If I’ve gotten either my facts or my opinions wrong on any of the Mongolian Protest posts, please email me or post a comment!

If the UB Post and Mongol Messenger are any indication (which they probably aren’t), there has not been a lot of political dialog in the newspapers - the opinion pages are silent. Indeed, the only media controversy seems to be a heated Wikipedia battle. Perhaps media outlets are taking defamation laws seriously, but one would think that a healthy division between the news and op-ed pages could overcome this. Of course, media bias is a problem throughout the world, but in Mexico, for example, by purchasing three or four of the main newspapers (e.g. leftist Journada and rightist Crónica) you could triangulate with reasonable accuracy what actually took place. Given protestors’ misconceptions about the whole Ivanhoe process, though,it seems that there was a lot of misinformation out there - though I’m not sure who is responsible for this (Was the press release translated into Mongolian? Ivanhoe’s Mongolian page does not seem to have been updated Was it distributed to NGO leaders?) It would have been nice to hear more than one quote from Layton Croft, Ivanhoe’s Executive Vice President for Corporate Affairs.

On a larger level, these protests are illustrative of the huge disconnect between elites and non-elites in Mongolia. All three protest targets - the parliamentary musical chairs, the Ivanhoe negotiations and Altjin Group’s silence over the SAPU fire - took place in the upper echelons of government power, and ordinary Mongolians had no way to participate in the process or, thanks to poor media coverage, learn about it. These protests have taken the country to a new level of political polarization, putting political NGOs in the difficult position of having to straddle the divide between two vastly different perspectives on Mongolian politics, if not splitting them altogether into ones that work closely with the government but are seen as sell-outs (or, to use a more academic term, ‘captured’) by the population and those which work more closely with popular movements but exhibit great antipathy towards the government (I’m thinking of J. Batzandan’s Healthy Society Movement here). This is taking the country in the wrong direction, away from the consensus between the three main sectors (government, civil society and business) required to successfully accomplish the judicial and legislative reforms that the country so desperately needs.

On a totally unrelated note, if you download the Mongolian Sights Google Earth placemark collection, the Mongolian parliament building is represented by a restaurant symbol. Must be some sort of political commentary…