After unmarried Turkmen women learned they needed to wear yellow head scarves to work in Ashgabat, their bosses shrugged when queried. The order came “from above” the women were told.
The directive for young women came in early March, along with a requirement for married women to attend work in yellow dresses. Those who fail to comply with the latest color condition have been warned they can be fired.
The aesthetic rules are the latest in a growing list of requirements in Turkmenistan that have no legal codification but can have heavy consequences if ignored.
Cars in Turkmenistan, especially in the capital Ashgabat, are required to be white or pale, air-conditioning condensers have been removed from buildings, and women are required to wear traditional dresses. Young men must also be clean-shaven in a de facto ban on beards, which has also been seen elsewhere in Central Asia.
“These ‘regulations’ are not based on legal documents,” Slavomir Horak, an expert on Central Asia at Charles University in Prague, told RFE/RL. “Often it's based on some notice, remark, or ‘recommendation’ of the president or somebody from the presidential family.”
Turkmenistan has been ruled by President Serdar Berdymukhammedov since March 2022. On voting day, the young politician arrived at a polling station in a car bearing the plate 72 97. He was later declared the winner of the presidential election with 72.97 percent of the vote. The 43-year-old is the son of ex-President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, who was in office from 2006 to 2022 but is widely believed to remain the primary decision-maker in the country.
Horak told RFE/RL that, in the case of a de facto ban on satellite dishes, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov publicly declared that the dishes “destroyed the face of the city.” For police on the ground, the statement was enough that “officers understood it as an order,” Horak said.
The head scarf ruling, which comes on the back of several previous directives on women’s appearance, has received a strong reaction privately.
"When will this end? When will the humiliation of women's dignity end?” one Turkmen woman told RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, speaking anonymously for safety reasons. Female state employees have previously been forbidden from using makeup, wearing tight dresses, or dyeing their hair blonde, among other requirements.
The Women’s Union of Turkmenistan did not respond to queries from RFE/RL's Turkmen Service about the latest clothing stipulation.
Horak says the aesthetic rules in Turkmenistan are partly a legacy of the country’s Soviet era and the whims of the country’s first president, Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in 2006. “But it reached its peak during Berdymukhammedov’s dynasty,” the academic adds.
So far, there is only speculation over why certain colors have been chosen for Turkmen women’s clothing. Some believe it is due to the preference for yellow by the wife and sisters of Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov.
Observers say that, since Serdar Berdymukhammedov took office three years ago, there have been small positive changes in Turkmenistan, including an apparent willingness to address forced labor in the cotton industry and the publication of census data.
But the country remains one of the most corrupt and authoritarian states on earth where -- outside showcase cities and resorts -- poverty remains severe. Although publicly available data is hard to come by, the median income in the gas-rich country is estimated to be just $2.40 per day, less than a quarter of that in neighboring Kazakhstan.
