Tuesday, July 1, 2008

International Coverage of the Situation

International coverage of the situation in Ulaabaatar is not in depth, but overall it appears fairly accurate based on what I have seen. BBC News is the only news agency to exaggerate the number of protesters, putting the number into the thousands. To be sure, more than a thousand people were standing around watching the events unfold, but I would put the number of actual "protesters" participating in the chaos at no more than several hundred. The vast majority of people appeared to be just watching, and there were no examples that I could see of the violence being directed at anything but the police and the MPRP building, which is bad enough in itself, but thankfully not so chaotic that innocent bystanders were also victims of the violence. Whether they may have been victims of rubber bullets or tear gas fired by the police is another story, of course. Eagle Television did show one teenage boy and an elderly man who had been hit in the head and neck, respectively, by rubber bullets, but the circumstances of them being hit were not clear.

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