“We know about the existence of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, but we do not have access to them. Everything is blocked here,” summarizes Biachim Ichangouliev, a fruit seller in Turkmenistan, one of the most closed countries in the world where the state exercises almost complete control over the Internet.
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To get around the bans, it is an obstacle course.
“Some people manage to connect to a VPN, but it is only temporary (because) it too is blocked,” continues the 19-year-old young man, whom AFP met at a bazaar in the capital Ashkhabad.
“And the internet is slow. So if someone manages to upload an interesting video, clip or film, we all watch it together,” he says to his friends.
However, the leader of the former Soviet Republic of Central Asia, which is rich in hydrocarbons, Serdar Berdimoukhamedov, clearly does not consider these drastic limits to be sufficient.
In mid-January, he announced his intention to “strengthen the country's cybersecurity,” following restrictions imposed by his predecessors, his father Gurbanguly Berdymoukhamedov and the late and eccentric Saparmurat Niazov.
Major messaging services are banned here: Quit WhatsApp, Viber, Signal or Telegram. Instead, the government set up an application under its control, Bizbarde.
As for online videos, the authorities have launched Belet Video, a kind of alternative to YouTube, which has been stripped of any content that could reveal the outside world to Turkmens, be it information or entertainment.
“Parallel Reality”
“There is no such thing as a media landscape,” summarizes Rouslan Miatiev, editor of the news site Turkmennews, which is banned in his country, for AFP.
Turkmens only see “propaganda promoting the cult of personality surrounding father and son Berdimuhamedow,” assures the journalist working from the Netherlands.
“And so that this parallel reality created by the media does not collapse, the leaders are blocking the Internet,” Mr. Miatiev accuses.
The Turkmen media, all state-owned, disseminated only official information and placed particular emphasis on the litany of thanks and praise to the country's leaders.
For Youssoup Bakhchiev, a 38-year-old civil servant from Ashkhabad, “Turkmen television is very boring, uninformative and always repeats the same programs.”
He used to have access to more foreign channels via satellite, but that is now impossible.
“City hall staff came to my house and told me to remove my satellite dish because it was ruining the city’s architecture,” he remembers.
So he subscribed to Turkmen cable television.
“The state therefore controls the information and receives revenue for this subscription,” he believes.
Certain Western channels, including France 24, BBC and Euronews, are permitted, but their audiences are more anecdotal in a country where very little English is spoken.
The worst of the worst
That's why Turkmens watch programs on their screens every day in which Serdar Berdymukhamedov reprimands embarrassed ministers, plants trees in the desert or receives thunderous applause.
His father Gourbangouly, the “hero protector” (Arkadag) and “leader of the Turkmen nation,” endowed with immense privileges, multiplies the eccentricities surrounding his cult of personality. Sometimes he excelled in sports, with a weapon in his hand, or as a musician.
Sometimes to the point of absurdity. The newspaper “Arkadag” reports that Arkadag (Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov) traveled to Arkadag – the city founded in his honor – to congratulate the victorious football players of the Arkadag team.
This may make you smile, but the reality of the regime is grim. In an analysis of civil and political freedoms, the American NGO Freedom House placed Turkmenistan in the “worst of the worst” category with a score of 2/100, even worse than North Korea (3).
Turkmenistan is also at the bottom of Reporters Without Borders' press freedom rankings.
But all of this bothers Oksana Choumilova, a forty-year-old employee of a construction company in Ashkhabad who is happy about the stability of her country.
As a subscriber to the newspaper “Neutral Turkmenistan” – with the unmissable photo of the president on the cover – she assures AFP that when she reads it, she feels a “sense of stability and calm” because “it does not contain any critical articles or negative information.”