Urban Regeneration in Turkmenistan
Pledge to spend serious money on run-down towns inspires as much scepticism as hope.
Friday, 29 February, 2008
Urban Regeneration in Turkmenistan
Pledge to spend serious money on run-down towns inspires as much scepticism as hope.
Friday, 29 February, 2008
The bus is much like the village itself - dirty and run-down.
“The roads in Goktepe are bad, there are no pavements and people have to scramble along the edges of the roads when vehicles pass,” Jennet adds. “They get covered with clouds of dust, and if it rains, with lumps of dirt.”
Goktepe lies in foothills 45 kilometres northwest of the Turkmen capital Ashgabat. A dusty, solid-looking settlement of one-storey buildings, most as similar to one other as peas in a pod, the air is clean only because there is no longer any industry.
A solitary textile plant, built ten years ago with the help of Turkish investors, has gone bankrupt and is on the verge of closure.
Of the 32,000-strong population, only teachers, doctors and other civil servants appear to have jobs locally. The rest are unemployed or work on construction sites in Ashgabat. Constant problems with the supply of water, gas and electricity add to the general air of hopelessness.
But now life here is about to change, apparently. The reason is that on February 4, Goktepe acquired the status of a town, along with several other large villages in Turkmenistan.
Alongside Goktepe, the presidential decree granted urban status to the villages of Tejen, Serdar, Koneurgench (also known as Kunyaurgench), Anau, Baharly and Gazachak, all currently home to populations ranging from 8,000 to 32,000.
MONEY PROMISED TO IMPROVE URBAN LIFE
The change in status stems from an ambitious plan launched last year to improve conditions in the country’s smaller conurbations.
President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov has promised to lavish large sums to transform overgrown villages into proper towns. A total of four billion US dollars is to be spent on upgrading them by the time work ends in 2020.
“The aim is to bring the living conditions of our citizens up to European standards,” Berdymuhammedov told a cabinet meeting on November 12 last year.
The first phase of renovation will involve providing small towns with new schools, kindergartens, hospitals, cultural and community centres, sports facilities, housing estates, roads, gas pipelines, electricity cables, fibre-optic communications, and water supply and sewage systems.
To ensure all these facilities are built to a high standard, foreign contractors will be brought in to construct some of the projects, subject to government approval.
In Goktepe, Jennet said news of the village’s newly-acquired status had not seeped out. “Most people here don’t even know about it,” she said. “We don’t read newspapers and don’t watch local television, either”.
HEALTHCARE COLLAPSE
If the president’s ambitious plans strike many people as impossible, it is because most of the country’s small towns are as in such a dire state.
As one local said, most urban settlements outside the capital are no more than “big, dirty villages, with a low standard of living”.
He added, “The first thing that is evident is the terrible poverty everywhere.”
Health standards in these backwaters are atrocious. A member of Medecins Sans Frontieres, the international medical organisation, told IWPR of his shock on visiting the town of Koneurgench in northern Turkmenistan.
As part of a delegation of medics carrying out a programme to against the spread of tuberculosis, he saw horrifying sanitary conditions in a community lacking a working sewage system and a supply of clean water.
“We had heard a lot about this old city dating back to the 11th century, and were looking forward to seeing the minarets and mausoleums,” recalled the doctor. “We never expected such desolation, abandonment, underdevelopment and poverty.”
Koneurgench – “Old Urgench” - which UNESCO added to its list of World Heritage sites in 2005, lies 90 km north of the provincial capital Dashoguz.
The site was once the capital of the ancient state of Khorezm, but was abandoned after being sacked and destroyed by 13th century Mongol emperor Chingis Khan and later by Central Asian ruler Amir Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane.
With its wealth of minarets, mausoleums and other monuments, Koneurgench ought to be a major tourist attraction.
But these days the city is known for more depressing reasons, principally for its high level of tuberculosis.
The disease has become an increasing blight over the whole of Turkmenistan following the decline in medical services since the end of the Soviet Union. The World Health Organisation, WHO, believes the rate of multi-drug-resistant TB in the country is alarmingly high.
“What first drew our attention in Koneurgench was the absence of well-fed people,” the doctor told IWPR.
“They all seemed skinny and stooping, with dull, lifeless eyes,” he continued. “There was a stench of faeces everywhere in the streets because of the absence of a sewage system.”
