Hundreds of people in Turkmenistan have staged a protest over power outages in the energy-rich Central Asian country, which is grappling with a deepening economic crisis.
Protests are extremely rare in Turkmenistan, one of the world’s most authoritarian countries where dissent is not tolerated. Journalists and activists have been jailed in recent years for speaking out.
The demonstration occurred on June 17 in front of the main provincial government building in the southeastern city of Mary, located near the border with Afghanistan and Iran, eyewitnesses told RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service.
Several hundred protesters — most of them residents of the Bayramaly district, which is part of Mary Province — demanded to see the provincial governor, the eyewitnesses said.
Bayramaly district, where temperatures have exceeded 40 degrees Celsius this week, has been hit by frequent power cuts. Locals blame aging infrastructure for the outages and accuse the authorities of failing to act.
Eyewitnesses said police officers were deployed to disperse the protest, but the demonstrators refused to budge.
“We are not going anywhere, we are still in one piece, and if we tell others to come, more than 2,000 people will gather here,” one of the protesters told RFE/RL.
Eventually, the governor, flanked by police officers, came outside to meet the protesters. The official promised to fix the issue in the next few days, after which the protesters dispersed.
RFE/RL was unable to reach officials in Mary, the country’s fourth-largest city.
Since the protest, district officials in Bayramaly told locals that a new power transformer would be installed shortly.
Residents of Bayramaly told RFE/RL that the electricity supply in the district has been weak for years.
“In our district, the electricity is 110 volts, so we can’t run a refrigerator, freezer, air conditioner, or water pump, and the fan barely works,” one resident said.
Turkmenistan is grappling with a protracted economic crisis caused by the country’s near-total dependence on revenue from hydrocarbons sales as well as by systemic economic mismanagement.
The national currency, the manat, has suffered massive depreciation in recent years, and locals in parts of the country have reported food shortages.
