In Turkey, she recorded a farewell video message.

On April 13, in Turkmenistan, the relatives of 36-year-old activist Zarina Akhtyamova, who live in the city of Turkmenabad, were visited by employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and began to put serious pressure on her elderly parents and eldest daughter. The visitors showed them Zarina's speeches in social networks and, threatening with various persecutions, brought their father, Akhtyamov Kyarim Matyulovich (74) to a heart attack.

In a letter to the THF, she writes: “They were shouting, your daughter has contacted a terrorist group, let her get out of there, this is not a good group. My eldest daughter constantly writes to me to stop speaking the truth openly. It turns out that workers from the house administration first came to them, then from the police and threatened with arrest, demanding that I stop participating in chats and actions of the foreign opposition."

Akhtyamova came to Turkey in 2006, eventually married a Turkish citizen, and gave birth to two children. In 2010, her passport was stolen, the Turkish police recorded this fact and issued a certificate. Zarina kept a copy of her passport. It seems that there are no problems, go to the consulate as thousands of people do in other countries and restore documents. But no. A woman who visited the consulate dozens of times has been fighting alone for 12 years with consular workers in the city of Istanbul, who deny her this right.

“This is how they forced me to become an activist,” - she told us in an interview, - “now they are persecuting my relatives in Turkmenistan because I became an activist in the DVT and started talking openly about the problems of ordinary citizens like me.” Her father's heart attack, caused by the fault of the Foreign Ministry officials, was the last straw, because of which she recorded a video message.

According to the Law “On consular offices of Turkmenistan abroad”, their functions include taking measures to restore the violated rights of citizens. Thus, from the information posted on the website of the Consulate General of Turkmenistan in Moscow, it f ollows that the citizens of Turkmenistan, in order to resolve the issue of restoring / obtaining a particular document, it is enough to personally contact the consulate without leaving Russia. In particular, to obtain a certificate of marital status of a citizen of Turkmenistan for the period of his residence in his homeland.

But there is no such information on the website of the Consulate General of Turkmenistan in Istanbul.

As the above and hundreds of other cases show, this agency does not actually provide such services. What is the difference between the Turkmen diaspora in Turkey and the Russian one, what kind of discrimination? Why the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan, as a higher organization, allows such a legal gap in relation to its citizens. As a result, one single certificate of marital status resulted in a conflict between consular officials and a mother of many children. And this is not the only case.

(Continued April 20, 2022)

Turkmen Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights