• NAMING NAMES: The tech reporters who flack for Second Life – Valleywag
  Clay continues to pick at the subscription numbers behind Second Life. Would be interesting to hear a Wagner James Au response, or an official statement on numbers from the Lindens
  (tags: secondlife hype media shirky)
• Kamini – Marly Gomont – L’av?nement du rap rural!
  Lyrics for Kamini’s “Marly Gomont” in French
  (tags: hiphop language)
• www.saulwilliams.com: Kamini’s Marly Gomont
  Pretty good English translation of Kamini’s “Marly Gomont”
  (tags: hiphop language)
• Jewels in the Jungle: A 2006 year end message for my readers
  A love letter from Black River Eagle to his readers, the read write web in general, and the global voices team specifically…
  (tags: citizenmedia globalvoices)
• Russian airports | Kama Sutra and feral cats | Economist.com
  One of the best pieces of travel journalism this year – an overview of Russian airports in the spirit of Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”: “It is weirdly cold inside. Feral cats have been sighted. The floor has not been cleaned since perestroika; the toilets
  (tags: russia travel airports funny)
• Foreign Policy: The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006
  Excellent list of stories that you probably didn’t read enough about in 2006. The sort of long “trend” stories that are hard to get covered in MSM, but which are very much worth knowing about. Especially interesting notes on China and African debt
  (tags: china africa uspolitics international media)

It was bound to happen. I’ve been enjoying finding out all sorts of fun details about friends like danah boyd, Matt Hurst and David Weinberger as they’ve answered the “five things people don’t know about me” meme. But Rebecca just tagged me, and now I’m forced to come up with interesting and little-known details of my life.

The problem is that, for the past few years, I feel like I’ve been more open about my life to a wider audience than I, as a shy person, ever expected to be. I’ve told journalists about countless stupid details of my life and have gotten used to total strangers knowing my whereabouts due to my blog. So I’m not sure I have five secrets left, or at least five secrets that I’m willing to share. But here goes:

1) I ran for President of the United States in 1988. I was 15 years old at the time. I found a book called “Everyone for President” at the local library book sale and thought the author had a great point: while you can’t serve as President until you’re 35, there’s nothing to prohibit you from running. So I filed the forms included with the book and more or less forgot about it, until a local journalist started researching presidential candidates who didn’t have a chance of getting elected and interviewed me for the Danbury, CT newspaper. It was a great lesson in PR, and taught me that no one takes the promises of politicians seriously – I promised to run every four years until I was electable as a way of calling attention to the absurdity of the “35 year old” rule, but I never ran again, and no one ever called me on breaking my promise.

2) I’ve never applied for a job. Not a real one, at least. My first job out of grad school was at Tripod, where I got hired because I knew HTML and was willing to work for stock options. I co-founded both Geekcorps and Global Voices, so didn’t have to apply for positions there. (And the Berkman Center doesn’t count as a “job”. It’s far too much fun to be a job.) I’m entirely capable of envisioning a life where I never apply for a job…

3) I’d be very happy as a 1950s New England housewife. My hero growing up was my maternal grandmother, who was an absolute dynamo, working full-time into her 60s as well as mothering and grandmothering a brood of children. I wanted to do whatever she did – cooking, sewing, knitting – and she never put any activites off limits due to gender preconceptions. As a result, I cook really well, sew competently, and could probably remember how to knit if I could take needles onto airplanes. And I can darn socks, even if I generally choose not to.

4) I didn’t study African history. Or technology. A friend was introducing me at an academic talk a few weeks ago and tried to give my academic background to the audience before realizing he had no idea what I’d actually studied. I spent my college career studying continental philosophy (mostly Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein) and African music (which is what got me to Africa in the first place.) The geekery began as a way to make beer money while in college and has gradually expanded to dominate my whole life.

5) My main regret in life is that I’m not a better woodworker. I make functional but ugly furniture and have great ambitions of making prettier furniture someday. Or at least buying lots more powertools so I can dream about making pretty furniture with fewer excuses.

Okay, enough of that. Who to tap? Let’s see – I’d like to hear five things I don’t know about Ndesanjo, Ory, Abdurahman, Bruno and Janet… (time to see who reads my blog every day and who pays attention to their trackbacks…)

Like many Americans, I am a monolingual idiot. English is the only language I’m comfortable expressing myself in, though I can function in Spanish-speaking countries and occasionally order breakfast successfully in French.

