Unpublished Census Provides Rare and Unvarnished Look at Turkmenistan

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Unpublished Census Provides Rare and Unvarnished Look at Turkmenistan
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 12 Issue: 26
February 10, 2015 04:02 PM Age: 8 hrs
By: Paul Goble

Turkmenistan is perhaps the most opaque country of all the post-Soviet states, with the government exercising tight control over almost all information and publishing only those statistical figures that serve Ashgabat’s interests. That makes the results of a census conducted in December 2012 especially interesting and important as the basis for considering what is actually taking place in that Central Asian country (Chrono-tm.org, February 3).

The 2012 census, previously unreleased by the government, was recently published in part on a Turkmenistani Internet portal. Turkmenistan’s last census that was more or less fully reported dates back to some 20 years ago. Moreover, the country’s leaders and officials have repeatedly provided inconsistent information about both the total number of people in the republic and the ethnic composition of its population. Sometimes the authorities have boosted the share of Turkmenistan’s ethnic Turkmens; other times, their reported figures increased the number of non-Turkmens. Frequently, Turkmenistani statistics have shifted the balance between ethnic Russians and other non-Turkmens in one direction or the other.

Now, some officials of the Turkmenistan State Committee on Statistics, speaking on condition of anonymity, have provided Chrono-tm.org with a selection of census data from the December 2012 enumeration. These figures show that the number of residents of the republic on the day of the census was 4.75 million, far fewer than the government had claimed over most of the last decade. Reportedly, 42,000 Turkmenistanis were studying abroad, 1,000 were working in embassies or other government agencies abroad, and approximately 82,000 were guest workers.

The officially unpublished census data also shows that the numbers of men and women in Turkmenistan are almost equal. It also claims that 100 percent of the men and 90 percent of the women of working age are working, figures that Chrono-tm.org says are almost certainly false given the high level of unemployment that anyone can see “with an unaided eye.”