Our caravan turned offthe dirt road and pulled up to the wooden palisades. The same routine unfolded at every campaign stop: giddy student volunteers poured out of two minivans and set up large blue tents on the open grassland while others motored into the heart of the felt tent settlements known as gers, shouting news of their candidate's arrival. On the roof of a vehicle, men set up loudspeakers to amplify the candidate's voice over the wind, the whine of nearby lambs and the hum of the gasoline generator providing the power. Excitement grew as the Toyota Land Cruiser came to a stop, and out stepped Sanjaasuren Oyun, the Cambridge-educated geologist who was campaigning for re-election as Mongolia's foreign minister.
It was late June, and I had arrived in Mongolia only hours earlier via rail from Beijing. I was spending the summer working at the Associated Press's China bureau, and had come to observe an election campaign in one of the world's most tenuous democracies. Oyun was sweeping through a series of town hall-style meetings on the uncultivated steppe, where herders carry on a subsistence life often without electricity or running water.
These were not hurried or orchestrated affairs. Typically, elderly voters in traditional robes and cowboy hats sauntered out to watch Oyun stump, then took turns voicing concerns—“Why are the Chinese taking all the city jobs?” “Why are they building reeking pig farms in our village without permits?”
Eighteen years after their country threw off decades of Soviet domination and adopted a parliamentary democracy, many Mongolians say life is no better than before. While the well-connected elite profited during the privatization that accompanied free markets, unemployment and homelessness have ballooned since 1990. A landlocked country of 3 million people, Mongolia possesses some of the world's most coveted uranium deposits and has a well-educated workforce, yet it ranks 164th in the world in per capita GDP.
The public's resentment over the perceived failures of the free-market system and anger about government mismanagement—evident in the comments overheard at Oyun's campaign stops—boiled over on election day. The first hint of trouble came from TV news accounts of what appeared to be a runaway victory by nearly every candidate of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, which ruled during the communist era and was closely aligned with the Soviets. At an upscale Italian restaurant in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, I found Oyun sitting stiffly with aides watching results come in. Although she eventually won by a slim margin, the Democratic Party took a thrashing. Pre-election polls had the Democrats ahead by as much as 20 percentage points, but vote totals showed MPRP had won in a landslide and now held a majority in parliament.
The unexpected result and the size of the victory immediately generated rumors of voting fraud. The next morning, July 1, an angry crowd gathered at the MPRP headquarters, slowly stoked by organizers with bullhorns. By late afternoon a few rocks were being pelted at riot police who had arrived to hold back the protesters. At about 6 p.m. the police line broke and a street battle unfolded in the parking lot and alleys around the MPRP building. Police were showered with stones, their tear gas and rubber bullets useless against the fury of thousands of charging rioters. A museum with priceless cultural treasures was burned and looted. A ransacked liquor store provided fuel for rampaging men and Molotov cocktails. Cars were set afire, and a bulldozer commandeered from a construction site hoisted the flaming wreckage into the air as rioters hooted triumphantly.
That night and in the following days, five people were killed and hundreds were arrested. The president imposed a state of emergency. Local TV news stations were forced off the air. At one point I was spirited into a stuffy army van where soldiers detained me for photographing the military's presence. They erased the memory card in my digital camera, claiming that my photos would make Mongolia look bad.
Foreign press parachuted in as Mongolia had a brief and uncharacteristic moment in the spotlight, and a reassessment of the country began. Mongolia's fragile democracy, long praised by the West, was at risk, experts said. One Mongolian scholar suggested that although the MPRP was the apparent target of the rioters' wrath, the violence more likely was aimed at the country's broken political system, and the MPRP building was merely a convenient symbol.
My contacts with some everyday Mongolians reinforced that view. In the sprawling shantytowns surrounding Ulaanbaatar, I heard account after account of shattered hopes and disillusionment. Shurai, a 52-year-old woman, complained, “They promised that democracy would make our lives better, but democracy came, and Mongolia was destroyed.” Gone were the days when the state put her in an apartment and a job at the city power plant. She now picks garbage along the river to support her orphaned grandchildren, whose mother died last year from pneumonia, unable to afford medical care.
But I heard a different view from Enkhtsegtseg, a 26-year-old chef in the same shantytown who studies Korean and dreams of starting her own restaurant, and from Baasandorj, whose family of eight sheltered me in their 10-by-10-foot shack (in the shadow of luxury hotels) during the first tense night of martial law. Life has never been more difficult, he said, but the opportunity to pull his family up makes the struggles worthwhile. “It depends on how hard you work,” he said. “It's good that it's a meritocracy.”
That view was echoed by Baljinnyam Dashdorj, '12, a Mongolian-American who traveled with me and acted as translator. Dashdorj, whose mother, Undraa Agvaanluvsan, is a visiting professor at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, credits Mongolia's transition to democracy for enabling his success. “Without democracy, my family never would have had the chance to leave Mongolia and make a better life for themselves,” he observed one day as we walked down one of Ulaanbaatar's dusty boulevards. “Without democracy, I never would have been given the chance to go to Stanford.”
If voter participation is evidence, the public's desire for self-rule remains strong. Seventy-five percent of eligible voters cast ballots in last summer's election, including many thousands who endured long trips on horseback or camel to reach a voting site. In conversations before he resigned as the Democratic Party chief in early September, Tsakhia Elbegdorj, one of the leaders of the bloodless 1990 revolution, boasted that Mongolia is “the only democracy between the Sea of Japan and Eastern Europe.” He jabbed a finger at me, the figurative Western audience, and declared: “The West said the transition would be impossible, especially here. But we proved them wrong!”
Time will tell.
Gerry Shih, '08, is a fifth-year student majoring in economics.
