Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow
Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow was president of Turkmenistan from December 2006, when Niyazov died and the deputy prime minister and health minister took the office the constitution gave to the speaker, who was arrested the same day, to March 2022, when he handed it to his son Serdar in an election with seventy-three per cent and kept the chairmanship of the upper house and the title of national leader, Arkadag, the protector, with a new city of that name built for him in the desert at a cost of five billion dollars. The dentist who had been Niyazov's personal physician dismantled the Ruhnama and the golden statue that turned with the sun, restored the ten-year school and the pensions Niyazov had cut, let the internet in under watch. Then he built a cult of his own, with the white marble capital that the Guinness book records as the densest in the world, the horse he fell off at the races in 2013 and the footage seized from every spectator, the songs he sings and the rap he performed with his grandson, the golden statue of himself on a horse on a cliff, the weightlifting, the medical books, and the renamed months put back. The state he ran was the fourth-largest gas reserve in the world sold almost entirely to China through the pipeline opened in 2009, at a price China set, after Russia cut its purchases in 2009 and the Iranian line failed. It was an economy that collapsed with the gas price in 2014 and produced the bread queues and the black-market manat at five times the official rate, and the Covid that the country declared it did not have. There were the forty-eight thousand emigrants a year, and a human rights record that Freedom House scores with North Korea's and Eritrea's, with the political prisoners disappeared into the Ovadan Depe prison and the state's denial that they exist. He was born in Babadaýhan in 1957, studied dentistry at the Turkmen medical institute and took a doctorate in Moscow. He ran the dental faculty and then the dental centre. He was Niyazov's health minister from 1997 and deputy prime minister from 2001, the man who put the ministry's hospitals outside the capital under the knife on Niyazov's orders. The son's presidency has been the father's continued, with the father's portrait beside it, and the family's, with the grandson Kerim in the ceremonies at fifteen. Arkadag has kept the foreign policy of permanent neutrality that the UN recognised in 1995 and that means nothing is asked of him. He has gone on singing.
- Lived: 1957 CE – ?
- Nationality: Turkmen
- Roles: president, dictator
