A Week Of Chaos, Politics, and Economics In UB

I woke up on the 19th feeling terrible; I guess it was my turn to get sick (I almost made it—9 out of the 11 of us got sick on one day or another this trip). I managed the day long car ride quite well and we stayed at the first tourist camp that evening. Our flight took off for UB around 12:20pm and we were back in the hostel by 3pm. I spent the entire afternoon checking e-mail and typing up these journal entries. I didn’t manage to finish and spent all of Sunday doing the same thing. The night we got back our entire group went out for excellent Indian food and were planning on going to the ridiculously named “scorpion club”, but as we left the restaurant we noticed that all of the stores, bars, clubs, and most of the restaurants in the entire city were closed (at 8pm on a Saturday?). We had no idea what was going on, but the city was really creepy with everything shut down. We called it a night and decided to try again on Sunday. After a day of journaling and internet use at various cafes and bars, a group of us walked down to the “scorpion” which would have been open, like everything else, if it still existed. Again no idea what happened…this place was here when we left for the home stay and when we came back it was gone, no signs, no lights, no trace that this place ever existed.

Sunday night just reaffirms my theory that in UB it is just chaos. In this city nothing makes sense, and as long as none of it makes sense everyone knows what’s going on and can adjust to it and live with the ridiculousness of the potholes, and the traffic, and the missing menu items, and the people who sleep on the sidewalks whether or not they are drunk, or the 30+ people on the street with scales waiting to either guess your weight or let you check if you’ve really put on those extra pounds from eating nothing but mutton fat. This city is quite outrageous, but I really do like it here, and it feels a bit more like home then the countryside.

Monday marks the beginning of a weeklong series of lectures by individuals who work in politics, economics and social change. The first speaker was former SIT student (who actually married his language instructor and now lives here-scandal!) who now works for Ivanhoe Mines. Mining is the economic backbone of Mongolian and will continue to be probably for the next century or two. Erdenet, which is the second largest city in Mongolian, came about because of the copper mine established there during the socialist period; the mine constitutes about half of the GDP of Mongolia. Anyway, Luke is in charge of communication for Ivanhoe, which is the company that will start mining in the south Gobi at a site called Oyu Tolgoi (OT) as soon as there is government approval. OT is the largest deposit of copper ever found next to an enormous deposit of gold; this site was the International Geological Mineral Find of the Year (that’s what they actually call it) in 2004. To put this into perspective, Mongolia’s GDP will quadruple when this mine actually starts producing, so there is a lot riding on this one project.

Politics surrounding and holding up the project are so complicated I cannot even begin to explain them, but it is fascinating that everyone in the country seems to have an opinion on the mine and expectations about the new capital. Mongolia as the law stands now has a windfall profits tax of 60% and want a 50% stake in the mine, haha you’ve got to be kidding right? Absolutely not, former socialist view are so ingrained in the politics of this country that this project looks like it may never get off the ground, but it probably will if the new parliament changes the mining law this session. Oh yeah, elections finally got sorted out (remember those riots over the summer-more about that in a minute) and the parliament elected a coalition government cabinet of 9 ruling party members MPRP and 6 opposition members (I know very little of this makes sense, what counts here is that the national government is in place and is structured way differently than in the U.S.).

So Luke went through the whole project, and I learned the difference between block cave mining and pit mining. Then Layton, Luke’s boss, came to speak to us more about Mongolia and community enhancement from the mine (essentially Ivanhoe is bringing in infrastructure to the local herders, which is good and bad....but I will leave it at that). Layton himself is an American who came to Mongolia in 1992 with the Peace Corps and has lived in UB since then. He had some interesting insights into the way UB has grown and how Mongolia in general has progressed from socialism to democracy from a foreigner’s view. Essentially, as will be the running theme for this government, Mongolia is to bureaucratic, centralized, and lacks a population big enough to have decent people working in every sector. Also people here are very independent and do not like being dominated (go figure, you descend from the man who ruled half the world and you don’t like being dominated), so they are very afraid and suspicious of outside investors and foreign influences.