While my monolingualism is an obstacle when I travel, I tend to notice it most profoundly when I’m sitting at home, spending quality time with the Internet. For many of the stories I’m most interested in, the most interesting and useful perspectives aren’t in English. Sometimes they’re in languages which I can navigate with the help of Babelfish, but often the stuff I want to read is in languages Babelfish won’t be touching any time soon, like Somali.

But the real problem I have is as a monolingual hiphop fan. Without French and Wolof, it’s really hard to get into MC Solaar, Daara J, Positive Black Soul and the other Senegalese crews who are obviously worth listening to. Ndesanjo has told me about the political significance of hiphop in Tanzania – with every politician worth his or her salt backed by an MC and a sound system – but without Swahili, I’ve got little hope of understanding what’s being said and less of understanding the larger significance of the references MCs are dropping.

And translation alone is not enough. I caught enough of Kamini’s fantastic “Marly-Gomont” to know that I wanted to understand everything he was saying. His site has his lyrics in French, and there’s a pretty good translation of the lyrics on a bulletin board attached to poet Saul Williams’s site. But it’s tough to get the references: “These godforsaken little towns that even France doesn’t know are a part of it, Godforsaken little towns that nobody knows, not even Jean-Pierre Pernault.” Is this a reference to Pernault because he’s a popular newscaster in France, or because – as one poster in a forum suggested – he’s accused of racism? Hard to get the significance of the line without having a better understanding of what’s going on culturally…

We talk about this a lot when people in the Global Voices crew talk about the role of our site. When we’re doing our jobs well, we’re selecting news to amplify (i.e., concluding that Kamini and the phenomenon of “rap de campagne” is worth sharing with the world… or at least more worthwhile than Bubba Sparxx), translating news into English (and Chinese, and if all goes well, into half a dozen other languages in this coming year), and adding enough context that people understand why Cantonese speakers think Bus Uncle is so funny.

And while translating, contextualizing and amplifying blog posts is something we should be doing, I can’t help thinking we’re missing an opportunity in not subtitling global hiphop videos. A Global Voices post by Sokari some months back got me to pay attention to Ugandan hiphop and specifically to Bataka Underground, a Kampala-based crew who are producing extremely political and positive hiphop, as well as doing a great deal of outreach in their community, running a youth organization – Bavubuka All*starz – and performing everywhere from HIV clinics to classrooms.

It’s easier to find out about Bataka than most African crews because they’ve embraced the Internet aggresively, putting up Myspace pages and videos on YouTube. They’ve been helped in the process by US-based producer 3rdi (aka Brett Mazurek), who is making a film about the crew titled Diamonds in the Rough. He filmed the video for “Lemelako“, and, critically, he and the crew added English subtitles, which is useful for anyone who is struck by the images and the beats, but doesn’t speak Luganda well enough to follow the “lugaflow” lyrics. (In a promo for “Diamonds in the Rough”, Krazy Native explains, “We’re like the dictionary, the lugaflow dictionary. What we say is what everybody says on the streets…”)

The fact that I can read blogs from around the world has made my world vastly richer than when all my information came from newspapers and the radio. But blogs aren’t the way most of the world communicates – I’d like to hear and understand what rappers are saying from Tanzania to Uzbekistan. Maybe this is a future Global Voices-type project – collecting and translating global hiphop, subtitling through dotSUB and making it possible for hiphop fans in one corner of the world to understand what rappers are saying half a world away.

A recent earthquake off the coast of Taiwan has highlighted the fragility of telecoms cables and served as an interesting reminder that “the death of distance” is still one of those ideas that is still more theoretical than real.

Much of the Internet traffic in Asia runs through rings of cable that connect Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan – usually, if there’s a fault in the cable, traffic can run the other way around the ring. But so many cables snapped in the quake that net users in China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan have had major difficulties accessing international sites, especially sites in the US and Europe. The IHT speculates that this may reflect on a need to route international traffic west, through Central Asia and Europe to the US, rather than via undersea cables to the West Coast of the US, where many major internet services are based.

Global Voices’ John Kennedy, reporting from Guangzhao, is watching his Chinese blogger friends get a lesson in network georgraphy as they discover which services do and don’t function after the cable break. Andrew Lih is in Singapore, and has the results of his tests on different blogging and email services, as well as other net-dependent services like Skype. He sees the current outages as a wakeup call for infrastructure providers in East Asia:

With expanses of water separating countries around the Rim of Fire, the region will need to come up with more innovative and robust backup plans. After the South Asia tsunami, satellite communication was the solid backup for voice communication. But those “pipes” are too small to handle so much high speed Internet traffic. I can imagine ASEAN might be interested in collaborating on a true fault-tolerant infrastructure for the region that can survive catastrophic losses of submarine communication.

