  Q: What do you do when you're a petty, mentally unstable third-world dictator and your nutball policies have resulted in, among other sorrows, urlLink a plague outbreak ? A: You declare plague "illegal. " The new nation of Turkmenistan, one of several Central Asian republics that rose from the Soviet Union's ashes, is ruled by a 64-year-old dictator named Saparmurad A. Niyazov, a strutting, miniature Saddam Hussein who calls himself Turkmenbashi (father of the Turkmens). A man of monstrous ego and modest intellect, he has outlawed beards on men and forbidden women to wear gold teeth, a sign of status. ... The world keeps quiet about Niyazov's eccentricities, aware that his vast wealth comes from control of one of the world's largest supplies of natural gas. All of this would be amusing, more or less, if we didn't think too hard about the effects of such policies. But over the last few months, the Turkmenbashi has taken the health of his nation's 5 million people into his own hands, with potentially devastating consequences. ... Most disturbing, he has declared all infectious diseases — cholera, AIDS and other scourges — illegal and has forbidden any mention of them. ... According to both Gundogar, a Turkmen opposition group, and the Turkmenistan Helsinki Initiative, a deadly plague epidemic has broken out in the Turkmenbashi's territory . ... These outbreaks happen periodically, and with good public health systems in place they can be managed. The Soviets in their day responded quickly, though they kept news of the outbreaks from the outside world.
...But the Soviets and their hundreds of trained plague experts no longer run the show, and the Turkmens are at the mercy of the Turkmenbashi's policies. At least 10 people are known to have died of plague this summer, and some reports place the figure considerably higher. The Turkmen government has responded, predictably, by declaring the word "plague" illegal. It has also instituted border controls "to prevent disease from entering Turkmenistan from neighboring states.
" Guess who will wind up helping this wacko and his unfortunate subjects out of this jam, with supplies, personnel and money? (Hint -- It won't be France. ) And how long do you think it will be before some Soviet apologist makes the "at least the trains ran on time" argument -- "Well, at least we never had plague under Stalin! " urlLink Turkmenistan is too important to ignore -- it borders both Iran and Afghanistan, has significant coastline along the Caspian Sea, and, as the article mentions, has lots of natural gas (and some oil). Anyone up for some humanitarian-motivated regime change? Oh, right -- urlLink never mind . Some other time perhaps. (Cross-linked at urlLink Outside the Beltway . ) UPDATE: urlLink Ex Nihilo has some more news out of Turkmenistan.
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