Print

Mail

wiki links

Mongolia's former rulers sweeping back to power

The statue of Lenin still stands outside the Red Hero Hotel. But it is George W. Bush and the American Dream that Prime Minister Nambar Enkhbayar invokes when talking up his formerly communist party.

A decade after they discarded communism, Mongolians swept Enkhbayar's party back into power last year, giving it 72 of the 76 seats in parliament in this vast land sandwiched between China and Russia. Today, the party that ruled Mongolia for 70 years as a Soviet ally hopes to seal its comeback by winning another term for President Natsagiin Bagabandi, its deputy chairman in the communist era.

Many countries that elected anti-communist reformers after shaking off Soviet domination have since re-embraced their old leaders, notably Mongolia. The Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party already holds all of Mongolia's 21 provincial governorships, and victory in today's voting would put it in charge of nearly every high government office.

But as Mongolia becomes a virtual one-party state, the president's followers have undergone drastic change and now espouse multiparty democracy and radical free-market economics.

"We recognize that private property is the most important kind of understanding in a democratic society," Enkhbayar said.

Already, private business accounts for 70 percent of Mongolia's economic output.

Now the government plans to sell the state airline and other major industries and turn over control of state radio and television to independent boards of governors.

"Our goal is to make government more efficient -- just like George W. Bush," Enkhbayar said in an interview. "The government's role should be ... to give opportunity to each person to become something, like the American Dream."

As for that 9m statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, he said: "What's more important is to remove the statues in your heart."

From the outset of its post-communist era, Mongolians were zealous reformers. The country of 2.4 million people won praise for quickly privatizing state companies and turning over millions of state-owned sheep and camels to families of nomadic herders.

But then came years of scandal and of weak governments rising and falling rapidly, and in 1997 the ex-communists began their comeback with Bagabandi's election. But he quickly deadlocked with the old parliament.

Things should have gone more smoothly after the former communists captured the parliament last year, but the government now faces daunting problems: rising crime and joblessness, and two harsh winters that have killed some five million head of livestock.

Bagabandi supporters say they yearn for stability.

"This is not totalitarian. A one-party system will be more stable than having many parties," said Byambaa Tsermaa, 50, a retired postal employee who sells children's clothes in the Ulan Bator bazaar to supplement her monthly pension of 17,600 tugruk (US$16).

In Mongolia's parliamentary system the prime minister runs the government but the president can veto legislation and Cabinet appointments, making his cooperation key to changing policy.

Bagabandi's leading challenger, former parliament speaker Radnaasumbereliin Gonchigdorj of the Democratic Party, argues that the country needs an opposition president to counterbalance parliament.

Gonchigdorj supporters accuse Bagabandi's party of indulging in its old communist habits, abusing its control of the government work force and state media to boost his campaign.

Party leaders deny it and say the Democrats were just as bad.

"This was quite a dirty campaign, with lots of rumors," Enkhbayar said with a sigh.

The prime minister, 42, is part of a newer generation of leaders who give the ruling party a younger, technocratic face. Built like a wrestler, he made his name as a literature scholar, translating Joyce and Dickens into Mongolian. He studied in Moscow and at Leeds University in Britain.

Others in the ruling party still yearn for the days of ambitious government development programs, helped by lavish Soviet aid.

"It would be better if socialism had lasted 10 more years, until 2000," said Sangaa Bayar, the president's chief of staff.
This story has been viewed 4947 times.