ACMS Mongolia Turns Five

The ACMS opened its first office in Ulaanbaatar on May 27th, 2004 in a ceremony attended by ACMS Executive Director, the university president, US ambassador, members of the media, and the academic community. The center was originally housed in a two room office in Building No. 1 of the National University of Mongolia, but moved to Building No. 5 upon its completion three and half years ago. In the spring of 2007 the center moved to its current location, opening for the first time a library, reading room, and resource center large enough to provide services to hundreds of students and faculty per week.

To mark this milestone, ACMS will host a reception on May 28th after the Speaker Series lecture (the 67th lecture to date). More information about the lecture at www.mongoliacenter.org/ss.

The lecture and the reception are open to the public. We hope to see you there, and we hope to see you in the center over the next five years.

Mongolia Elects New President

It’s official. According to www.news.mn, the General Election Committee has called the presidential election for Ts. Elbegdorj over his rival current President N. Enkhbayar. A year on from the parliamentary elections, which resulted in a riot that destroyed the MPRP headquarters and parts of the Cultural Palace, Mongolian voters seem to have voted for change. The preliminary results give President-elect Elbegdorj 51.24 percent of the vote nationwide, or just over a 40,000 vote lead out of 1.097 million total ballots cast (again, according to www.news.mn).

I spent most of Sunday monitoring the election in Chingeltei District in the 12th-16th microdistrict polling stations. As the day progressed and I saw the amount of people voting, I started to get a feeling in my gut that things might go Elbegdorj's way. I thought Elbegdorj had little chance in winning the election before Sunday. However, something about the mix of people I saw voting and the extreme effort that everyone seemed to be making at the polling stations to remain fair, started to work on my gut. Something just seemed to indicate that people were taking the election seriously, and the people showing up at the polling stations were not interested in the status quo. This bares out in the election results for the city, at least, where Elbegdorj won by more than 12 points. He also seems to have remained competitive in the rural constituencies losing by only 2 points.

It is certainly not my intention to suggest that I guessed the correct outcome, but only to convey that I sensed that my previous estimation about Elbegdorj's chances was incorrect. The feeling actually compelled me to think about what if Elbegdorj won. What would that mean for the political landscape in Mongolia?

It is too early to tell, but there seems to be a reasonable argument to make that Sunday in many ways constituted a win-win situation for the ruling party. If Enkhbayar had won, then the status quo would have been maintained. An obvious win. Where we stand is slightly more interesting because the loss of the presidency at first blush may appear like a serious blow to the MPRP. However, it seems to me that much of the political pressure going forward is placed on Elbegdorj and by extension the opposition party. Another win for MPRP.

The president is a somewhat ill-defined position in the Mongolian constitution focused on being a ceremonial figurehead. However, there are provisions in the constitution which give the president the ability to impose himself on the political process; for example, the right to veto legislation passed by parliament. President Enkhbayar had made a point of stretching the limits of presidential power during his term by vetoing legislation and, most spectacularly, imposing a state of emergency and calling up the military during the riot last summer. This use of power was seen by his critics as an overreach, but his supporters saw it as a proper interpretation and execution of the powers vested in the president's office.

Elbegdorj is therefore inheriting an ascendant office with precedents that will allow him to impose himself more on the political process. Maybe much more than any previous president, in fact, and he has demonstrated in the past he is not afraid to start a political brawl.

This is where the real difficulty lies for Elbegdorj and where the opportunity may lie for MPRP. Prime Minister Bayar and President Elbegdorj will most certainly become contentious public rivals (if not already contentious enough). But, Bayar's authority to push the political process forward is given automatically by his status as the head of government. Elbegdorj, on the other hand, is inheriting a position that is imbued with some nascent executive powers, but the extent of those powers is still very much up for political debate, even if the electorate may be predisposed to accepting efforts to further strengthen them. The progress made with Enkhbayar could be easily undone by a politician ill prepared to handle the delicate nature of indirect power that the presidency represents. One too many gaffes or attempts to wield power that turn into obvious and easily defeated overreaching, and one's opponent in a rival party can look quite good by comparison.

The pressure is on Elbegdorj to perform, because, assuming the next few days pass without incident from MPRP supporters, the victory could potentially put a stamp of legitimacy on the parliamentary elections through revisionist history. The victory demonstrates that MPRP does not wield absolute power, and it took defeat magnanimously--unlike rival parties in the parliamentary elections. From a political strategy standpoint, it would make sense to play up this aspect of the election and then stand back and hope the new president makes a fool of himself.

