TO RECLAIM MINEGOLIA

In September 2013 a gunshot rang out during a demonstration outside Mongolia’s State Palace in the capital Ulaanbaatar. No-one came to any harm. But the damage it did to a popular movement to protect the country’s rivers made big ripples.

But let’s track back and begin at the beginning. When Mongolia emerged from nearly 70 years of communist dictatorship to become a democracy in the early 1990s, a mainly agrarian nation long supported by the Soviet Union went down the market economy route and suffered the predictable shocks. Extensive privatization urged on by some of the usual suspects – the International Monetary Fund and Asian Development Bank – and supported by ‘reformers’ within the newly formed Democratic Party became the order of the day. In the ensuing turbulence, many old communist-era industrial enterprises floundered and failed – except mining. (Today the state-owned copper producer, the Erdenet Mining Corporation