Neurologists learned a great deal about the human brain from patients who’d survived severe brain injury, like Phineas Gage, who survived an iron tamping bar through the front of his brain, but experienced major personality changes, teaching doctors both about neuroplasticity and about correlations between mental function and brain region. In the same way, we may learn the most about how the Internet works when it’s not working – when the bits are flowing swiftly, there’s no real incentive to think about the fragility of the networks we’ve all grown to depend on.

The headline on Les Neuhaus’s AP article from Mogadishu this morning announces, “Somalia’s PM greeted by cheers“. Reading three paragraphs into the article, the situation becomes a bit more complicated. While “hundreds of cheering residents” greeted the heavily armed convoy, “several thousand demonstrators” took to the streets to demonstrate against Ethiopian troop presence, burning tires and using cars to block the main road. And “dozens of young men” threw stones at prime minister Gedi’s convoy.

Wouldn’t a more accurate headline have been “Somalia’s PM greeted by cheers, protests”? Oh well. I guess there were no statues left standing in Mogadishu for the Ethiopian army to pull down for the news cameras.

PM Gedi is evidently not too concerned by symbolism. He was installed in the US Embassy complex in the southwest of the city, brought into Mogadishu – which he had not previously entered during his “rule” – by a procession of 40 Ethiopian tanks. Given anti-Ethiopian and anti-US sentiment – not to mention anti-provisional government sentiment – it’s hard to believe this particular entrance into Mogadishu is going to endear the PM to most Somalis.

Martin Fletcher has been reporting about Somalia for The Times of London, and has strong feelings about the folly of US support for the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. Here’s his analysis of the popularity of Gedi’s government:

Most Somalis detested the official Government, which was created after two years of tortuous negotiations in Kenya between rival Somali factions, but was stranded in the town of Baidoa until this week because it dared not return to Mogadishu. The so-called Transitional Federal Government contains some of the warlords the Islamists drove out in June. It has relied for its survival on thousands of troops from US-backed Ethiopia, Somalia’s most bitter enemy, whose Christian Government feared the Islamists would foment trouble among its own sizeable Muslim minority.

As for Washington’s role in the situation:

Washington backed the warlords in their losing battle against the Islamists. And it tacitly approved Ethiopia’s military intervention to support the TFG.

It has even been passing aerial surveillance reports to Addis Ababa, according to US news reports.

Preoccupied with the spectre of Islamic terrorism, the White House is thus party to an attempt by a repressive regime in Ethiopia to replace a popular de facto government in Somalia with a widely reviled official one. It is a dangerous gamble.

But hey, don’t worry about it. We’re barely hearing about the Ethiopian invasion in the US media, and we’ll probably hear almost nothing when Mogadishu descends into the chaos Somalis have grown so familiar with when Ethiopian troops are forced to pull back. In the meantime, why not stay with CNN and watch the 24/7 Saddam Hussein deathwatch? That’ll be fun, won’t it?

(Apologies that I’ve been absent the past few days. Events in my immediate world have demanded more attention than events in east Africa…)

What a surprise. I guess there were Ethiopian troops in Somalia after all.

Ethiopia had strenuously insisted that it had not “invaded” Somalia, and that its presence to support the provisional government in Baidoa was “advisory”.

Evidently some of those advisors brought tanks and airplanes with them. You know how it is… I hate leaving home without my laptop and mobile phone. And now the nations are at war.

Until quite recently, the provisional government controlled little beyond the town of Baidoa. The rest of southern Somalia was controlled by the Union of Islamic Courts. UIC had brought more stability to Mogadishu than had been seen in a decade, and the international press was expressing surprise that the city could return to comparative normalcy so quickly.

But not everyone has been thrilled by the rise of the UIC – some US policymakers have expressed concern that some members of the UIC may have Al-Qaeda ties. And US ally Ethiopia has strenously objected to the rise of an Islamic power on its eastern border. Ethiopia further worried that the UIC would lay claim to the Ogaden, which the countries have warred over before. And Ethiopia worries that Eritrea may be backing UIC forces, fighting a proxy war on Ethiopia’s southeast flank to complement border tensions on their shared border.

