Spectator's Journal: An Asian Wyoming

...The Communist government was very bad—not in ideology and politics—but because it did not decide anything...

...Our driver scowled, "Three months is a short time," he said...

...The country will debate a number of unpopular measures in the next four years, such as a reform of the social security system estimated to take 93,000 people off pension rolls...

...This resistance from the local level apparently has become a major pitfall for the Democratic Alliance, in spite of its huge majority in parliament...

...are considered barely edible and in Mongolia a rare delicacy, especially if poached (that is, hunted out of season, not a method of cooking...

...The MPRP could have done good things after 1992, she told us, because many of its still loyal members wanted change...

...The only ventilation is a two-foot hole in the top which accommodates the stove pipe, lets sunlight in and smoke out, and is so effective we plan to import a container load of gers for ourselves and our friends...

...Some oppose one party rule, even if the party is called "Young Democrats," not Communist...

...Nonetheless, with mobility so important to herdsmen, boundaries so well set by custom, and Mongolian land so abundant relative to the population, some local governments are meeting the problem, he said, by forcibly relocating newcomers to available land...

...In the afternoon, we came upon two men sitting on a rock holding their bridle reins, smoking cigarettes and wearing their dress-up boots that curl up at the toe like a sled runner...

...We passed several accident scenes where drivers barreled right into the herds...

...In 1996, the Democrats asked the question, "Are you better off now than before...

...Outside of the capital, pastoral life dominates, even on the outskirts of provincial towns...

...The grass was good, and the cattle and horses looked in better shape than the herds around the cities...

...The world thinks some countries like Mongolia are a little underdeveloped and tries to help them...

...Winter was coming on, the climate was harsh, surviving was tough...

...The former ruling party is undergoing its own transition to free market policies and democratic ways...

...Even on main roads, cattle browse on the broad median strips...

...11 Western-style hotel rates start at $90 a night The narrow winding streets of the older sections have been replaced with broad boulevards, crowded with Mercedes Benzes and BMWs...

...The View from Ulan Bator The newer parts of the capital look a lot like a generic East European city, with cement eight-story apartment buildings built under Soviet influence...

...Said Severinghaus, "The Democrats said they would take no positions in the government: let the MPRP run it for four years and see how they do...

...They weren't as lucky as their city cousins...

...The irrigation development we visited was an exception, not the norm...

...We eventually arrived in Altai Town, the provincial capital in the far west, expecting to find quite a small city...

...Before we realized that we had found the wrong wedding, we were honorary guests and MaeCile was official photographer...

...It was the evening before the wedding...

...Moreover, with extensive personnel turnover in the capital, there is a danger that the central government is losing touch with the people in the countryside...

...We got a close up look at the livestock even while driving...

...they drive their herds from one clearly defined grazing ground to another...

...The MPRP dominated the 1992 elections, blaming the Democrats for the economic crisis following the end of Russian support...

...The outside world is opening up gleaming banks and office buildings, with reflecting glass fronts...

...Yet the scarcity of good pastures near urban areas with electricity and education create competition for them...

...This time, our vehicle was a Ford Bronco, an outstanding vehicle to take over roads like these—almost as good as the Model A and Model T Fords that navigated roads like this when roads in the United States were at this stage...

...Some voters were simply impatient with the new government The day before the local election, we gave a ride to a lady 56 July 19 9 7 The American Spectator hitch-hiking to town who had retired to the country to raise cattle...

...To understand the atmosphere of the wedding, one must appreciate the merits of a ger...

...We stayed in the home of the local elected official...

...The bride's father cried openly at losing his best helper...

...Has this remote country suddenly turned its back on a Western-style free market, or is the political change following a more subtle local path...

...And they have made changes...

...But the repudiation of the Democratic Alliance in the May presidential election, and the 61 percent landslide for Nachagyn Bagabandi, candidate of the formerly Marxist Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP), was by no means a return to the old ways...

...We visited in towns, where the bureaucrats of the old regime were strongest, but even more, we camped in the countryside where the herding families kept their autumn pastures...

