The authorities in Turkmenistan continue to deny there are any cases of coronavirus in the country.
The World Health Organization (WHO) sent a mission, delayed by some 10 weeks, to Turkmenistan in early July but the carefully guided tour the mission received from Turkmen officials left them able to say only that in the places they visited there was no evidence of coronavirus in Turkmenistan.
But the WHO seems unconvinced and Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus participated in a video call at the end of the first week of August with Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov to push for a WHO mission to return.
Berdymukhammedov agreed.
On this week's Majlis podcast, RFE/RL's media-relations manager for South and Central Asia, Muhammad Tahir, moderates a discussion on the situation inside Turkmenistan and what a second WHO team might find out that the first WHO team did not.
This week's guests are, speaking from New York, Rachel Denber, the deputy director of Human Right Watch's Europe and Central Asia division; from Europe, Ruslan Myatiev, the founder and director of the Turkmen.news website; and from Prague, Farruh Yusupov, the director of RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, known locally as Azatlyk; and Bruce Pannier, the author of the Qishloq Ovozi blog.
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Majlis Podcast: Turkmenistan's COVID Dilemma