Turkmen television viewers watching the visits of the country’s President not live, but following a long delay, were shocked and disappointed by the TV footage.

The chant was reminiscent of the slightly-forgotten slogan “Khalk, Vatan, Turkmenbashi!” (People, Motherland, Turkmenbashi). However, the television audience was more upset not with the new slogan – sooner or later this was destined to happen – but with the fact that the slogan was chanted by young Turkmen students studying abroad in higher educational establishments in Belarus, i.e. this was not coming from the country’s least educated but rather from a more progressive group of people.

 Hearing the unison chanting arranged by the Turkmen students, Berdymukhammedov smiled in return and seemed to be pleased with the reaction of his young fellow countrymen.

The Turkmen intelligentsia is outraged by the current situation. “This was chanted by Turkmen, who in the 1920s were referred to as aristocrats from the steppe by Belyaev and Uspensky in the first volume of the book “Turkmen music”, and who unlike other neighboring Oriental peoples are in no way viewed as having a servile nature” - a professor from one of the Turkmen higher educational institutions bewails.

“A high-ranking official, who back then had composed the slogan “Khalk, Vatan, Turkmenbashi” was sentenced to life imprisonment by the very same Turkmenbashi. Will this bitter experience serve a lesson to anybody?” – asks a woman who was previously employed in the Cabinet of Ministers office.