On Tuesday, Undarya came to speak to us; she is a civil society leader who runs and works with NGO’s. Undarya had excellent English and was the most passionate speaker so far and focused her attention on human rights abuses propagated during the July 1st riots. This was our first real taste stories about the riots since we’ve been here because no one really seems to know what happened and no one wants to talk about it. Now the riots happened on July 1st after the MPRP (former communist party) won a majority of parliament seats. Their headquarters and the modern art gallery, which also housed national artifacts, were looted and burned and 6 people were killed by police. A four day state of emergency was put into effect that evening.

No one really knows what happened that night, and stories are conflicting. Undarya’s stories contradict what I read in the states, but I also read that the election was fair and there was no voter fraud (looking back I was ignorant). Voter fraud in this country is rampant and buying votes is how you win elections. There is visual evidence of massive voter fraud in many previous elections as well as this one, however, the West’s major news source from Mongolia is the head of the Asia society in Mongolia who declare that this election was fair on the basis of one review in one province. He, Bill Forder, was then quoted in all of the major articles in the U.S. as saying that the elections were fair.

It is more likely that protesters were out that night because they were fed up with this voter fraud. That night the government building had an entirely new fence put up around the building, and several hundred police men in full riot gear were stationed outside the MPRP headquarters well before protesters ever got violent (in the U.S. this would be called a conspiracy theory, but here the MPRP really do have this kind of control and could engineer this protection in advance if they thought something was really going to happen). Well in the end the MPRP building was probably burned by the MPRP themselves (they also burned the art gallery so that people would be enraged about the entire event). I say this because the police left suddenly around 10pm and people started looting (managing to get past complicated security systems in the art gallery that one would need access cards to pass). Hundreds of people were arrested and beaten brutally for no apparent reason. The police apparently grabbed anyone on the street and beat them and locked them up (the police knew that there was a state of emergency that evening but did not inform citizens for some reason). Undarys whole speech was eye opening because neither the government nor the police were prepared to handle a riot, but, now that this huge catastrophe has happened, no one is being blamed or prosecuted (which is her work-trying to get the human rights abuses to be recognized and prosecute). No one in the government even wants to talk about it, and now most of the information had been classified and taken out of the public view, so we may not know for a long time what really happened.

On Tuesday afternoon, we went back to the purges museum that I visited during my first week, and I learned that most of what I figured out from the pictures (which lack English signs a lot of the time) was correct. The office that was recreated belonged to P. Genden whose grandson now runs the museum and gave us a tour revealing my ability to decipher history from pictures and limited English. P. Genden was the first secretary of the community party in Mongolia, but when the purges came about he disagreed with Russian officials and was held under house arrest in Russia until they killed him. However, years before, when Genden first took his post as the head of Mongolia he would have frequent meetings with Stalin in Moscow, where they would often debate and argue, and (here’s the great part) during one of these debates Genden slapped Stalin in the face and walked out. He is the only person ever to do so, and he managed to live another 7 years before he was killed to make way for a more amenable soviet puppet.

On Wednesday, the former Prime Minister Amarjargal came and spoke to us (yes, this country is that small that a former Prime Minister, who is still in parliament, could take time out of his day to talk to 11 American students personally). He said a lot of the same things that Layton did about socialist and Mongolian legacies influencing politics. He also told us that he thinks there needs to be a refocusing of government on education and healthcare and that the corruption and problems in government will not likely change for several generation. I have to agree that as easy as it would be to change the government here, it’s not going to happen until the people born in the democratic era gain power over the government which will not be for another generation at least. I’m not really doing anything around UB after class except checking my email to see about Watson and Fulbright stuff so my evenings are not that exciting, thus I am not really writing about them.

