Under Secretary Nuland accompanied Secretary Blinken to the G7 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Karuizawa, Japan, April 16-18.

She will then travel on to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia to meet with senior Mongolian officials, civil society leaders, and tour a USG-supported cultural heritage project April 19-20.

On April 17, Luo Zhaohui, chairman of the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA), signed a cooperation document with Khurelbaatar, deputy prime minister and minister of the economy and development of Mongolia, on the implementation of the Global Development Initiative (GDI), during his visit to the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Head of the CIDCA's Global Development Promotion Center Tang Ying, Deputy Director-General of the CIDCA's Department of Policy and Planning Li Ming, and Permanent Representative of Mongolia to the United Nations Vorshilov Enkhbold also attended the meeting.

As part of the liberalization of air transport, the Government has been working toward launching direct flights to the main air transport regions of the world in 2023-2024 and plans to conclude air service agreements with 10 countries.

Minister of Road and Transport Development S. Byambatsogt met with the British Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy to Mongolia Daniel Kawczynski and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to Mongolia Philip Malone on April 13 and exchanged views on development tendency in the fields of air transport, railways and roads, and expansion of cooperation between the two countries.

Minister S. Byambatsogt expressed his gratitude to the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for paying special attention to its economic cooperation with Mongolia and sending the Prime Minister's Trade Envoy to increase trade turnover between the countries and voiced his desire to expand the cooperation in the future.

The Minister said, "The transport sector plays an important role in Mongolia's relations with third countries. Therefore, we plan to establish more air service agreements to increase the number of direct flights. We envision it possible to sign the Intergovernmental Agreement on Air Communications between our two countries during the International Transport Forum in Leipzig, Germany, on May 24-26” and he asked to convey the proposal and support it.

In view of the traffic congestion in the capital city, the Government plans to implement the "Tuul Highway" project, reflecting it in the New Revival Policy. The road and road facilities along the banks of the Tuul River, as well as the road facilities to connect this road to the Ulaanbaatar-Khushig Valley Airport Expressway, will be built under this plan. Briefing about the "Tuul Highway" project and the "New Kharkhorum" project, which started by decree of President of Mongolia Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh with a goal to rebuild the capital city of the Mongolian Empire Minister Byambatsogt expressed Mongolia’s interest to cooperate with Germany in developing the feasibility study and designing of a high-speed railway connecting Kharkhorum city with the capital city.

The Ministry of Road and Transport Development informed that the British side had agreed to expand cooperation in trade, economy, and transport sectors and to cooperate in major infrastructure projects.

Mongolia has experience in introducing British advanced technology and know-how in the railway sector. Specifically, products of "Pandrol," a manufacturer of rail fastenings of reinforced concrete sleepers, and "RM&S," a manufacturer of concrete sleepers, were used in a newly built railway in Mongolia. The fastening technology is suitable for the extreme climate of Mongolia and meets the quality requirements. Given that concrete sleepers and fastenings will be required for the projects to construct western and eastern vertical railways and to renovate existing railways, the Mongolian side put forward cooperation proposals.

The Government of Mongolia and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have been working to expand air transport links since 1997.

1. Aeronautical Authorities of the two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 1997. In the Memorandum the two parties agreed that the airlines designated by the Mongolian side may operate up to two services per week in each direction and to grant Mongolia the fifth freedom traffic right on Moscow and Berlin route as well as to designate MIAT, Mongolian National Flag Carrier to operate on Ulaanbaatar-London route. However, MIAT has not operated flights to London due to the shortage of flight fleets and lack of passenger traffic to the European Market.

2. The Government of Mongolia and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland signed an Agreement on Air Services in 2000, agreeing to allow the designated airlines of the two countries to operate flights between Ulaanbaatar and London.

3. During the Air Consultation Meeting between Aeronautical Authorities held in Ulaanbaatar in 2009, both parties agreed to specify Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich as destination points in Germany and granted fifth freedom traffic right to a designated airline of Mongolia to/from London, Paris, Prague and intermediate points of Moscow, Prague.

4. Aeronautical Authorities of the two countries met in London in 2012 and the UK delegation confirmed that the designated airlines of Mongolia may operate Ulaanbaatar-Moscow/Berlin-London with fifth freedom traffic right and agreed on a code-sharing arrangement at the 2013 Air Consultation Meeting.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced today the launch of its five-year (2023-2028) Mongolia Strategic Framework that will guide the agency’s work. The strategy focuses on supporting Mongolia’s efforts to strengthen democratic institutions, enhance national sovereignty, and diversify its economy.

In partnership with the Government of Mongolia, civil society, and the private sector, USAID will build on past progress to strengthen democratic systems, unlock private enterprise-led economic growth, reform the energy sector, and improve resilience to climate change.

“As Mongolia’s long-standing partner and third neighbor, the United States remains committed to help strengthen Mongolia’s democracy and enhance its economic vitality,” said USAID Mission Director Ryan Washburn. “The U.S. government, through USAID, will continue strengthening our partnerships to advance our shared goal of sustainable development for all Mongolians.”

For more than 30 years, USAID assistance has spanned a variety of priority areas, including developing the energy sector, helping to establish and strengthen major banking institutions, providing humanitarian assistance, promoting small businesses and diversifying income in rural areas, and spurring inclusive participation in the democratic process. The United States also provided more than 24.8 billion MNT ($8 million) to help Mongolia respond to COVID-19.