...They were scared that they would lose power in the next election...

...The old system is gone...

...Our driver Davadorg worked sixteen years for the Ministry of Agriculture inspecting collective farms...

...Another problem comes from the clustering of rural families around the provincial towns, drawn by electricity and education, which they value highly...

...He thought we were asking too many questions...

...Zola, our interpreter, inquired about a wedding and they said, "Follow us...

...Milking all kinds of animals is the constant occupation of Mongolian women, since men are forbidden by superstition to milk...

...in the world to go Communist, threw out the Marxist parliamentary majority last year in possibly the most sweeping turnover yet seen in a newly democratic country...

...he supports the move to a market economy but criticizes the Democrats for rejecting everything done by the Communists...

...He explained to us that in the transition stage we were running into bureaucrats from the old system who were just hying to protect their turf Turf battles, literally, may benefit the Communist revival simply because the central government may come down on the wrong side of issues like land use and land fees that directly impinge on the life of the herdsmen...

...They spent several months late last year touring the Mongolian steppes and visiting with their fellow herdsmen and horse trainers...

...Ever present dogs range inside the stockades, ready to take a chunk out of intruders...

...With no drainage along the roads, rainwater collected at the edge of the pavement, and cattle wandered onto the highway while watering...

...Although, says Severinghaus, the macroeconomics had improved, the day-to-day experience was more crime, poverty, and unemployment, and people answered no...

...At the end, the breeze got the better of our tent, and knocked it flat beyond repair...

...About this time, a tall man who spoke English and turned out to be Markus, a44 But the pastoral life isn't far off...

...If our party changes the name of the paper," said our host, "you can expect big changes in policy in the next two years...

...The bride and her assistants entered around noon and the celebration continued through the afternoon as the new couple and their one-year-old daughter hosted the contingent in their new ger...

...Everywhere we There's a reason Newt Gingrich is bullish on Mongolia...

...There were some habitations up on the hill from us about a quarter of a mile apart...

...It is a shock for people, having been told what to do for so many years, to suddenly have to find their own way...

...Nate, aged 75, has wrangled horses in the Big Horn Basin for most of his years...

...The ceremony began just before daylight the next morning in the brides' father's ger...

...An interim parliament was elected in 1990 to draft the constitution and set up a structure of government...

...Visit '171c American Spectator Online at WWNN .spcctator.org 82 July 1997 • The American Spectator...

...The Drive West The local and presidential elections may have restored a two-party balance, but without local support, several people told us, the Democratic central government will have a hard time putting through its policy of change...

...But the pastoral life isn't far off...

...We called each day, and hightailed it over when we had news of a delivery...

...When the date arrived, we struck out according to his directions, creating several new roads as we crossed the countryside in search of the celebration...

...Something of a backlash set in with the October local elections, in which the MPRP retained many districts outside the capital, and even more so with the presidential vote, in which MPRP candidate Bagabandi carried Ulan Bator by two to one and also swept many rural districts...

...One must wait at least a year...

...Everyone celebrated by roasting a goat and feasting while the bride milked six cows...

...then mounted up and took off with us in hot pursuit...

...This turned out to be a middle-aged man named Barha who was in charge of the environmental protection office...

...71 Swiss agronomist, came in and cleared things up by visiting with Barha in Mongolian...

...Heading south from Altai, we camped at a place Nate called Dry Creek, about a quarter of a mile from where the water sank into the sand...

...The journalist Burenbayer warned, "Before the election, the platform promised many drastic changes in every aspect of life...

...But it turned out to be almost a ghost town as far as the business-manufacturing district and the big buildings were concerned...

...The younger people realize they cannot live the way they did four years ago," he said...

...Now the shoe is on the other foot, as the Democratic Alliance majority in parliament, still the dominant part of government, faces the check and balance of an MPRP President...

...Some families in Altai Gobi had camped three days at a gas station waiting for a fill-up...

...But think about this...

...His young bride MaeCile is writing a doctoral dissertation for Harvard after living ten years in China...

