Turkmenistan has a special approach to wiping out the coronavirus — by completely banning any mention of the word, according to reports.
The Turkmen president has reacted to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic by banishing the word “coronavirus,” according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The word has disappeared from viral disease brochures given to schools, hospitals and workplaces by the country’s Ministry of Health reports the Turkmenistan Chronicle, which RSF describes as “one of the few sources of independent information in a country where the government keeps tight control on the media.”
“They take away people for any talk about the coronavirus. Special people listen to the conversations in lines, at bus stops, on buses,” a journalist at Radio Azatlyk, a station that circumvents press restrictions in the country to broadcast reports on Turkmen and Russian, said of life in the capital city of Ashgabat.
Ranked last in the group’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index, the gas-rich autocratic ex-Soviet nation of Turkmenistan is one of the world’s most closed countries. It also neighbours Iran which has reported more than 44,000 cases.
The Central Asian nation is ordering citizens to stop saying the name of the deadly illness that’s sweeping the globe — and even empowered police to detain anyone letting it pass their lips in public, the Independent says, citing local media.
Undercover “special” agents even eavesdrop on public conversations to stamp out any mention of the name, the UK paper says, noting reports on Radio Azatlyk.
Also Read: What Press Freedom are we talking about?
The best residents can do is talk euphemistically about the coronavirus. Any safety measures enforced by the government only refer to protecting against “illness” and “acute respiratory diseases,” Radio Free Europe says.
It has left Turkmenistan one of the few nations reporting no confirmed cases of the virus — claims treated with suspicion by health experts outside of the notoriously secretive, closed country.
“This denial of information not only endangers the Turkmen citizens most at risk, but also reinforces the authoritarianism imposed by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov,” Jeanne Cavelier, the head of Reporters Without Borders’ Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said in a statement. “We urge the international community to react and to take him to task for his systematic human rights violations.”
Turkmenistan is ranked last in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index. It’s a place where speaking out is punished and where the government frequently shuts down the country for no reason, says Alexander A. Cooley, director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and an expert on Central Asian politics.
“Banning the term ‘coronavirus’ might seem to us obscene and extreme,” Cooley says. “But in reality, when the state controls all of the media and all of the digital nodes coming in and out, it’s not that outrageous. My sense is that they’ll try and keep [the pandemic] under wraps as long as they can.”
Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has ruled the country since 2006 through an all-encompassing personality cult that styles him as Turkmenistan’s “arkadaq,” or protector.
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