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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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Politics in Mongolia: In Which Threats of Lawsuits Follow

The President has sent an official letter to the heads of the two main parties, requesting them to come to a resolution at their soonest. During the inaugural session of the new Parliament, 16 DP MP's walked out in protest, before the new MP's could be sworn in, leaving the Parliament short of 7 members required for the swearing-in ceremony.

After a meeting of the DP MP's, both outgoing and incoming, the DP have reportedly come to a unanimous decision to take the chairman of the General Election Committe B.Battulga, to court. They have also voted to set up a Special subcommittee that will work with the prosecutor's office and provide the families of the riot victims with information. The DP have also demanded a public apology from the Russian Ambassador to Mongolia, for his biased commentary on the political situation in a recent interview to the Russian press. The Ambassador reportedly fingered the DP as perpetrators of the riots.

A Parliamentary session usually takes place today and the MP's are reportedly gathered outside the hall, with little or no indication of whether a session will actually take place. The MP's themselves are obviously not too sure. Well they can't exactly be absent, in the so-unlikely-that-it-will-probably-happen case the DP and MPRP suddenly call a Parliamentary session. S.Oyun, Foreign Minister and the only electee from Civil Will Party this year, has announced the her decision to not attend Parliamentary sessions until the Dornod election disputes are resolved. Her second, M.Zorigt, lost the election at Dornod and accused the MPRP of election fraud. The decision was announced earlier to recount votes in Dornod and 2 other constituencies. Since then, the GEC has yet to release any updates on the final results.

Further to the previous post The Blind Organize a Demonstration on Knees, President Enkhbayar put a veto on the proposed changes to laws concerning the pension funds and other state subsidies for the disabled. A few weeks ago, the representatives of various Mongolian disabled people's rights associations demonstrated against the proposed changes, showing their protest by walking on all fours across the central Sukhbaatar square.
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