As someone who is half-Turkmen (I don't live in Turkmenistan), I'm clearly surprised to see Niyazov drawn as a cute maid. Never thought he would be remembered in Japan. And it's hilarious to see how he's portrayed as an adorable girl unlike the most dictators in this collection. I think there should have been included other details in the art: his famous book Ruhnama, isolation, Owadan-depe prison, gas pipe (Turkmenistan has large gas reserves), indigenization, and excessive love for his deceased parents (monuments, renaming of objects, coins with their image, etc). Yet the art is still cute and good :D For me, he's very intriguing and interesting dictator, though i cannot say either he was good or bad. Yes, he made water, gas, bread and salt free, and also maintained stability in his country, but he was also obsessed with own personality cult, which looked very absurd. And let's not forget that he ruled Turkmenistan in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR, when there was a crisis in the post-Soviet countries. I wish there were arts of other Central Asian dictators like Nursultan Nazarbayev (ruled Kazakhstan for almost 30 years, made own personality cult and committed massacre against protesters in 2011), Islam Karimov (he was like Nazarbayev and even committed massacre in 2005 against protestors as well, forced children to work at cotton fields), and Emomali Rakhmon (stopped civil war in Tajikistan, built own personality cult and fights Wahhabism). Sorry for necroposting, long comment and my bad English
Niyazov's favorite food was melons. Apparently, he loved melons so much that the second Sunday in August each year became "Melon Day", a national public holiday to extol delicious melons.
There's no end to all the queer decrees that Niyazov set up, including no lip-synching, forbidding news anchors from washing their hair or wearing makeup, banning tobacco because he had cancer and was practicing abstinence, constructing a 6-lane freeway between the capital and his hometown, Gypjak (nix users,) and building a zoo with only penguins in the middle of the desert.
Also, in Turkmenistan was built a giant golden statue in Niyazov's image. In fact, this statue was made to rotate full circle in 24 hours, so that it would always face the sun.
Leave a comment