Turkmenistan president set for 'swift inauguration'

Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is to be inaugurated for a second term on Friday, less than a week after winning over 97 percent of the vote in elections, a source said. "The grand ceremony for the inauguration of the elected president of Turkmenistan will take place on February 17," a government source told AFP Wednesday, asking not to be named. Berdymukhamedov won 97.14 percent of the vote in Sunday's polls against seven rivals who were all loyal members of the elite and none of whom made the slightest effort to criticise his record. His nearest competitor mustered barely over one percent of the vote. The president in his first term embarked on cautious reforms to dismantle the bizarre legacy of his eccentric predecessor Saparmurat Niyazov who died in 2006. But critics say his stabs at change, known as the "Era of Rebirth" in Turkmenistan, amounted to mere window dressing and accuse Berdymukhamedov of creating his own personality cult. Turkmenistan has shrugged off Western scepticism over the polls, which were not monitored by any full-scale Western observer mission. The official news agency Wednesday hailed the elections as "going down in history as the culmination of the era of great changes started five years ago," saying Turkmenistan had voted for its "leader-creator". In comments published by the government mouthpiece newspaper Neutral Turkmenistan, Berdymukhamedov appeared to reject any pressure for faster change in the ex-Soviet state. "We don't have the habit of hurrying and we will not artificially form and accelerate social-economic processes in society just for the sake of someone's interests," he wrote.