Turkmenistan has a special approach to wiping out the coronavirus — by completely banning any mention of the word, according to reports.
The Central Asian nation is ordering citizens to stop saying the name of the deadly illness that’s sweeping the globe — and even empowered police to detain anyone letting it pass their lips in public, the Independent says, citing local media.
Undercover “special” agents even eavesdrop on public conversations to stamp out any mention of the name, the UK paper says, noting reports on Radio Azatlyk.
The best residents can do is talk euphemistically about the coronavirus. Any safety measures enforced by the government only refer to protecting against “illness” and “acute respiratory diseases,” Radio Free Europe says.
It has left Turkmenistan one of the few nations reporting no confirmed cases of the virus — claims treated with suspicion by health experts outside of the notoriously secretive, closed country.
It is bordered to the south by Iran, one of the epicenters of the global pandemic that by Tuesday had reported more than 44,600 infections and nearly 3,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Other bordering nations — including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan — have also registered hundreds of cases.
The Turkmen government’s “radical move to suppress all information about the pandemic” is only “putting its citizens in danger,” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) warned, confirming reports of arrests for uttering the word.
“This denial of information not only endangers the Turkmen citizens most at risk but also reinforces the authoritarianism imposed by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov,” said Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.
“We urge the international community to react and to take him to task for his systematic human rights violations.”
The group noted that Turkmenistan has long been seen as one of the world’s most closed countries, and ranked last in RSF’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index.