Politics Week

The politics week was fascinating, though a bit depressing. We got to hear from all kinds of people with different perspectives on Mongolian politics. The speakers were of varying quality, though only one lecture was through translation (the rest in English), but all the speakers had interesting stories to tell, and the Q/A sessions were generally the most interesting parts. A few lectures were attended by students from the University of the Humanities, with whom the SIT program is affiliated. We got to chat with them, and hopefully they’ll be joining us tomorrow night when we celebrate Kevin’s 21st birthday at one of UB’s more ridiculous discos (more on that later. maybe…)
A summary of Politics week speakers: an independent consultant on Civil Society and Gender Analysis on Democritization: Challenges and Opportunities; a former journalist working in corporate media relations/communications at BHP Minerals Asia on Development of Free Press in Mongolia; an MP and leader of the Citizen’s Will Party on Burning Questions of Politics and Social Development; Secretary of ruling MPRP party (former Communist party) on Strategic Choices of Mongolia in the XX Century; the grandson of purged PM P. Genden and founder of the Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution on the Political Purges of the 1930’s, an American responsible for all community relations aspects of the new Oyu Tolgoi mining project from Ivanhoe Mines Mongolia Inc. (my favorite speaker) on an Outsider’s Perspective, he has a strong and sober conceptualization of what is happening in Mongolia; the President of the Confederation of Mongolian Trade Union on From Civil Society Movement to Trade Union, the General Secretary of the Millenium Challenge Account (a $150m 5 year development grant from the US) on The Millenium Challenge Account: What are the Projects?; and lastly another representative from Ivanhoe who is an SIT Mongolia alum (and works under our first Ivanhoe speaker) on the details of the new Oyu Tolgoi project, espectially regarding community relations and public image.
The general perspective I came away with is that Mongolian politics is at a crucial crossroads in its evolution. Democracy is going strong, but pervasive and rapidly growing corruption is threatening to disenfranchise a public already weary of politics from the Soviet era. Economically, the insane amount of revenue that Oyu Tolgoi will generate (if it is approved) will either provide the engine for Mongolia’s development and eventual economic feasibility, or like in so many other resource rich countries, it may simply turn the smoldering corruption into a firestorm engulfing and asphyxiating this young democracy. As my colleague Kevin wisely said “Yeah, I’m both super scared and super excited.”
Whether the civil society movement can get its act together and pressure the government to clean up its act seems to be the big question. Yet the woman who came to talk to us from the forefront of the civil society movement almost left Mongolia out of depression at the state of things two years ago, and says that now, if anything, things are getting worse. There is an election approaching that will decide the country’s fate; if the corruption has reached a critical level, then electoral fraud will be rampant and MPRP will stay in power and the light at the end of the tunnel will dim; if the election is fair, and the MPRP monopoly is broken, then there is hope: Mongolia’s fate will then depend on the opposition groups’ ability to rule maturely and restore the public’s faith in democracy.