health disaster. Already, there are too few medical staff and other qualified health professionals to serve Turkmenistan’s rural population, and in 2003, Niyazov fired 15,000 health personnel, replacing them with army conscripts. While health care is becoming increasingly less accessible to the population, President Niyazov recently had a team of six German doctors flown to Turkmenistan to operate on his eye and give him a check-up. Many patients desperate for medical care are now obliged to travel hundreds of kilometers to the capital—if they can afford the cost—their families frequently camping out around hospitals where expensive but substandard care is delivered.
In addition to closing hospitals, Niyazov announced a large-scale closure of the country’s public libraries including all libraries in rural communities. Large parts of the school and university curriculum are being given over to the study and glorification of the President’s Rukhnama ideology. The government has banned opera, ballet, circus, the philharmonic orchestra, and non-Turkmen cultural associations. It appears intent on driving the whole Turkmen population into conditions of ignorance and insularity, cutting them off from knowledge and from communication with the world.
President Niyazov heads a government that has attempted to exercise absolute control over the lives of the Turkmen people. Human Rights abuses are widespread and include violations of civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights. There is no free media, or freedom of expression, assembly, or association. Those who criticize the government are imprisoned after grossly unfair trials and often tortured; their relatives are often evicted from their homes and dismissed from their workplaces. In a practice reminiscent of the Stalin era, the government banishes individuals and groups deemed “dangerous” to uninhabitable desert regions.
In this moment of crisis for the people of Turkmenistan, we urge the international community to act on their behalf. We urge all nations to:
- Support a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Commission to condemn repression and further alarming threats to the right to health in Turkmenistan and to establish a Special Rapporteur to investigate human rights abuses in the country.
- Closely monitor Turkmenistan’s policies with respect to public health and demand that it provide all people within its jurisdiction access to health care.
- Call on Turkmenistan to allow access to international monitors to assess the human rights situation in the country, including the right to health.
- Review their political and economic relations with the government of Turkmenistan to ensure that they are not helping uphold the status quo.
- Consider further measures, including the denial of visas to Turkmen officials and the freezing of their assets abroad, should the government not ease its repression.
Human Rights Watch
Physicians for Human Rights
International Federation of Health and Human Rights Organisations
Johannes Wier Foundation-Netherlands
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Doctors for Human Rights –United Kingdom
Health, Research and Rights Foundation-Bangladesh
World Medical Association
