Three hundred miles east of here, near a wall built by Genghis Khan, dust blows from the steppes through the empty barracks and apartments of an abandoned Soviet military base at Choybalsan.
The local mayor, South Korean missionaries and American congressional staff members share a common vision for the old border post. They hope to make it the first transit camp for North Korean refugees, on their way to a new life in the US. But the plan seems frozen in place, like most efforts to aid people fleeing North Korea.
Alarmed by the idea, North Korea last year sent Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun, its highest-ranking envoy to Mongolia in 14 years. During a three-day visit, he renewed a bilateral friendship and cooperation treaty, replacing one torn up almost a decade earlier, and officials here indicated it would be fine with them if the barracks remained empty.
China frowns on the idea of preparing a transit camp for people who have been fleeing the repression and economic hardship in North Korea, preferring to bottle up potential refugees at the source, its 1,400km border with North Korea. This fall, China is placing as many as 150,000 soldiers on that border to keep the North Koreans at home.
South Korea's government quietly objects to the transit-camp idea for fear of irritating North Korea.
In this setting, Mongolia does not want to make a move alone.
"Mongolia does not want to offend anyone," said Mongolian Prime Minister Nambaryn Enkhbayar. "We are a small country. We are also not a direct neighbor to the two Koreas."
Enkhbayar, who plans to visit both North and South Korea in November, has received several delegations in recent months from groups that think creating refugee camps would be a good solution. One South Korean Christian group, the Doorae Community Movement, has bought land in Mongolia that could be used for refugee camps.
"These are human beings, people who suffered in this long journey, crossed the border, risked their lives," Enkhbayar said of the refugees. "They should be treated as human beings in a humanitarian way. But, on refugee camps, there is no such plan by the government."
With Mongolia at least two days from North Korea's border by train, the refugee flow here was always only a trickle. Since the late 1990s, missionary groups have quietly brought hundreds of North Koreans to Mongolia, a multiparty democracy with a population of 2.5 million, for eventual settlement in South Korea. But after the Chinese police intercepted 29 refugees two years ago, missionaries stopped running their underground railroad.
The prime minister said bona fide North Korean refugees who reached Mongolia were allowed to travel on to Seoul, the destination most North Koreans preferred, on daily flights that link Mongolia and South Korea.
An earlier policy of repatriation to China, the route here for the North Koreans, has been dropped, partly because of pressure from the US.
American pressure on China to allow camps here takes a back seat to Washington's need for Chinese assistance in dealing with North Korea's nuclear program.
At the urging of Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican who visited the North Korean refugee areas in China last year, the US Senate in July approved measures to allow North Korean refugees to go to the US.
With Bush administration officials talking of admitting several thousand next year, senators have urged the State Department to use refugee relief money to support transit camps for North Koreans.
Joel Charny, an executive with Refugees International, a Washington-based group, said the North Korean refugees he interviewed in China last year all wanted simply to live safely in China, near their families in North Korea.
"For them, Mongolia might as well be another planet," he said.
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