MONGOLIA IN 2000 The Pendulum Swings Again

Abstract

Mongolia in 2000 saw a political sandstorm befitting the Gobi Desert. When the dust settled toward the year’s end, the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), formerly the Communist Party, had wrested four years of political power away from the Democratic Coalition by winning both the national parliamentary elections in July and the countrywide local legislative elections in October. The elections were free and open, the transfer of power was peaceful, and Mongolians and foreign observers were left waiting to see what the new government will do. During the winter of 1999–2000, the country also suffered a terrible natural calamity in the form of a cold freeze called the dzud during which 2.6 million head of livestock died, affecting the lives of thousands of herders who depend on animals for their livelihood. Concerns about corruption, poverty, unemployment, crime, alcoholism, domestic violence, street children, health and education, and other issues continue. The new government plans to focus heavily on such social and economic concerns. The major foreign policy event of the year was the visit of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Still unresolved at the end of 2000 is the two-year-old assassination in 1998 of S. Zorig, one of the founders of Mongolia’s democracy movenment and one of the country’s chief architects and leaders after that.