Thursday our first speaker was Ganbat (the reason I keep only giving first names for people is that Mongolia is such a small country that everyone just uses first names or nicknames-they also only have 6 digit telephone numbers), a professor at the Academy of Political Education. He essentially gave a lecture on the political history of Mongolian and then broke down the hugely bureaucratic system of government for us. There are over 2100 appointed governors at various government levels and a quarter of those positions have corresponding elected bodies that range from 11 to 76 members (this does not include an actually bureaucratic civil servants who do the grunt work thus an enormous percentage of the population works in the government sector).
Our second speaker was named Lutaa and was, seemingly the foremost expert on media in Mongolia. Most of the newspapers and T.V. stations in the country are owned by major political parties and business, so the media is very skewed and rarely fact-based. Therefore, as has been true since the Mongol empire, the main source of information is word-of-mouth, which is more reliable and impartial then other media sources (make you think). Journalism has not evolved to be impartial and much of the print media is a mix of opinion and fact. Mongolia also has a freedom of press and free media society, so foreigners are allowed to broadcast and distribute media in Mongolia. This allows Eagle T.V., an American evangelical news network that tries to be like CNN for Mongolia (and is probably the most impartial T.V. station in the country) and broadcast Fox news in the evenings, is allowed to function in Mongolia. Most of the entertainment programming in the country comes from South Korea, which provides soap operas free of charge to Mongolian stations (these shows are very popular and pretty much drive popular culture and trends among youth in the country). The movie industry consists of a film or two a year and the most popular show on T.V. is an extremely low budget Total Request Live with one dude who takes request on his cell phone and plays them. After class I went to a café with wireless access and ended up talking to this woman who runs and NGO that does medical training in Mongolia (it’s amazing the people you meet in expat bars in this country).
Friday the 26th was the end of our lecture series for the week, and we heard from two people who work in economics. The first was Vinny (from Jersey-no joke) who was the Economic and Commercial Section Chief at the U.S. Embassy, who was not very much like a Vinny at all. He talked about the work that the embassy does to help promote American business in Mongolia and vice versa. They advocate for transparency and a stable economic environment and fair opportunities for U.S. business (it’s ok you can laugh). Mongolia is also getting a Millennium Challenge Grant from the U.S. for $300 million that actually will do some good and not fall into the wrong hands (unfortunately it’s at the cost of land privatization, which is a relatively foreign concept in a country that is nomadic- this will eventually destroy the nomadic way of life, but that’s a larger conversation). At the end of Vinny’s talk he broke down the entire Foreign Service Exam, which is a hell of a test, but I did learn the no language component is require, so I may still give that a shot in the future.

Our last speaker was the chairman of the board of the Haas Bank in Mongolia, which is a microcredit bank and is apparently doing really good work here. Ganbold was a highly optimistic man with a very sharp suit. Unfortunately, his talk rehashed all of Mongolian history for us. After he finished we held a student-led discussion about the speakers that week. The four men in the group led the discussion, which went all over the place, but I guess we all did well, I hope, since a large part of our grade is dependent on this discussion. After the discussion I met up with this girl who was doing her Watson, which is on architecture, in Mongolia right now and another girl who is currently applying to the Watson from Mongolia (she is with a different program but we met in a café randomly and I offered to help her since my application had already been submitted- I find out if I’m nominated on the 14th, which is the same day as my Fulbright interview). Again, that night alcohol sales stopped all over the city because, and I’m not joking, there is a new law that alcohol will not be sold on the 26th of every month. It seems arbitrary days and some Saturdays have been designated as no alcohol days at district all over the city to curb the alcoholism in UB (we will see if that works- alcoholism is rampant here and there are drunkards passed out all over the streets at any time of day and you can smell vodka on peoples breaths at all hours walking though the city).

Saturday was the day I had been dreading all week because not only do we have class all day, but it is language class (3 back to back to back classes). The classes actually were not as bad as expected and moved along quickly once Chris started calling our class a prison, Audrey stuffed an entire apple in her mouth and ate it, and we played hangman and Pictionary, which all provided sufficient distraction to pass the time. Tomorrow I am going to the black market to buy some stuff and prepare for my next home stay. My next host father is named Sharav and is a night watchman for the local community garden as well as being a herder. My host mother’s name is Tsetsgee an there is one little girl, who is three and my host parent’s granddaughter, that will be there during my stay. The home stay is south east of UB and on the flat steppe where you can get lost just by wandering off a little ways because the land all looks the same (it seems even these natives in this area frequently get lost-not comforting). The people and the lifestyle are supposed to be much slower in Delgerhan (the name of the soum), which I cannot really imagine because I thought the lifestyle at my last home stay was slow. I guess I will just have to wait and see.