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Irish Times
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
First the Soviets, then the Chinese, attempted to suppress the memory of Mongolia's founder
It was the first week of warm, summer weather in Ulaanbaatar, a city where the temperature was still below zero on some nights only last month. There was a music and folklore festival on Sukhbaatar Square outside the Mongolian government palace where weeks of demonstrations toppled the prime minister last week . A few blocks away, a wedding party was posing for pictures outside the ornate, black and gold entrance to the Genghis Khan National Museum. The museum has been open for less than three years but it has already become one of the city's most popular landmarks and tourist attractions. With eight floors of exhibition space beneath a gleaming domed room, the museum's 12,000 artefacts cover 2,000 years of history surrounding the Mongol Empire. Stretching from the Sea of Japan to Hungary, it was the largest contiguous empire in human history, established by Genghis Khan and expanded by his successors. READ MORE The museum illustrates some of the innovative methods Genghis Khan brought to warfare, including new weapons technology such as lightweight bows and arrows and the use of propaganda. He sent agents to cities he planned to attack, instructing them to frighten the populace with stories of the Mongols' savagery in the hope that they would surrender without a fight. Many visitors to Ulaanbaatar take a day trip out of the city to view a 40 metre tall stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan, which is the claimed to be world's tallest equestrian statue. There is another statue of him outside the government palace on Sukhbaatar Square, where foreign dignitaries on official visits bow before it to show their respect. When Vyacheslav Volodin , the speaker of Russia's State Duma, visited Ulaanbaatar two years ago, he caused public outrage by refusing to bow before the statue. Pope Francis had bowed before the statue only a couple of weeks earlier, and Vladimir Putin made the same gesture when he visited the city. Volodin's offence struck a deep chord among Mongolians who recalled how the memory of Genghis Khan was suppressed when the country was a communist state under heavy Soviet influence. In Ulaanbaatar this week, they were still talking about what happened during the 800th anniversary of Genghis Khan's birth in 1964. [ Mongolian prime minister resigns after losing backing of parliament Opens in new window ] One of his descendants living in China was a leader of the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia and he persuaded the authorities to build a mausoleum of Genghis Khan. Daramyn Timur-Ochir, a member of the politburo of Mongolia's communist party, heard about the Chinese plan to mark the anniversary and suggested that the warlord should be commemorated in his homeland too. The politburo decided to build a monument, issue a postage stamp, commission a documentary film, organise a scientific conference and produce a Marxist appraisal of the role of Genghis Khan in Mongolian history. The Soviet embassy then sent a report to Moscow about the conference, complaining that the Mongolian government 'declared that Mongolia's accession to the United Nations was to the credit of Genghis Khan when it was to the credit of the people'. When Mongolia's communist leader Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal visited Moscow shortly afterwards, Nikita Khrushchev demanded to know what the Mongolians were thinking by issuing a postage stamp commemorating Genghis Khan. Tsedenbal returned to Ulaanbaatar and ordered that the monument that had been built for the anniversary should be destroyed, but local officials never carried out the order. Within three months, Timur-Ochir was purged from the politburo and the Soviets later blamed the Chinese for encouraging the Mongolians to foster a cult of Genghis Khan. [ Who gains from Mongolian prime minister's downfall? Opens in new window ] A few decades later, with Mongolia now well established as a liberal parliamentary democracy with much weaker ties to Moscow, it is China that is trying to suppress Genghis Khan's memory. Five years ago, the Château des ducs de Bretagne history museum in Nantes said it was postponing an exhibition about him that was due to open in February 2021. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the Inner Mongolia Museum in the Chinese city of Hohhot, but the museum director in Nantes called the project off following a number of interventions by the Chinese government. The Chinese Bureau of Heritage told the museum to remove the words Genghis Khan, Empire and Mongol from the exhibition's title and requested full control of the catalogue, explanatory texts and communications related to the exhibition. The Nantes museum claimed a proposed new synopsis included 'biased rewriting aimed at making Mongolian history and culture completely disappear for the benefit of a new national story'. The exhibition was finally staged last year without Chinese co-operation and instead of featuring objects from the museum in Hohhot, most of its exhibits came from collections in Mongolia, including the Genghis Khan National Museum in Ulaanbaatar.