I am not suggesting this is what will happen. I have no idea what kind of president Elbegdorj will make, or what kind of strategy MPRP will adopt to counter this victory. However, the political pressure will naturally build on Elbegdorj to perform above average as president and to effectively challenge the power of the government led by Bayar (assuming rivalries remain). I see the road ahead being much more difficult for the new president and somewhat easier for the ruling party because of the nature of the political situation. The onus is on the new president to prove he can deliver the change he promised, and if he fails to deliver, he may diminish the office of the presidency and his own party in the effort. The work begins today, and one almost thinks the old phrase "careful what you wish for..." is apt for the current situation.

Golden Age of Publishing

The evidence seems to be mounting that we are experiencing a new golden age of publishing in Mongolia. Admon Press seems to be reprinting old titles and producing new content at rate possibly unprecedented even during the Socialist Era. One item that has me particularly excited is the reprinting of the standard Mongolian dictionary which has not been published by all accounts since the mid-sixties. The ACMS library has a copy of the old edition, and next month we'll purchase the new edition (see them side by side in the picture). At the risk of revealing myself as a complete nerd, this new dictionary is a truly exciting thing for anyone interested in studying Mongolian, especially at the advanced level. The dictionary is only 39,500MNT which means it is within easy reach of most libraries, organizations, and a substantial portion of the population, and it contains updated and new entries completely in Mongolian.

Culture and language are inextricably linked, so dictionaries are much more than tools for learning or translating. They are also a record in time of the essence of a society. I shouldn't overdo it, but it is a fairly momentous occasion to have this dictionary available, because really good dictionaries that capture the essence of Mongolia are the exception not the rule. As a native speaker of English and non-native speaker of Japanese, I have almost boundless selection available to me in terms of dictionaries. I took for granted when I first arrived in Mongolia that quality dictionaries would be available for the language, because it made sense for any community of speakers to focus substantial time and effort on documenting a language. The Oxford Dictionary for English is the standard by which all English dictionaries are measured with its extensive information about not only the definition of words but also the etymology of words and extensive examples in context. I foolishly thought I would find something similar in Mongolia, and instead I found that the most widely available dictionaries were those used solely for translating Mongolian into other languages or vise-versa. You can't beat the natural forces of economics when it comes to less commonly spoken languages is what I quickly learned.

The new addition of the Mongolian dictionary does not have the history of words like the Oxford Dictionary, but this is understandable because of the scholarly effort it would take to assign histories to even a small portion of the total Mongolian lexicon. It would be a great project, though, if a Mongolian scholar or group of scholars put together a dictionary in the manner the Oxford Dictionary was developed through years of individual scholars and lay people contributing their tacit knowledge of the language as described in the book "The Professor and the Madman." In the absence of the history of words, though, the entries in the new edition of the dictionary do include substantial numbers of examples in context which is very helpful.

In this emerging golden age of publishing, I am curious what the margins are like for the publishing companies? I wonder not because I want to go into publishing myself, but rather in hopes that the money is good enough to sustain the industry. Published works are an integral part of any society, and it is heartening to think a written record of the current era is being produced at an unprecedented and, hopefully, sustainable rate.

City Pride

Every so often a musical group produces a song that is a fitting homage to a city. I think the Lemons on their most recent album have done this with their song "1983...1986" which is a light tribute to Mongolia's city. The video is particularly fun for its historical footage of Ulaanbaatar before the frenetic and unfettered development of the last two decades. An idyllic reminiscence of much simpler times gone by.



It is easy to sometimes forget that Ulaanbaatar has a storied past as a crossroads and cosmopolitan destination for Eurasian explorers, travelers, merchants, and spiritual pilgrims. Recently the ACMS library purchased a book that was published in 2006 in commemoration of the 800th Anniversary of the founding of the Great Mongol State. It is a fairly thorough photographic and pictorial history of the city, and includes some amazing archival pictures such as the dedication ceremony of the Sukhbaatar statue on Sukhbaatar Square when the square was an huge open patch of dirt and there was no parliament building. The photos are supplemented with passages describing different aspects of the city's development overtime, which for those unaware, has been going on for 370 years! I would encourage anyone with curiosity about Ulaanbaatar's history to stop by the center and look at the book. It is also available at Internom bookstore at the unbelievable price of 30,000MNT.

Ulaanbaatar can be an eyesore much of the year, but with the budding of spring leaves on the trees the city is becoming greener by the day. The Lemons song, the book, and the reemergence of natural colors outside the center windows does remind me that for all its faults Ulaanbaatar is a unique city that each citizen can find pride in. It is a 370 year work in progress, and, for all its supposed isolation, it has certainly never been a utterly boring place to live.

