The fact that the world is worrying about ongoing human tragedies and looming wars is no reason why some national leaders should not attend to their own priorities. Turkmenistan President Saparmurat Niyazov is doing just that. He is now renaming the days and months of the calendar. He can do that. He is president for life.
However, the idea is likely to prove problematic. Turkmens share with 400 million others in Asia, a language that is essentially Turkish. For all its own economic woes, the Republic of Turkey has been playing a key role in the economic and industrial development of Turkmenistan. Turkish businessmen and officials are unlikely to be anything other than confused, when told that they will be expected at a meeting in the country on the first "Spirituality Day" of "Mother", which would be the first Saturday in April.
The proposals from Niyazov are not yet concrete but before the Turkmen government presses ahead with them, it might like to consider some other moments in history where such name changing has been tried. Perhaps the most outstanding attempt came in the wake of the French Revolution, when the revolutionary leaders forced through not only new names for the months but wound the calendar back to Year One. It was a conceit that did not last long. Even before Napoleon had started driving back the tide of revolution with his initial whiff of grapeshot from cannon fired down Paris streets, the French had tired of this fundamental change to such a fundamental matter as the delineation of time. The French Revolution, therefore, not only ate its own children, but it ate its calendar as well.
At the founding of the United States, there was a suggestion that a new calendar be introduced based upon Masonic principles. The Founding Fathers, however, very wisely decided that they had more important things on their minds, such as repelling the gathering counterrevolutionary forces of the British Crown. Another significant historic moment when the calendar was changed was when Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader in Cambodia, began to butcher almost half his country’s population because they were seen to be against his lunatic rule. He decided that Cambodia, like France, would begin to count the years from the moment he took power. Cambodia’s year zero was the start of a decade of misery, the bloodthirstiness and horror of which quite eclipsed anything that happened in revolutionary France.
President Niyazov’s proposed reforms, therefore, have a checkered past. The time in history when a country can live in isolation with its favored ways, are pretty well long gone. Economic development is going to mean that Turkmenistan will become ever more integrated into the world pattern of trade and commerce. In that world, the trend is toward ever more standardization and greater homogenization, driven by the demands of high-speed transactions carried out by information technology.
While it might not take a computer more than a nanosecond to figure out that in relation to Turkmenistan, "Mother" meant "April", the world business community will not take kindly to introducing such exceptions to their sophisticated systems.