Irish Times
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Questions over who gains from Mongolian prime minister's downfall
Soon after the start of the demonstrations that led Mongolia's prime minister to resign last week, Enkhbadral Myagmar noticed masked figures following him when he left home. One day, after he received a call from an unfamiliar number, a man on the street asked to use his phone and when he was finished, Enkhbadral saw he had called the same number. The 32-year-old sociologist was one of a small group that organised the protests, which followed reports of lavish spending by former prime minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene 's 23-year-old son. The others had noticed suspicious behaviour too and all had been subject to aggressive trolling online. 'We kept it quiet because we didn't want to scare young people away from joining the protests,' says Enkhbadral. The daily demonstrations in front of the building on Ulaanbaatar's Sukhbaatar Square that houses the State Great Hural, Mongolia's parliament, began on May 14th with just 40 people. But by the time the prime minister announced his resignation last week, thousands were coming to the square every day. READ MORE 'It was started by a group of friends who all knew one another and had collaborated on things before. I am the oldest, the others are in their 20s,' Enkhbadral said, adding that none of the group had any political party affiliations. 'It was building up over time, the frustration over how freedom of speech and media freedom, and civic space, was shrinking. It was all building up and the outburst was this protest. As soon as the news about the lavish lifestyle of the prime minister's son came out on social media, frustration really peaked, and then they started to contact each other.' Oyun-Erdene, who became Mongolia's prime minister in 2021, rose to prominence as an organiser of mass demonstrations against corruption and presented himself as a politician in touch with ordinary people. But when his son's fiancee posted pictures of an expensive Dior bag and boasted of helicopter rides and luxury cars, it was not clear how the couple could afford such a lifestyle. The demonstrators demanded an explanation from the prime minister but for weeks he declined to address the issue. Even when, on the eve of his resignation, Oyun-Erdene and his son submitted financial statements to anti-corruption authorities, they offered no public account of where the money came from. With 3.5 million people living on a landlocked territory between Russia and China, 22 times the size of Ireland, Mongolia is the most sparsely-populated country in the world. Rich in copper, gold, coal and other minerals, it is still a lower middle-income country where 30 per cent of the population live below the poverty line. A communist state with close ties to the Soviet Union from 1921 until 1990, Mongolia has been a parliamentary democracy for the past 35 years. International monitors have consistently approved the country's elections as free and fair but the political system has been dogged by corruption, much of it linked to the mining industry. 'After 70 years under a socialist system, the first accumulation of capital was only possible in mining and real estate. And this was of course misused by people close to decision-making,' said Jargalsaikhan Dambadarjaa, an economist and policy analyst who runs the DeFacto Institute in Ulaanbaatar. 'Because of this unequal distribution of wealth there are groups which support political parties above or under the table and certain interests prevail.' Mongolia's then prime minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene bows after losing his position in a vote on June 3rd. Photograph: Byambasuren Byamba-Ochir/AFP via Getty Images Oyun-Erdene's government, a grand coalition including his Mongolian People's Party (MPP) and their usual opponents in the Democratic Party, commanded 94 per cent of the seats in parliament. Last April, it passed a long-anticipated law establishing a sovereign wealth fund that allows the government to take a 34 per cent stake in 16 mines judged to contain strategic mineral deposits. 'That's why this guy paid the cost. He finally wanted to really accumulate money in this wealth fund,' Jargalsaikhan said. 'Out of the 16 mines, seven are state-owned, which means they can give money to the wealth fund. But the other nine are owned by private individuals, nine families really. They don't want to, because this new law says that 34 per cent of the deposits of the strategic mines come to the state and will accumulate into that fund. You can imagine what big money we're talking about.' Jargalsaikhan believes that the new government will leave the sovereign wealth fund law on the books but that it will not implement it. So the state will simply not move to take its 34 per cent stake in the privately-owned mines. Enkhbadral agrees that the private mining interests are probably happy to see the back of Oyun-Erdene but he rejects any suggestion that they orchestrated or manipulated the demonstrations. And he argues that strengthening Mongolia's democratic culture is essential to make politicians more accountable and their links with moneyed interests more transparent. 'To maintain the legitimacy of the protest and to protect it from interference from outside interests, we formulated three demands,' he said. 'The first was that the prime minister should resign. The second was an end to the grand coalition and the return of a parliamentary opposition. The third was that there should be no constitutional amendment to allow the president to run for another term in office.' Oyun-Erdene claimed he was the victim of an 'organised campaign' by 'major, visible and hidden interests' but when he failed to win a majority in a confidence vote on June 2nd, he resigned as prime minister. His MPP announced the end of the grand coalition, putting the Democratic Party back into opposition. Mongolia's president is directly elected and is limited to a single, six-year term. Although the office has few executive powers, the president appoints the chief justice and nominates other members of the judiciary and the chief prosecutor, chairs the national security council and can veto legislation. Demonstrators demanding the resignation of then prime minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene earlier this month. Photograph: Byambasuren Byamba-Ochir/AFP via Getty Images There has long been speculation that Khürelsükh Ukhnaa, who took office in 2021, would attempt to seek a second term and to change the constitution to give the president more powers. But the president confirmed last week that he had no intention of seeking a further term in office, conceding the demonstrators' third demand. 'All the protests and demonstrations before this one, they were never successful in the end, or they were used by the government. But this protest achieved its demands,' Enkhbadral said. 'Since 2008, any kind of demonstration was not a way to change anything. They were all very unsuccessful. This one not only won the three demands, but also culturally, it set a new standard. Every day we had agendas, every day, whatever the protesters were doing was transparent and announced. The organisers were young people from media backgrounds and from civil society and they brought a new approach to democracy. It showed a new era of democracy emerging in Mongolia.' The MPP this week nominated Zandanshatar Gombojav, president Khürelsükh's chief of staff and a former party general secretary, as prime minister. Enkhbadral is optimistic that the Democratic Party will resume its role as an opposition party in holding the government to account. New legislation regulating political parties and requiring greater transparency on their funding should come into force after a year-long delay. And a change to the electoral system means there are now more members of parliament, a portion of whom are elected in individual constituencies rather than as part of a party list. 'Ever since the Covid pandemic, we have had what we call a PR government that tried to buy the media and control the information that the public received,' Enkhbadral said. [ From Mongolia to Dublin: 'Coming to Ireland was a blessing. It was a great move for my life, I have no regrets' Opens in new window ] 'And their attitude was, we're going to make you think what we want you to think. So the outcome of the demonstration is not about one person or one government, one coalition. Its effect is to break this PR government that has been in place since the pandemic until now.'