Hidden Gobi

As part of a weekend trip out to eastern Umnugovi Aimag with friends from Khankhongor Soum, the school driver from Khanbogd Soum (a mutual friend) led our group out to an interesting geological formation about 30km from the soum center. He emphasized to me several times that few people knew about the place, and everyone in the Khankhongor contingent confirmed this by repeating several times they had never even heard of the place let alone had visited it previously.

I am not a geologist, so I could only marvel at the site and wonder how it was formed. The rock looked like a cross between granite and crystalline concrete. It was very rough and it easily broke under modest pressure. It looked as though the rock formed initially under a sedimentary process, and then later the area was shaped by some sort of erosive force. I was compelled based on intuition and knowledge barely remembered from a geology class I took over ten years ago in college to think that it formed under the influence of water. It had several hallmarks of water erosion, especially pock marks born into the sides of boulders. But, that would suggest that a very large sea or other body of water with currents was present at the location at some point in its history, and I am not sure if there was such a body of water in the Gobi. The hypothesis therefore has an obvious flaw, and I remain ignorant of the true cause of the formations.

If there are any geologists out there reading this with ideas, please do offer comments. It was a truly interesting place.

The Other "Tolgoi"

Over the weekend I made a trip out to the eastern part of Umnugovi Aimag with my wife and a group of friends from Khankhongor Soum. Along the way we stopped at Tavan Tolgoi which is Mongolia's fantastically huge coal deposit and the other "tolgoi" after Oyu Tolgoi (the copper and gold mine near Khanbogd Soum). It was an impressive sight to behold. It was a large open pit mining operation, and although it is not even close to working at full capacity, it was amazing to see the amount of trucks coming and going from the pit. We were all greatly impressed by the size and potential scale of the project.

A few kilometers down the road we were flagged down by reporters from Channel 25 who were interviewing truck drivers and people like us about the conditions around the mine and on the road. Listening to our driver talk with the reporters I got a new sense of the uneasiness that regular people feel about the mining agreements at Tavan Tolgoi and Oyu Tolgoi. In particular when asked about the large trucks coming and going from the mine site tearing up the jeep trail used to go from the aimag center to the Chinese border, he made the comment that it was a bit frightening because the trucks were large, wipping up dangerous amounts of dust and he didn't know who the drivers were--Are they Mongolian or not? Who do they work for? Where do they come from and where do they go?

These questions struck me as reflecting a much larger worry of average people. Seeing the shear size of the Tavan Tolgoi mine site one is almost awestruck by it. So much mineral wealth. And, yet, where is it going? Who is going to reap the benefits of that wealth? Is it a very large fraud on ordinary people? If you don't even know who the drivers are, how can you know who the people making the real money are?

Of course, there are answers to these questions if one goes looking for them, but that is not what most people do. Instead in the absence of information people worry and they let their imaginations take control of what they know from experience. In Mongolia this is a particularly unproductive and insidious thing to happen. Owen Lattimore described the following in his book "Nomads and Commissars" (Oxford Press 1962) in a chapter entitled "Autonomous Mongolia: Years of Frustration" when referring to the forces that led to that nationalist movement that eventually became the socialist movement in the 1930s and 40s:

The people felt that every time there was a deal over national autonomy, over debts to Chinese merchants, over anything at all, there was also a sell-out. The big fellows came out of it with new titles, emoluments, and stipends. Then they turned around and wanted more taxes and special contributions from the people to pay for it all. They incited ordinary Mongols to massacre and beat up Chinese merchants and money-lenders, and burn their account books, but that just put the big fellows in a position to say to the Chinese, later, "Well, forget about my personal debt and I'll help you to collect the rest." (pg. 65)

There are some unsettling parallels between that passage and the present situation in Mongolia. One almost feels that it could be written today with "Chinese merchant" replaced by "mining conglomerate." It makes one think of the old adage the more things change the more they stay the same.

It is a real concern that ordinary people do not trust anyone to make the proper decision regarding the mineral wealth of the country whether it be Mongolia's political leaders or the people negotiating the mining deals for the multi-national corporations. I always understood that in an academic and abstract way, but seeing Tavan Tolgoi for the first time made me feel first hand a sense of the real worry that ordinary people have. It is the same feeling you get when you sense that a trick is being played on you. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and Mongolia loses its best chance at accumulating real wealth because people at the top are playing a game.

It is easy to become cynical and read into these feelings that nothing good can come of all this, as if the sentiment that the rich get richer; etc, is the only alternative. The mining agreements have been painfully slow to move towards fruition. On the one hand, this could mean that the "big fellows" are just trying to position themselves to become even wealthier at the expense of everyone else. On the other hand, it might mean that the worries of ordinary people like my driver to eastern Umnugovi are actually having an influence on the process. A third option is that both are occurring with a whole lot of other political machinations in between which makes the whole thing one big Gordian knot. Whatever it is, it is certainly not easy.

