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The chaos theory of Mongolia

I returned to Mongolia 15 years ago after an absence of 13 years, save for the occasional 2-week leave from work, and that time I spent a semester and a half at a local university drinking endless cups of brown, watery 150 Tugrik instant MaCcoffee at the cafĂ© strangely, or perhaps egotistically, named "In my memory", writing the first and so far the only book that got us into trouble with the local intelligence who apparently had little else to do than to pore through the ramblings of teenagers to catch the tell-tale signs of drug dealery. But I digress. When you visit a country for a short period, be it home or not, you hardly have time to immerse yourself in the spirit of the country and the city and feel the nitty gritty and dirty shiny of it all. So after 13 years, it took me a while to readjust and finally understand what the hometown of my childhood had become.  The most striking, ubiquitous, and inescapable feature was and still, unfortunately, is the traffic. In 2008,

Mongolia Riots: Eagle TV footages

Eagle-TV Mongolia is currently the only source of online video news from Mongolia. Various footages and interviews are posted on their website: www.eagle-tv.mn. Unfortunately for the English readers, the videos are in Mongolian only with no English captions.

The below video is a series of interviews conducted by the Eagle TV reporters at the Denjiin 1000 detention centre. Crowds wait outside the detention centre for news of their family members. Most of them are not even sure if they are inside, as the police have not provided the list of detainee names. Many simply turned up at the detention centre after their family members did not come home after the riots. There are some Eagle-TV footages taken from a nearby hilltop of the groups of squatting detainees surrounded by police officers. The crowd outside claim to have seen the police ordering the detainees into stress positions, beating them with sticks and pipes and threatening violence on the crowd gathered outside the detention centre.

Some 700 are reported to be in detention following the riots.

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