And when you feel yourself strong
Be aware, for there are many traitors with traps to set
Foreign distribution of the Ruhnama began several years ago.
A massive monument to the "Book of Spirit," or Ruhnama, written by Turkmenistan's president, dominates a park in Ashkhabad, the capital. Almost all Turkmens are compelled to study the book, which has been translated into 30 languages for publication abroad.
(2003 Photo Burt Herman -- AP)
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"Dear Mr. President," wrote a director of the Finnish electricity concern Ensto in a letter last year. "The publication of your book will undoubtedly serve as a stimulus for the development of relations between our countries. It will allow for close acquaintance with the culture and national traditions of your people, and the political principles of Turkmenistan. . . . The international industrial concern has an important role in the manufacture and maintenance of energy grids."
The company's chief executive, Seppo Martikainen, said in a telephone interview that the company now planned to translate the book only for its employees. "The situation has changed," he said. "We had discussion on how far we should go with this, and it's only for our own use."
The Irish firm Emerol, which has contracts in Turkmenistan worth tens of millions of dollars, published the book in Lithuanian -- one of its directors is Lithuanian, according to company registration documents filed in Dublin.
DaimlerChrysler, the automobile giant based in Stuttgart, Germany, and Auburn Hills, Mich., sells ambulances and other vehicles to the Turkmen government. The firm published the first volume of the Ruhnama in November 2003.
"I can tell you that employees of DaimlerChrysler translated the book," said Ursula Mertzig-Stein, a company official. "A contract was signed and the book was presented to the leader." She said the company did not otherwise publish books but noted that "there are, I believe, not many other heads of state who are authors." She declined to be quoted on the human rights situation in Turkmenistan.
When a translation is complete, the book is launched abroad with coverage in the Turkmen media.
"Millions of readers whose mother tongue is Italian are looking forward to an opportunity to [get in] touch with the great history of the ancient Turkmen," reported the State Information Agency of Turkmenistan after this month's reception in Sicily, which was attended by local schoolchildren.
A sales representative for an Italian water company with major contracts in Turkmenistan organized the Italian translation.
Turkmen opposition leaders say they are dismayed by what they see as a cynical quid pro quo -- books for business.
"Having millions of copies of his nonsense in various languages is immoral when children in school have no textbooks," said Khudaiberdy Orazov, a former deputy prime minister under Niyazov. He is now in exile in Sweden, where he leads the opposition group Watan.
"For these companies, who should know better, it's unforgivable," he said.
A spokesman for the Turkmen Embassy in Moscow said the companies were under no obligation to publish the president's work and acted on their own initiative.
"Who can prohibit this if they wanted to do it of their own free will?" said Grigory Kolozin, the embassy spokesman. "The Turkmen leadership approaches the issue of making contracts with foreign companies on the basis of pragmatism."
"We felt it was only polite to do it," said Imre Sesztak, head of the gas industry firm Turbo Team in Hungary, which paid for the publication of 1,000 copies of the book in Hungarian in October. "People know very little about Turkmenistan, so we feel we're spreading information."
Russian news media reported recently that the energy giant Gazprom, which has been involved in a dispute with Niyazov over huge natural gas contracts, is behind a recent proposal by a number of renowned Russian poets to translate the president's poems into Russian. The offer kicked up a literary storm. Alexander Tkachenko, general director of the Russian PEN center, condemned the offer as a "disgrace and a shame." He also said that Niyazov's "gibberish is impossible to translate."
A Gazprom spokeswoman said the report was untrue. One of the poets, Mikhail Sinelnikov, would say only that "a sponsor with business interests," whom he declined to identify, had suggested that they write to Niyazov offering to translate his work. The poets, who had planned a volume of classical Turkmen poetry, now suspect they were hoodwinked into a second project.
"We made ourselves targets by signing this in haste," said poet Yevgeny Rein, who co-signed a letter to Niyazov that read, "Your verses about mother, moral purity, about family and statehood have become secular prayers in the life of Turkmens. Their publication in Russian would raise the significance of poetry."
Special correspondents Shannon Smiley in Berlin, Stacy Meichtry in Rome and Kriszta Fenyo in Budapest contributed to this report.