Mongolia and Conservatism in the US

Over the weekend I was finishing up Robert P. Newman's "Owen Lattimore and the 'Loss' of China" (UC Press 1992), and I came across the following passage:

Sokolsky reviewed the "great power of Ghengis [sic] Khan, which in the 13th Century conquered China and conquered much of Europe, east of Germany. It held Russia for a prolonged period. It held India and the Mongol Empire in India. It is Mongolia which is being revived as a power in this attempt to force upon the world the United Nations. This peril which is really greater than one imagines because, to us, the name Mongolia hardly means anything anymore and yet, out of that desert land has come this great power which at one time dominated much of the world and which can do it again if armed and given the direction and guidance that could lead to that. This, then, is our peril at the time." (pg. 507)

The passage is a transcript from a radio broadcast on ABC July 16, 1961 in which conservative columnist George Sokolsky was reacting to news that Owen and Eleanor Lattimore were in the People's Republic of Mongolia on a study tour at the same time the Kennedy administration was exploring the possibility of diplomatically recognizing Mongolia. According to Newman, a firestorm was unleashed by the coincidence of these two events among ultraconservatives, causing people like Sokolsky to make fatuous comments like the one above. Surely only the truly ignorant and uneducated at the time would have accepted the recognition of Mongolia as first step in reviving the Mongol Empire under the auspices of the United Nations?

Yet, these sorts of musings unfettered by reality and basic research seem to still find their way into conservative media in the United States. The above passage reminded me of a full page ad printed last year in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF) expressing real and immediate concern that Mongolia was backsliding in its commitment to protect private property rights and democracy, implying that it was moving down a path ideologically hostile to the foreign policy of the US. True, the ad was not an editorial, so it did not necessarily represent the views of the newspaper. But, WSJ still printed the ad, which called for punitive action against Mongolia in the form of removing its Millennium Challenge Account funds if progress was not made in its allegedly deteriorating record of upholding the rights of private businessmen.

I believe the very same week an article was printed in the Washington Times painting Mongolia as a significant player in a worldwide sea born smuggling ring of illicit materials to rogue states. The Times article is an amusing read because it comes across as a similar attempt to Sokolsky's passage above to construct a conspiracy from one's readers' active imaginations without reference to common sense or basic fact. I do not contest that Mongolian ships have occasionally been used for nefarious purposes (I have not researched this, so it could be true), but taking it to the level of geo-political maneuvering sort of defies logic. I would not be surprised to learn that 9 in 10 Mongolians and an equal ratio of parliamentarians are unaware that Mongolia even has a maritime fleet. It is more likely a criminal matter than a geo-political matter. The government can hardly enforce the traffic laws in Ulaanbaatar, should we be surprised that it is unable to control who flies the Mongolian flag on international waters on occasion? The argument in the editorial seems very far fetched and construed to support a particular agenda.

This entry is not intended to be a survey of US conservative views on Mongolia but rather a reflection on historical and modern examples of the strange views on Mongolia that can make their way into print in the US. It is altogether possible that liberal outlets also have an odd predilection to present fantasy about the situation in Mongolia, but so far I have only seen the really weird stuff come from the right. It makes one wonder what the fascination with Mongolia is and why there is little effort to actually do even the most rudimentary research to support conjectures about the country. The simple answer probably involves the desires of business interests seeking to reap profits or ideologues seeking to promote particular beliefs in a world that matches that which is invented for the pages of newspapers. Understanding reality, in the case of Mongolia's reality, may not be nearly as attractive for those particular people. It's not exactly mass denial or outright lying but rather a wishful attempt to use the power of argument to bend reality to conform to the requisites of one's own agenda.

One conclusion that I have come to from reading Newman's book is that Owen Lattimore's biggest crime was actually doing research (e.g. learning local languages and customs and interviewing regular people in Inner Asia) and then reporting the truth back to power. One can see recent parallels in other geo-political hot spots in the world in which prominent people have suggested listening, showing empathy, doing field research, and reporting the truth about people who inhabit those areas to make better policy decisions. When there is big money involved, though, it is fair to surmise that it is easy for people with active imaginations to paint a picture they want policy makers and the public to believe is true. It does make one pause and consider that with $100 billion worth of copper and gold sitting in the Gobi Desert, it behooves everyone--Mongolians and foreigners with a vested interest in Mongolia alike--to be educated about the basic facts of the world and Mongolia's own history. Otherwise, even ideas as ludicrous as Sokolsky's above or the Washington Times editorialist's can potentially gain traction in the absence of credible and forceful arguments based on facts and reality.