On December 20th, the UIC began attacking Baidoa, the only city the transitional government held. And announcements were made inviting foreign fighters to join the fight in Somalia… an action that made the US nervous, and let the Ethiopian government portray the UIC as inciting terrorism within its borders. It’s not a surprise that Ethiopia has struck back.

What is a surprise, to me at least, is that Ethiopia has seized this opportunity to “crush” the UIC and to take Mogadishu. Since the UIC has small arms and “technicals” – Toyota pickup trucks with machine guns mounted on the back – and the Ethiopian army has invaded with jet fighters and tanks, it’s not a real surprise that some or all fighters would choose to take off their green skullcaps and melt into the crowd, rather than be killed by Ethiopian troops in a straightforward military engagement.

The report from the NY Times seems to suggest that the UIC has “dissolved” – UIC fighters abandoned their checkpoints and disappeared into the crowd. The authors suggest that this dissolution may be permanent – as UIC lost battles to the Ethiopian army, warlords who’d been part of UIC demanded their vehicles and fighters back, which may have fatally crippled the UIC.

I find this analysis very hard to believe. Any guerilla commander, facing an overwhelming invasion, would get out of the way of Ethiopian tanks and wait to see how troops tried to hold the city. If Ethiopian troops leave Mogadishu and let the provisional government – in alliance with their preferred warlords – try to hold the city, I would expect UIC forces to emerge again and engage with the warlords, perhaps routing them as they did before. If Ethiopia remains in Mogadishu to help the provisional government hold the city – perhaps trying to move their center of operations from Baidoa to Mogadishu – I would expect major diplomatic pressure on Ethiopia, which invaded without authorization or support from any transnational entity. The AU has already demanded that Ethiopia – as well as any other foreign fighters – withdraw from the country immediately.

Abdurahman of “No Longer at Ease” offers the additional concern that Puntland, allied with the transitional government, might become another front for fighting. There have already been skirmishes between UIC forces and forces from Puntland, supporting the transitional government/Ethiopian forces.

As Ethiopian forces marched toward Mogadishu, Zenawi and his ministers were taking to the airwaves to announce that villagers were now free to watch cinema and listen to pop music again. They were also free to resume their addiction to qat, which the UIC had banned – qat sellers opened their booths almost immediately. Some media reports are claiming that the Ethiopian troops are being met with “cheers and flowers.” (This is all sounding hauntingly familiar to me, for some reason…)

Other reports suggest that Mogadishu is back to normal – that is to say, pre-UIC normal, which means looting, robbery and armed men roaming the streets. Ali Said Omar, writing to the BBC from Mogadishu, says:

Looting has been going on. Some of those involved freelance militia that were kicked out by the Islamists, but some are just opportunists, grabbing as much money as they can. Last night many, many people were robbed.

Speaking to people I did pass it seems as if our city is full of tears, waiting to burst. Most seem very worried, some terrified, waiting to know what to do.

He goes on to mention something that probably isn’t intuitively obvious to my American readers: the US is seen as the driving force behind this invasion.

No-one is giving much consideration to the transitional government as they are only being guided by the Ethiopians who are in turn are guided by the Americans.

If the government brings the previous warlords back then life will revert to how it was – the warlords will kill everyone to gain revenge on the people for supporting the Islamic courts. The people will be punished.

Two warlords escaped with the help of the Americans when the Islamists took over. Since 9/11 everything has changed… America used to be a dream for us.

But here the Ethiopians are hated more. You see – this is Somalia not Ethiopia. You do not have a right to come to another country and destroy civilians and say you are doing it to protect your own country.

People are comparing Ethiopia’s action to what America has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ethiopia is saying that Somalis are a threat to our security.

People here are very angry with Ethiopia and then secondly with America.

Somalis aren’t the only ones who see a US hand in these events. German newspaper Die Tageszeitung writes:

Washington is supporting the transitional government to prevent an Islamist victory. But the USA is employing the wrong means. It is supporting warlords who are hated among the population and the Americans believe they can use Ethiopia as a proxy to avoid having to use their own troops. That is simply idiotic. Ethiopia is Somalia’s archenemy, partly because of a territorial conflict. If Ethiopian troops enter Somalia it will drive even moderate Islamists into the Islamists’ camp.

While there are certainly moments when US foreign policy is “simply idiotic”, it’s possible that someone in the US State department understands that an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia is unlikely to make many friends in Mogadishu. The Kampala Monitor reports that the US has been reaching out to Uganda to act as a peacekeeper in Somalia, perhaps forcing Ethiopia into a more secondary (and less inflamatory) role. That said, statements from the National Security Council are being read as support by the US government for the Ethiopian invasion. In both statements by the NSC and from the State Department, connections between the UIC and Al-Qaeda were invoked.

