Page 5 - AsianOil Week 02 2023

AsianOil COMMENTARY AsianOil

strand of the Power of Siberia running through official organ, Berdimuhamedov thanked China Chinese President Xi
Mongolia and landing in northern provinces of for its help developing the Turkmen space indus- Jinping and Turkmen
China. try, which he said would, among other things, President Serdar
Since the added gas deliveries from Turk- bolster his country’s national security. He did not Berdimuhamedov,
menistan to China will be focused on supplying spell out what he meant by this. Beijing, January 2023
more southerly customers, there should be little As for honest-to-God commercial deals
or no sense of competition with Russia. reached as a result of Berdimuhamedov’s trip,
When Berdimuhamedov talks so point- there was little of that. Chinese company CRRC
edly about “security of energy supplies” and Ziyang revealed on its Twitter account on Janu-
the importance of this for the preservation of ary 9 that it had reached a $30mn deal to supply
international stability, it feels like he is seeking Turkmenistan with locomotive spare parts. It
to nudge China into getting directly involved in was a noteworthy bit of business mainly because
implementation of the trans-Afghanistan Turk- back in 2017, Turkmenistan stiffed the very same
menistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) company over the payment of $2.4mn due for
pipeline, which could play a big role in improv- the delivery of a pair of locomotives. It took legal
ing the well-being of Turkmenistan’s war-torn action to resolve the whole impasse.
eastern neighbour. It does not look like China is In one heartening development, Amster-
taking the bait, though. dam-based website Turkmen.news reported
Beijing’s contribution to geopolitical order on January 3 that the beneficiaries of a mass
is in chivvying vassal state-lite petitioners like amnesty declared in December included the
Turkmenistan into signing up to grandiloquent imprisoned doctor Khursanai Ismatullaeva.
initiatives like the Global Security Initiative, Ismatullaeva was arrested in July 2021 after
which Xi proposed at a conference in April 2022. she went public with claims that she had
In very crude summary, the GSI, as it is known in been unfairly dismissed from a position at
its abbreviated form, repackages familiar Beijing a neonatal clinic in Ashgabat in 2017. What
mantras about respect for sovereignty and terri- really got the doctor into trouble was that she
torial integrity. Berdimuhamedov duly pledged spoke about her situation at an event organ-
his determination to promote implementation ised by members of the European Parliament,
of the GSI and then reasserted his government’s which the Turkmen police state evidently
opposition to Taiwanese independence for good deemed to be an unseemly act of airing dirty
measure. linen in public. Ismatullaeva was sentenced
Yet one more area in which China and Turk- to nine years in prison on almost certainly
menistan intend to deepen cooperation, appar- trumped-up charges of embezzlement in
ently, is space. In an article published in The September 2021, but will now be allowed to
People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s go free. ™

Week 02 13•January•2023 www. NEWSBASE .com P5