...Here in Ulan Bator we found a listening post for politics at the local Rotary Club, which meets once a month on Wednesdays in the huge conference room of the Bayangol Hotel...

...The day-to-day life of the people seems to be The American Spectator July 1997 much like it must have been seventy-five years ago...

...Until the new leadership develops an opposition and evolves into a real democratic party, they say, the aloofness and elitism of the previous regime, with all its trappings of power, is the only example it has to follow...

...In a few miles, we came to the ger of the groom, where our caravan was joined by horsebackers and motorcyclists who tore across the country to the ger of the bride's family...

...He sees pitfalls in the fast-track Democratic program, especially its sudden end to energy price controls without a safety net, but points to a generational shift in the Marxist party too...

...Hopes for change were high, perhaps way too high, and we could already see a reaction setting in during the local elections of last fall, in which the former Communists won a large majority...

...Yet it recently gave a landslide victory to the presidential candidate of the revamped Marxist party...

...She voted for the Democratic Coalition in June but said she would vote Communist because in the past three months she had not seen any good, positive changes...

...In our travels, we became acutely conscious of a widening gap between the modern capital and the semi-nomadic countryside...

...But the top was very passive and indecisive and could not find a new direction," she said...

...James Ring Adams This country is reminiscent of Wyoming in many ways— a similar climate and the presence of magpies, jackrabbits, and marmots, known in our country as rock chucks, which in the U.S...

...Some tumbleweed blew by (the plant is native to the Central Asian steppes), but we saw none of the sagebrush and greasewood of Wyoming...

...During our two-week stay at Dry Creek, we were constantly buffeted by the steady intense wind, just like home in Wyoming...

...Traditional scenes like the wedding, and the traditional life of the horseman and herder, still mark the vast expanse of this land, the most unfenced country a person ever saw...

...As we made supper during our first night, the neighbors had their saddle horses and were busy with their evening chores, milking cows and goats, moving the herds in to water and pushing them to the bed ground on a rocky knoll past the gers...

...Even on main roads, cattle browse on the broad median strips, finding better grass here than in the overgrazed fields around the city...

...Part of the ceremony involved promoting the youngest daughter, a slight child of fifteen, to Dad's best helper by draping her in an adult-sized del...

...Scanty Western coverage hasn't conveyed the real concerns behind these dramatic shifts, which range from the protection of pasturage to cuts in the social safety net to simple distrust of one-party rule...

...The View from Dry Creek But the central government seemed very remote after our drive across country...

...The name of the paper was changed from Truth to Is It the Truth...

...By sunup, twenty-three horses and sixteen The American Spectator • July 1997 81 motorcycles, a big blue dump truck and our Ford Bronco were parked outside the ger...

...Continued on page Si) The American Spectator • July 1997 57 Spectator's Journal (Continued from page 57) While we were camped on Dry Creek, two men on a motorcycle stopped to visit and one of them invited us to attend his daughter's traditional Mongolian wedding on the coming Sunday...

...The families bring their livestock, and over-grazing is ruining the pasture land near the towns...

...Guest speakers draw a large audience, about half and half Mongolian and foreign...

...As we drove over washboard gravel and dirt roads through the Mongolian countryside, I recalled the sound of my aunt's new Ford sedan as I stood on the running board sixty-four miles to Lander trying to keep from getting car sick...

...Women do the work...

...All the herds and herdsmen came past us as they went to the spring to water their livestock...

...The parliamentary elections in June 1996 in which the Democratic Alliance won 5o of the 76 seats in the Great Hural came as a surprise to the world—even more so to the Mongolians...

...It just sat around...

...Yet these people are struggling with the transition from Communism—from a period characterized by efforts to industrialize agriculture, replace kinship relations with administrative control, and transform nomadic pastoralists into salaried employees of the state—to a free market economy and democracy...

...We followed the main road through the Gobi steppes, between snow-capped mountains visible to the north and the waste of the Gobi desert well off to the south...