The doctor was appalled to find locals did not even have access to clean tap water. “The population has to use water from wells which has a high level of salinity,” he explained.
The local people’s lifestyle is traditional and modest. As one local journalist put it, “a typical scene is of a wife sitting with her children in front of a pot of green tea and a churek [a flat cake]. That is their usual meal.”
A pensioner named Anna, who has lived in Koneurgench since 1956, describes her home town with some bitterness as a “godforsaken place”.
She blames the lack of government investment since independence and the failure to repair the existing infrastructure for feeding unemployment and compelling many people to leave.
Anna sincerely hopes the decision to reclassify Koneurgench as a town – with the investment that implies – will lead to better times.
“If the city had its own administration, then the attitude towards its problems would change and they could be solved,” she said.
Under the change, Koneurgench, with Serdar and Tejen, will be accorded a higher status than the rest - their village council or “gengesh” will be replaced with a “people’s assembly” or “khalk maslakhaty”, with greater powers, and they will get their own local government and public utilities offices. The other four will retain their gengesh structures, renamed as town councils.
The promised improvements in healthcare and education provision may address the serious challenges facing communities in places like Koneurgench and Goktepe.
According to the latest WHO data, relating to 2006, the rate of infant mortality in Turkmenistan is almost three times the average in the former Soviet Union.
In rural communities, families are traditionally large. Because state healthcare is poor and costly, women often give birth at home with the help of midwives, leading to a high rate of infant and maternal mortality.
Because so many kindergartens and nurseries to close, young children stay at home and do not undergo regular medical check-ups.
The few kindergartens remaining in Goktepe do not inspire much confidence. One local resident changed her mind about sending her youngest son to a kindergarten last summer when she found out it was based in a ruined building with no roof or ceiling.
“When I saw it I was appalled”, she said. “The kindergarten teacher and the children were all sitting under the burning sun with umbrellas.”
SOCIAL INVESTMENT PLAN FACES SCEPTICISM
In the meantime, people in places like Goktepe wonder whether, and how, their lives are going to change.
Gozel, a young woman, expects little positive to come out of the government’s small towns programme. Like many others, she fears that it will grind to a halt after the first phase; in other words that old buildings will be demolished and their residents left with nowhere to live.
That happened two years ago when the authorities announced plans to build an airport on the outskirts of Goktepe. After reviewing the technical plans, officials aborted the idea - but by then, they had already demolished the homes of 20 families, who have still not been re-housed.
“For two years those families have been living in subhuman conditions, waiting for new private dwellings of their own,” said Gozel. “Half were housed temporarily in the local government offices and the others were put into an abandoned schoolbuilding.”
She warned, “We could all suffer the same fate if the authorities start on some large-scale international-class construction project.”
A passer-by echoed her concerns. “I don’t want these ‘Euro-standard’ things the president is talking about,” he said. “They’ll just start by demolishing houses, and that will be it.”
This young man said a friend of his worked in the Ashgabat city administration and had told him that people there suffered from the same problem.
“He says that in the capital alone, there are more than 1,000 people waiting with certificates in their hands for the moment when they’ll be given new apartments to replace their houses and land plots that have been destroyed. They’ve been waiting a long time.”
Systematic demolition of traditional single-story homes to make way for plate-glass high-rise buildings was a feature of the rule of autocratic former president, Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in December 2006. The authorities would simply designate an area for reconstruction, order the residents out, and flatten their homes with bulldozers, with no comeback and little attempt to compensate them.
FEARS THAT MONEY WILL BE SIPHONED OFF
One young man from Kaakhk, a community 20 km east of Ashgabat, told IWPR that people there were equally alarmed by the “small towns” programme, for the same reasons as before – mistrust of the authorities, disappointment with unfulfilled promises, and fears that corrupt officials would siphon off investment funds.
Many people believe the money allocated to provide facilities for towns like Koneurgench and Goktepe will never reach its intended beneficiaries.
“It’s possible things will get done – but only as long as the money the president earmarks for building infrastructure in the small towns doesn’t get stolen,” said the young man in Kaakhk.
A fifth-year university student said she could not imagine how Turkmen urban centres would look after their European-style makeover.
“No one really knows anything about the various different programmes they have announced,” she said. “If the authorities truly want to attain these ‘Euro-standards’ then they should publish a leaflet about it and explain everything to the population.”
(Names in this story have been withheld out of concern for interviewees’ safety.)
