Note: This is not much more than a personal rant. For serious information, eyewitness accounts, etc. try here, here, here, here, or your favourite news site. For some additional pictures, try here or here.

When I went to work this morning, I met my neighbour in the lift. He immediatly asked what is up with Mongolia - he knows where Uudraa is from - and I, half jokingly, replied that one of the parties was set up because they lost the elections. At that point I did not yet know that people had been killed.

Let me first point out that I am extremely cynical towards the claims of the DP. They found out that they fared worse than expected, and began throwing around accusations. This is no unfamiliar pattern, the MPRP in 2004 did roughly the same. The night after the election the DP had still been confident that they might succeed even in places like Zavhan or Uvs. I still remember the post from the currently shutdown olloo.mn website, with the invitation to watch the Eurocup finals at the DP Headquarters. Just too bad they apparently did not realize how the German team did not accuse the Spaniards or the referee of cheating, and how the German fans did not start to riot.

Is this a conflict between communism and democracy, or corruption and transparency? Hardly. At best it is a fight between two groups of businessmen. At least this time Erel and Buyan won't have their seats in parliament. Golomt seems to have made it, though. Unfortunately, I have to agree with bilguun at asiangypsy that this turn of events is not entirely surprising. With parties that, even if hardly distinct, treat each other like the scum of the earth and are always happy to accuse each other of every possible kind of malice - at least so long as they do not form a coalition - it's no surprise that supporters get carried away at some point. Add a number of (probably) bored young men and alcohol, and political hooliganism seems not so much out-of-place.

As for the riots themselves, it seems as if this could all have been better contained by a police better trained and equipped for crowd control. It might also have helped if some of the "leaders" had gone out and tried to defuse the situation. I have seen this work in Germany, I don't think it would have made the situation worse in Mongolia. But maybe they were not sufficiently confident of their leadership qualities.*

What else can one say? I just hope people begin to realize that mudslinging and violence are no ways of conflict resolution in democratic society, and that the country one day gets honest and competent leaders.

For those who read German, someone has posted a much more enjoyable rant here.

*Update July 5th: In a letter previously posted on Thomas Terry's blog, Elbegdorj said that he actually spoke to protesters four times - but apparently to those on Sükhbaatar Square, not to those in front of the MPRP building.

Last sentence ("For those who read German ...") slightly rephrased for clarity.

Mongolia's next elections are scheduled for the 29th this month. Some serious and competent commentary can be found at Asiangypsy. The last parliamentary elections led to mutual accusations of fraud in some electorates, and the Democratc Party is already starting to voice some prophylactic objections. The General Election Comission, on the other hand, has now given the data of all potential voters to the parties, and also made each citizen's data available on its website: If you know your registration number (either from your birth certificate or from your I.D. card) and your name, you can find out where you are registered, what your birthday is etc. Of course with Mongolia's generally, let's say, pragmatic attitude towards paperwork, I won't rule out that there may be people with more than one registry number. On the other hand it seems hard to say how this would affect the outcome of the election. Btw. the GEC website also let's you 'vote' on proportional vs. majority voting system.


I personally find the election campaigns budgets of the candidates especially interesting. They were capped at several hundred million MNT (several hundred thousand USD) per electorate district earlier this year, which should break down to several USD (5$ ?) per voter. At my last-but-one district to Mongolia in late summer 2006, we witnessed some of the by-election campaign in electorate 46, western Hövsgöl. The incumbent MP of the region, from the DP, had died, and now the MPRP and, to a letter extent, the other parties poured in rather large amounts of capital in order to convince people to elect their candidate. Our visit at Uudraa's grandmother, whose summer encampment is roughly half-way between Bürentogtoh sum center and Sangiin Dalai nuur, was just in the days running up to the election. Several jeeps from the different parties would visit grandma-in-law, and most of them would leave some small present.


Gündalai's People's Party left a bowl with the face of Chinggis Khan, the Democratic Party left a big insulation can that features prominently on most of the pictures I made these days. The Irgenii Zorig Nam only reminded that she and Grandma were old acquaintances, appealed to female solidarity, and left a ticket for a disco in the sum center, but the MPRP would, on several occasions, hand out a total of 40.000 MNT, plus two glossy magazines, one for children and one for juveniles.


On the morning of election day, Uudraa's grandmother was visited by three men on two bikes, to collect her vote. They and Grandma were joking around a bit, and - just for me, I guess - conducted the voting process in an especially correct manner, with Grandma making her cross behind the curtains of her bed. Of course they knew each other, and probably also knew at which party Grandma made her cross.

The MPRP candidate, Ö. Enhtuvshin, was the one who won this by-election. It would be easy to ascribe it all to the amount of presents given to the voters, but Enhtuvshin is also much more prominent within the MPRP than the DP candidate was within his party. He would be more likely be able to effect certain perks for his voters, like connection of the sum centers to electricity and cell phone networks. As far as I know, this connections to electricity and cell phone services are now largely completed, though I am not sure if this is really all due to Enhtuvshin.

Or, more precisely, about some visitors to the Soviet Union: It was in the 1980s when my grandmother and some coworkers from her LPG (East German agricultural cooperative, roughly equivalent to negdels in Mongolia or kolkhozes in the USSR) for made a touristic trip to Leningrad. I'm not sure about the background, it may have been some kind of award, or they just wanted to go there.

In any case, in these days foreign tourists in the Soviet Union, even from socialist brother countries, were usually kept under watch, only led around in groups, only allowed to see what they were supposed to see etc. My grandmother's group came from a Mecklenburgian village and for some rather natural reason also were interested to see what villages, or agricultural cooperatives, in Russia looked like. But when they asked their guide if this would be possible, she flatly rejected, and quite angrily.

The conclusion left was rather devastating - "they are so ashamed of their villages that they can not even show us one". East German villages were never particularly tidy, and some of the male members of the group might have seen Russian villages back in WWII, so the impression probably was all the worse. In any case, I am sure that what their relatives remember to this day are not the pictures brought home from the trip (nice or not, altered or not, wrongly labeled or not), but the information that the Russians were so embarassed by the state of their countryside that they did not dare to show it to East German visitors.