...If they do not succeed within four years, they will lose credibility with the public and will not win in the next elections...

...In the June 1996 parliamentary elections, a highly literate rural population contributed to the landslide Democratic victory...

...With the end of Soviet subsidies, the Mongolian government had gone deeply into debt to pay for its oil imports, and free market Russia was withholding shipments pending payment...

...Although the privatization of urban land is widely accepted, the governor, an old Communist, finds it unimaginable that the new government could talk of privatizing rural land...

...The governor of Baganuur, a district attached to the capital Ulan Bator even though it lies 14o kilometers away, identifies himself as a Communist Party member and doubts that the rural herdsmen will accept the new government's plan to privatize rural land...

...One consisted of five gers, another of three gers...

...We found the government office and went in to'see who we could get acquainted with...

...If they have done badly, we will hit them hard for it...

...55 found hope but apprehension for the new government...

...One meeting featured Sheldon Severinghaus, representative of the Asia Foundation, who traced the changes to 1990, after Moscow ended its economic subsidies...

...Semi-nomadic families don't just wander...

...Outlooks seemed to divide more by age than party...

...Our travels took us 4,000 kilometers across country much like Wyoming when I was a kid and could smell an automobile coming for two miles...

...44 In Ulan Bator we found a listening post for politics at the local Rotary Club...

...As we were saying good-bye, the Communist daily newspaper arrived...

...And this is Nate speaking...

...For a unique perspective on Mongolia's political transition, and what it really means for a largely pastoral population, we introduce new contributors Nate and MaeCile Brown of Grass Creek, Wyoming...

...It was the countryside we sought out in our travels, heading west from the capital...

...For reasons having less to do with ideology than with public impatience and, ironically, fear of one-party government, the old Marxist party made a comeback in local elections last October and even more dramatically in this May's presidential elections...

...After the Democrats came to power, people's hopes were so high that they put a historically unique responsibility and opportunity on this party in four years...

...We heard a variant on this theme from a perceptive thirty-something businesswoman named Tsarsral...

...We saw this change while visiting an irrigation project on the River Halliun in the southwest...

...Mongolian men have never seen a steel-post pounder or an irrigating shovel...

...His wife having died three years previously, the fourth of his five daughters was leaving home...

...In rural areas where people breed cattle," he said, "the government must wait while development continues, see what happens, take time to make decisions on rural land...

...We're going to one...

...In Altai and elsewhere, a substantial part of the suburbs consists of "gers," the traditional conical tents known in the West as yurts, grouped by extended family and surrounded by stockades of one-by-six planking...

...Imagine being one of thirty people — sitting on the beds, chairs, and floor of a round room 4.2 meters in diameter—while people chain-smoke, eat mutton dumplings, exchange gifts, drink, sing, laugh, cry, and cuss...

...The journalist Burenbayer is founder of the Mongol Messenger and runs the Mongol Travel Service...

...The Marxist party contributed to its stunning defeat by what many saw as its arrogance...

...We had to curtail travel plans because of a persistent gasoline shortage...

...Some who voted for the MPRP said the party was turning leadership over to younger members and facing the reality that the previous system was a utopia...

...As the governor of Baganuur stated, "Mongolia occupies a big territory with good forests and grasses...

...As the governor of Baganuur explained on one of our earlier trips from Ulan Bator, Mongolia supports five kinds of grazing animals (horses, cattle, camels, sheep and goats) and each pastoral family has its own pasture for each of the four seasons...

...Miraculously, cow and car collisions seem rare, at least in town...

...In 1992, the democratic opposition won only six seats...

...If this is underdeveloped, one can see why they may like it just the way it is...

...A master of ceremonies served the role of preacher, asking for the bride's hand on behalf of the groom, overseeing the exchange of silk and other gifts with the bride's kin, leading traditional chants and songs and filling silver bowls with mare's milk and vodka...

...Right away he wondered where our official permission papers were...

...As we drove west, we saw big, beautiful, freshwater rivers that ran eventually into saltwater lakes, but not an irrigation ditch in sight...