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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 café 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,...
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Mongolia on Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera English has an interesting article titled "The battle for Mongolia's resources". Excerpts:
Despite being one of the world's poorest countries, Mongolia's large reserves of natural resources have drawn increasing international interest alongside rising commodity prices and the rapid economic growth of China and India.

In more than 680 places in Mongolia, deposits of copper, gold, silver, iron ore, phosphor and zinc are hidden below the grassland. Up to 150 billion tonnes of high quality coal are said to be waiting to be mined.

Mongolia has the biggest known coal reserves in the world, the second largest reserves of uranium after Russia and one of the largest occurrences of silver. Its gold reserves are estimated to amount to 3,000 tonnes, copper reserves to over 30 million tonnes.
My impression from this election and the general state of politics in Mongolia, is that we don't really have political parties, but a few powerful businessmen vying for power. Ivanhoe shares soared on Monday, the day after the elections, as soon as preliminary results showed a landslide victory for the MPRP. The shares fell after the riots began.

Raymond Goldie, Senior Mining Analyst with Salman Partners, Vancouver, was quoted as saying "(The project) is now less certain than it was on Monday, but more certain than it was on Saturday, because it seems likely that the governing party will keep its majority." (Source: Salman Partners). What he means, my interpretation, is that another hung parliament would have meant further delays in the agreement finalization, and a change in government would possibly have brought some uncertainties.
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