Turkmenistan and the Gates of Hell

Amid unrest and violence in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan edged briefly into headlines when President Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov ordered his government on January 7 to find a way to close the Gates of Hell, a natural gas pit that has been burning in the Turkmen desert since 1971.

There are no original records of precisely what happened to create the flaming crater, but one verson goes like this: In 1971, Soviet engineers drilling for oil struck a pocket of natural gas instead. The accident created a crater near the village of Darvaza in the Karakum Desert 160 miles north of Ashgabat, into which the oil rig fell. Fearing the effect of poisonous gasses on nearby villages, the engineers decided to set the natural gas alight, estimating that it would burn out in a week. Some versions suggest the crater was created a decade earlier, and others that it was set on fire much later.

Half a century later, the 200-foot crater still burns. It’s one of Turkmenistan's best-known tourist sites – an accomplishment in a country that sees few tourists. It featured in a 2014 series on National Geographic in which a Greek-Canadian adventurer became the first person to set foot on the bottom of the crater (donning a spaceman-like heat-resistant suit and lowered on a kevlar harness) and was a stop along the route of a 2018 automobile rally organized by the Turkmen government across more than 900 miles from Turkmenabat through the Karakum Desert to Hazar on the coast of the Caspian Sea.

In 2021, the Gates of Hell got some press coverage after a report by Bloomberg, citing research by a Canadian emissions monitoring company, GHGSat Inc., identified Turkmenistan as “one of the world’s worst emitters of planet-warming methane.” GHGSat Inc. technicians had noticed a significant release of methane from near Turkmenistan’s Korpezhe natural gas field. The apparent leak, another researcher discovered, had been active for five years. Methane is a colorless and odorless gas, and a major component of natural gas. Bloomberg characterized the severity of the leak like this:

“Since methane has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide when it first enters the atmosphere, this one leak had a climate impact roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of all the cars in Arizona.”

The Bloomberg report concluded that given Turkmenistan’s international isolation, pressuring the government to make dramatic changes in order to address the apparently severe methane leaks from its natural gas industry would be difficult. Meanwhile, “changes to environmental standards in the broader energy industry pass Turkmenistan by.”

To be clear: The crater in Darvaza isn’t producing the methane leaks precisely because it’s on fire, but it’s possible Berdymuhamedov’s announcement was intended to come across as doing something about environmental problems. The president reportedly said, in reference to the burning crater, “We are losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the wellbeing of our people.” He did not offer a hint as to how it would be closed. Importantly, Berdymuhamedov had already ordered the Gates of Hell closed back in 2010.

A better reading of this development – which got much more coverage than other comments at the cabinet meeting on January 7 – is as a set of measures to both distract international attention and head off the possibilities of domestic unrest. At that same cabinet meeting, Berdymuhamedov announced he would convene an extraordinary season of the People’s Council, the upper chamber of the parliament, in early February to discuss a 30-year development plan.

“We bear great responsibility for the fate of our state and the future of our descendants,” the president said.

As Eurasianet noted, one of those tasked with coordinating the session is the president’s 40-year-old son Serdar, his presumed successor. Serdar was appointed by his father last February to the post of deputy prime minister and chairman of the Supreme Control Chamber; Berdymuhamedov also made Serdar a member of the State Security Council.

Turkmenistan, like Tajikistan, looks to be on the pathway to dynastic succession as an alternative to democracy or a managed, non-dynastic, political transition.

Kazakhstan’s attempt at a managed political transition appears to be tearing at the seams, with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev taking aim at the Nazarbayev family network in the wake of the early-January protests and violence. Tokayev’s rise to the presidency in 2019 occurred exactly as Nursultan Nazarbayev orchestrated it. Nazarbayev’s resignation preserved his role as lifetime head of the National Security Council, a position from which Tokayev removed him on January 5 in an effort to quell protests. The purported understanding that Tokayev would help preserve the Nazarbayev legacy (and its linkages to power and money) seems also to be fraying. One of Tokayev’s post-unrest announcements included a critique of a recycling monopoly set up in 2015 by Nazaryev’s youngest daughter, Aliya. He announced the ending of the government’s exclusive contracting with the company, Operator ROP, to which Kazakhs have had to pay recycling fees.

Berdymuhamedov may also hope to avoid the sort of uncertainty that brought him to power: The sudden death of his predecessor in 2006. While the political transition in Uzbekistan in 2016, which occurred after the death of President Islam Karimov, seems to have resulted in a stable government, it’s still a gamble.

It’s of little surprise that in the wake of Kazakhstan’s unrest, Turkmen authorities began enforcing an unannounced curfew in major cities in early January and stepped up the police presence, too. Under the guise of enforcing social distancing rules, RFE/RL reported that police in Mary, Turkmenistan had begun to break up gatherings of people chatting on street corners. Additional reports claimed police were stopping random citizens and checking their phones and paying visits to the homes of people who had family living or studying abroad.

On January 12, Berdymuhamedov said in a televised session of the State Security Council that “control over the internet had not been properly conducted in 2021." He ordered the National Security Ministry to tighten controls and focus enforcement on those posting “ideas damaging to Turkmenistan's constitutional structures, actions that disrupt social order, and propagate terrorism, extremism, ultra-nationalism, and other illegal activities.”

Turkmenistan already has some of the world’s slowest internet services.

It’s clear that the unrest in Kazakhstan has Turkmenistan spooked. Maybe closing the Gates of Hell will fix the problem.