ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan — Secretary of State John Kerry seems unlikely to make it to North Korea in his 15 remaining months in office. But on Tuesday he got the next best thing: A two-hour visit to another of the world’s most-sealed-off autocratic states, where the leader recently unveiled a 69-foot-high gold statue of himself on horseback, to go along with the regularly produced videos of his sporting prowess.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov (pronounced gur-BAHN-goo-lee bair-dee-mukh-ha-MAY-doff) of Turkmenistan greeted Mr. Kerry at the gates of his white-marble palace in this eerily empty capital less than an hour’s drive from the border with Iran. No American secretary of state had landed here since 1992, when James A. Baker III showed up just after the breakup of the Soviet Union. What Mr. Kerry discovered here was a city that looks like Pyongyang might look like if the North Koreans were sitting on one of the world’s largest stocks of natural gas, as the Turkmens are.
Central Ashgabat is almost entirely made of white marble, even the under-construction American Embassy, whose marble content has been of particular interest to Mr. Berdymukhammedov. But Mr. Kerry wanted to focus on other issues, including the jailing of suspected dissidents and religious practitioners on flimsy charges, Turkmenistan’s recent slowness to pay American contractors for work they have done — a result of a downturn in gas prices — and the matter of what the Central Asian states might look like if they put together a network of electricity grids and gas pipelines, rather than relying on selling to markets in Russia and China.
“I am not here to lecture you,” Mr. Kerry said, a line he has repeated often on his four-day tour of the five “Stans” of the former Soviet Union. He discovered, however, that many of the leaders in the region were ready to lecture him, unloading their grievances about extremists flowing in from Afghanistan and the troubles of balancing larger powers on their borders: Russia, China and Iran.
Mr. Kerry’s trip has been an experiment in both power-balancing and sleep deprivation. He has flown from the potholed streets and crumbling architecture of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, near China’s western border; to the cozy, tree-lined streets of Samarkand, Uzbekistan; and then far north to snowy Astana, Kazakhstan, which looks vaguely like Las Vegas.
But for pure weirdness, it is hard to beat Ashgabat. No Turkmens were allowed anywhere near the reception site to see their president as he walked down a pathway between the palace’s cascading fountains, past his goose-stepping guards, to greet Mr. Kerry.
Whatever Mr. Berdymukhammedov, a 58-year-old former dentist, lacks in retail political skills he makes up in stage-managed elections: He received 97 percent of the vote when he was re-elected three years ago, having picked his opponents, many of whom said Mr. Berdymukhammedov was clearly the best choice.
But by some measures, Mr. Berdymukhammedov is a reformer. He returned the country to a normal calendar; his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, had named days of the week after family members. Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Berdymukhammedov does not insist that his image appear on every piece of currency; just some. The statue of Mr. Niyazov rotated so that it always faced the sun; the new, gold-coated one of Mr. Berdymukhammedov is stationary. And he insists that he did not really want it.
Two years ago he explained that his electorate demanded that it be erected. “My main goal is to serve the people and the motherland,” he said at the time. “And so I will listen to the opinion of the people and do as they choose.”
As Mr. Kerry has traveled along the steppe, he has been adjusting his language on human rights, becoming more forthright with every stop. It is a hard thing to calibrate. Say too little, as he did when he initially urged leaders in the region to think about the “human dimension” of development, and critics might accuse him of bending to some of the most authoritarian governments in the world. Say too much and the conversation is shut down.
In a speech to students in Astana, Mr. Kerry made his most direct case that Central Asian states had gone too far in the crackdown against Muslim extremists.
“We have to understand that the terrorist presence doesn’t give authorities a license to use violence indiscriminately,” he said. Evoking some language from the Vietnam War, in which he fought, he said: “We can’t rescue a village from Daesh or Boko Haram by destroying it,” referring to militants of the Islamic State and extremists based in Nigeria. “And terrorism is not a legitimate excuse to lock up political opponents, diminish the rights of civil society or pin a false label on activists.”
That is exactly what has happened in Turkmenistan. Western human rights organizations have been banned. Human Rights Watch calls it “one of the most repressive and closed countries in the world,” noting the dozens have “simply disappeared in the Turkmen prison system.” Mr. Kerry noted a list of “87 prisoners of concern.”
Mr. Berdymukhammedov said each situation involved “technical issues” that would have to be followed up by “experts.” At a meeting in Washington two weeks ago, a senior Turkmen official offered a lecture about the United States’ use of capital punishment and the percentage of Americans who are in the prison system.
In Tajikistan, Mr. Kerry also got vague answers about the dozens of members of the Islamic Renaissance Party who have been barred from political activity, and one presidential candidate, Zayd Saidov, who was sentenced to 29 years in prison.
The hard question in each of the countries Mr. Kerry visited is how to tie progress on human rights to the economic and diplomatic relationship.
Mr. Kerry knows he has leverage now, thanks to the economic downturn in the region and the nervousness about Russia. But it is unclear whether the Central Asian leaders value new ties with the United States more than efforts to oppose what they view, perhaps out of paranoia, as direct threats to their rule.
Mr. Kerry’s trip has dropped him into one of the least globalized corners of the Earth. Internet service is spotty and almost always monitored. When he gathered the foreign ministers of the five Central Asian countries in a meeting in Samarkand, chosen because it was once a crucial trading post on the Silk Road, it was clear that when they broke free of the Soviet Union, the countries did just the wrong thing: They devised their rules and their infrastructure to keep from trading with one other, valuing independence over interconnectedness.
“Twenty-five years ago we were all linked, through Moscow,” one of the foreign ministers, who declined to allow his name to be used, said at the end of the session. But mutual suspicions, border and water disputes, and fears of openness have kept them from unifying; each has its own currency and bizarre import rules.
Mr. Kerry made it clear that the United States has to make up lost time; 23 years between visits, he said in Ashgabat, is “far too long a time.” His message struck a chord with the students he spoke to, many of whom have studied in the United States and Europe. Some of the leaders he visited, on the other hand, had a look that said they had heard it all before, in a land where larger powers come, make promises and go.