It’s getting hard to defend my country from charges of “Islamophobia as foreign policy”. A country that’s seen very little peace in the past 15 years has just been destabilized by the army of a traditional enemy, commanded by a man who’s proved willing to have troops fire on unarmed civilians. It’s very unlikely that the invading army can hold the territory without a wider invasion, in which a Christian nation would occupy and hold a Muslim nation. The result, in the short term, is likely to be looting, violence and warlordism in a country that’s already been destroyed by fifteen years of the same. The long term consequences? Regional war is one possibility. An increased sense that the US is willing to sacrifice stability for any nominal action against “global terror” – no matter how ineffective – is a near certainty.

David Bosco in Foreign Policy Passport, asks a question I skirted in this post: “Are US advisors helping the Ethiopians in Somalia?” It’s a damned good question. Certainly, there’s US presence in the horn of Africa, including carrier support in Djbouti. It would be far from shocking to discover that battlefield intel was conveyed to Ethiopia from US aircraft… though it would put the issues I tried to raise in this post into sharper focus. Would this be yet another example of the 1% doctrine?

Like David Weinberger, I’m very surprised to be named Time’s person of the year (along with you, and you and you). Like Rebecca MacKinnon, I see the choice of “you” as a vindication of the work that we do at Global Voices. And, like Matt Hurst, I’m somewhat disappointed by Time’s justification of their selection.

In showing enthusiasm for all things “web 2.0″, precisely what Time’s celebrating gets a bit blurry. Their overview article points to many of the exciting phenomena taking place online today: Wikipedia, OhMyNews, Flickr, Facebook, Amazon reviews, Open Source Software and several flavors of blogging and video authoring. But the focus on YouTube in subsequent articles shows that much of the enthusiasm for ’06’s most hyped acquisition focuses less on citizen media and more on America’s continuing love affair with television. Two examples given of YouTube’s power are its role in letting people see Stephen Colbert’s commentary at the White House correspondent’s dinner and in providing a second chance for sitcom “Nobody’s Watching”. While it’s certainly interesting that YouTube behaved as a “court of appeals” for these programs (stealing a phrase Jay Rosen has applied to blogs), the only thing “you” had to do with these programs was watching them.

“You” evidently also includes political consultants “Creative Response Concepts” – you know, the guys behind Swift Boat Veterans for “Truth” – and the producers of Michael J. Fox’s Missouri election ad. Evidently who makes a video isn’t so important as that the video is “viral”… This isn’t to say that there isn’t citizen media taking place on YouTube – the piece on Kamini’s absurdly wonderful Marly-Gomont video is a great example of how YouTube is giving voice to people who otherwise might not be heard. But a huge amount of the content that makes YouTube so popular is professionally created content being used in questionable legal fashion.

(The confusion between citizen media and new media delivery isn’t unique to video – a good bit of the enthusiasm for blogging is actually enthusiasm for RSS, and the increasing tendency of newspapers, magazines and virtually everyone else to put all their content online in a subscribable format.)

Beyond the question of whether Time is really celebrating citizen media, or different ways we watch media, Rebecca raises an interesting set of questions about who gets to author media in this “new” world. (Which, as I’ve argued elsewhere, isn’t actually all that new…)

How do we help more people become creators of their own media? What kind of outreach can Web 2.0-savvy citizens provide to the still-uninitiated? How do we bridge massive and endless barriers of language and culture? Are the technical tools accessible enough to the next billion Internet users, or are we in need of new solutions better suited to the developing world? And how about people who are being prevented from speaking – or being heard – by governments, corporations, and other powerful entities?

These are all great questions, and ones that everyone involved with Global Voices is wrestling with. But there’s another critical question raised by Rob Rogers:

In other words, even if we manage to build tools and strategies that allow people in developing nations to express themselves… even if we offer sufficient protection to people in repressive nations to allow them to speak… even if we figure out how to translate between the thousands of languages people speak… will anyone will pay any attention?

While the read/write web means that anyone (i.e., anyone with a net connection, access to a computer, sufficient literacy and computer literacy, and political freedom) can create media, it also means that lots more media gets created. But it’s unclear how much more media most of us can consume. Which means we’ve got to consume this media selectively – either we find what we’re searching for, or we watch what we’re shown by a new set of gatekeepers. (I’m a lot more likely to see a viral video if it’s mentioned on Metafilter or BoingBoing than if it were just posted to YouTube.)

