What happens in Ashgabat, stays in Ashgabat

High rollers welcome.

A few years ago, tales of Turkmenistan’s crazy “president for life,” Saparmurat Niyazov, made the secretive Central Asian nation the darling of offbeat travel writers. Niyazov’s title was actually “His Excellency Saparmurat Türkmenbaşy, President of Turkmenistan and Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers,” and he wielded his power as  Top Turkman with a heavily gilded fist. Like all good dictators, he plastered his likeness everywhere, but he also renamed the month of April for his mother, personally approved college applications and declared long hair illegal for men. He was one weird cat.

Then, he died. And most people resumed their forgetting all about Turkmenistan.

That may change soon. Thanks to an abundance of natural resources, Turkmenistan has some money in the bank. They’re using some of it to build a casino wonderland. From MSNBC:

Four white-marble hotels opened here in June on a spit of sand by a landlocked sea — the beginnings of what is billed as Central Asia’s answer to Las Vegas, an opulent $5 billion oasis of seaside villas, casinos, an artificial island and a ski center.

The resort-to-be stands out in this arid country the size of California, where camels clop down dirt roads and bedraggled Soviet-era apartment blocks doze in the blistering desert heat. Yet Turkmenistan also sits atop the world’s fifth-largest reserves of natural gas, and is rapidly emerging as a key player in global energy markets.

“Coming to our country has always been a problem for foreigners,” Murat Kariyev, the country’s elections commission chairman, told The Associated Press. He called Avaza “the world’s window on Turkmenistan.”

The world’s biggest consumers of energy want to do more than peek through the window at Turkmenistan — they want to barge through the door. The United States, Europe, China, Russia and Iran are all jostling for greater access to the country’s mammoth natural gas fields, which could contain more than 26 trillion cubic yards (20 trillion cubic meters) of natural gas. That’s enough to supply Europe with gas for the next 66 years.

The European Union and the United States see Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov, who took power 2 1/2 years ago, as a potential ally in their efforts to break reliance on Russia for natural gas.

But Russia, Turkmenistan’s chief energy partner, is fighting a rearguard action to keep its near monopoly on the purchase of Turkmen gas. In 2008, Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom paid Turkmenistan $7 billion for gas that Russia resold to Europe, according to Global Witness, a London-based watchdog group.

China in turn has moved boldly to challenge Russia, cutting its own energy deal, which includes a $4 billion loan. Beijing plans to begin tapping a major natural gas field in eastern Turkmenistan when a new pipeline is finished as early as this year.

Courted from all sides, sitting on vast wealth, Turkmenistan’s regime faces stark choices: to open its doors or live in continued isolation, to push for reform or renew repression.

The Avaza resort on the Caspian Sea symbolizes some of these conflicts. It is designed to appeal to the sophisticated business traveler. Yet during opening ceremonies, the white marble hotels were decorated Soviet-style with gigantic pictures of President Berdymukhamedov, and a huge television screen beamed down a picture of the president’s face.

With visas nearly impossible to secure, getting into Turkmenistan has always been difficult. Even once you’re in the country, travelers are told where they can go and whom they can meet. It’s not quite North Korea, but it’s not much better. Don’t expect this to change once the gambling complex is open. They’re building an international airport specifically to serve Avaza and special visas will be issued.

Will Avaza really fulfill “Every schoolchild’s dream [of] holidays on the sea,” as Turkmenistan’s official website claims? Or will it become a high-end Interzone for perverse Russian oligarchs and debauched Saudi princes? My money says the latter. I just hope I can afford to visit.

via Turkmenistan opens its own Las Vegas | MSNBC.com.

via Avaza – a symbol of the new epoch | Turkmenistan.gov.