Old media gatekeepers, for all their shortcomings, often retain a quirky fondness for international news. This may be nostalgia for their (short-staffed and, increasingly, closed) overseas bureaus or genuine concern that informing global citizens requires global news coverage. While CNN is a long way from providing media coverage in proportion to global population (that would be a LOT of China and India stories if they did), it tends to give more global diversity than you’re likely to encounter on YouTube, unless you’re explicitly searching for global content.

Read/write media doesn’t make us xenophobic or ignorant… but as Time observes, “Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom.” New tools like blogs, video and photo sharing can make it possible to have a far deeper, more intimate view of life in other parts of the world… but only if we bother to look for these views. If not, it’s possible that Web 2.0 just gives us thousands more ways to learn more about Britney and her underwear habits.

• Tehelka – The People’s Paper
  Shivam Vij’s very generous review of the Delhi conference and the global voices project as a whole
  (tags: globalvoices india)
• In the realm of fantasy – Sunday Times – Times Online
  excellent turkmenistan travelogue
  (tags: turkmenistan travel)

• Wired News: Bloggers Shrink the Planet
  Quinn Norton’s review of our third conference, with a focus on Sami’s Tunisian prison mashup
  (tags: globalvoices media)
• Global Voices on Internet Activism | PodTech.net: Technology, Business, Media, and News Podcasts
  A podcast by Khamla Bhatt, an interview with Georgia Popplewell and me about Global Voices, from Delhi. And a picture proving, conclusively, that I am very, very big in comparison to our managing editors…
  (tags: globalvoices podcast india)
• RConversation: Blogs and China correspondence – survey results
  Interesting new research from RMack on the attitude of journalists towards China blogs – really useful stuff
  (tags: blogs china berkman data)

Turkmenbashi’s dead. As Blake Hounshell noted on Foreign Policy Passport, “He will be missed by approximately … nobody.”

That’s not entirely true. The editors of News of the Weird, for instance, probably shed a tear or two. They will have to redouble their efforts to cover other wacky dictators like Kim Jong Il and Alexander Lukashenko.

Saparmurat Niyazov – also known as “Father of all Turkmen” or “Turkmenbashi” – ran a cult of personality like almost no other. While stridently insisting that it made him uncomfortable to see pictures of himself all over his nation – he once said “I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets – but it’s what the people want” – he built a nation that was basically a Turkmenbashi theme park. Indeed, one of the last times he was seen in public, he was riding a brightly colored toy train at the opening of the “World of Turkmenbashi Tales” children’s theme park. (RIA Novosti has a special section on Turkmenbashi’s most eccentric “reforms”.)

Niyazov ordered construction of a lakeside resort in the desert, a ski resort on the sunbaked foothills of the Iranian border, an ice palace with a habitat for penguins in one of the world’s hottest capitals. In downtown Ashgabat, a giant golden statue of Niyazov rotates to face the sun – the running joke amongst Turkmenistan watchers was that the sun actually moved to follow the statue…

But Turkmenbashi wasn’t just about wacky policy declarations, like naming months after himself, his mother and his favorite poet. No, he managed to create one of the world’s most repressive media environments, to turn the country’s medical system over to the military, to dismantle the educational system, creating a generation educated only to work the cotton fields or in the natural gas industry, and to create a standard of living comparable with the poorest of sub-Saharan African nations, despite having the fifth-largest reserves of natural gas in the world.

There’s no doubt that Niyazov’s death is an early Christmas present for the Turkmen opposition, and, arguably, the whole nation of Turkmenistan. But there are serious questions about what the future will be like for the nation. There are serious questions about succession, and questions about whether a nation founded on a cult of personality can survive the death of its leader. It’s greatly in the interest of regional players that Turkmenistan continue pumping oil and gas… but what sort of government will emerge from the shadows of deep authoritarianism is anyone’s guess.

If you’re keeping track of the guessing game, let me recommend Nathan Hamm’s Registan, which is already all over the story. New Eurasia also covers the country – they offer the intriguing speculation that Niyazov has been dead for several days and that a political activist was arrested to prevent him from spreading the news to Moscow. The post also includes an ominous warning about the possible disintegration of the state after Niyazov’s death: “The population will not cheer the passing of a despot, but they may come to mourn the passing of a deeply compromised stability.”