To learn more about the Agency’s five-year Strategic Framework for Mongolia, visit www.usaid.gov/mongolia.

Mongolia has substantial coal deposits across the country. Coal is an important source of government revenue alongside mineral exports from mega mines such as Oyu Tolgoi and the Erdenet copper mine. But in September 2022, a coal scandal began to unfold in Mongolia’s capital city of Ulaanbaatar.

Multiple disclosures were made regarding corruption and conflicts of interest associated with the state-owned coal company, Erdenes-Tavan Tolgoi JSC. Then in October 2022, the Mongolian government revealed that coal was being illegally transported across the Chinese border without customs registration. This coal smuggling was allegedly directed by individuals in high-level government positions. Mongolia’s new national opposition political party, the HUN Party, calculated that the total loss of potential revenue to the Mongolian government was equivalent to an estimated 40 trillion Mongolian tugrik (US$13 billion). The Mongolian government did not officially confirm this figure.

Coal executives involved in such deals directly implicated the governing Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) because Erdenes-Tavan Tolgoi JSC is state owned. According to Mongolian news media revelations in December 2022, Erdenes-Tavan Tolgoi JSC executives secretly signed multiple offtake contracts (largely with Chinese and Mongolian companies) to fund infrastructure projects in exchange for cheap coal. These projects included the Zag water pipeline, the Bogd Khan railway and Tavantolgoi Gashuun Sukhait road projects.

Erdenes-Tavan Tolgoi JSC’s chief executive officer was eventually arrested and imprisoned. Mongolia’s government installed a special representative to replace him. On 30 March 2023, two members of parliament — Tumurbaatar Ayursaikhan and Dashdemberal Bat-Erdene — lost their positions. Several Chinese officials associated with the coal trade were also arrested in China at the end of 2022.

This revelation of secret, internal deal-making within the state-owned company triggered large-scale protests in Ulaanbaatar. Yet these protests were directed not only at this scandal but embodied a larger anger at political dysfunction and endemic corruption in Mongolia. During the protests, many different opinions were broadcasted, including calls for the government to resign. Protesters also promised that this would be the first of further protests planned for when the intense winter cold thawed.

This scandal was seen as an example of so-called ‘theft-by-law’ because state secrets rules technically protect internal deal-making and it is within the power of the ruling party’s decision makers. The scandal’s information source remains unclear — no single whistleblower has come forward, though several copies of the offtake agreements have been shared publicly.

The initial spotlight on the smuggling came from within MPP. Given the nature of Mongolian politics over the last decade, this situation is an indication of party fracturing and an internal fight for financial resources.

With the next election coming in June 2024, internal party fighting may have culminated in Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene’s effort to exert his control over the MPP and use the scandal to display an anti-corruption stance. This was evident in Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene’s speech at the Plenary Session of Mongolia’s parliament on 15 December 2022 when he stated his rejection of the ‘MANAN gang’. MANAN refers to MAN — the MPP, and AN — the Democratic Party — combined to construct the Mongolian word for ‘fog’.

As Gantulga Munkherdene has argued in his analysis of ‘wild capitalism’ in Mongolia, MANAN has come to embody public perceptions of the fusing of Mongolian party politics with jockeying for control of the nation’s wealth. It has been in circulation to contest corruption since the mid-2000s.

The coal smuggling is not an isolated event. Powerful political figures are closely intertwined with large-scale business interests. The culture of corruption within the Mongolian state has existed over at least three decades, which closely tracks with the Mongolian mining boom starting in the early 2000s.

Politicians’ use of public funds for personal gain and the cultivation of financial and social privileges has a long history in Mongolia. A 2005 USAID report on corruption highlighted ‘a profound blurring of the lines between the public and private sector brought about by endemic and systemic conflict of interest at nearly all levels’.

Corruption scandals have plagued Mongolia. The Mongolian government unfairly awarded scholarships to relatives or children of politicians and a state-run health and social insurance fund was subject to high levels of corruption and theft of assets. The Development Bank of Mongolia’s famous Chinggis and Samurai bond money was gutted by government authorities and their family members and major Mongolian private companies with political connections. The state fund for small and medium enterprises also gave large loans to members of the MPP — often without them paying them back.

The coal smuggling scandal is another example of the culture of corruption in a long line of similar events. But it is unclear why the Mongolian government only uncovered this so-called open secret of coal smuggling within its own party now.

Coal smuggling has been on the radar since at least 2018 when former member of Mongolia’s parliament from Omnogobi province, Luvsang Enkhbold, warned about millions of tonnes of coal missing in customs declaration forms. Beyond pointing to internal fighting for power within the MPP, the scandal may serve as a convenient crisis to make the prime minister look good in anticipation of the elections in 2024. The scandal could distract the Mongolian population from bigger protests calling for genuine reform.

BY:

Gantulga Munkherdene is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, National University of Mongolia.

Ariell Ahearn is Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Oxford.

The Xiongnu, contemporaries of Rome and Egypt, established their nomadic empire on the Mongolian steppe 2,000 years ago, emerging as Imperial China’s most formidable adversary and inspiring the construction of China’s Great Wall.

According to a new study, the Xiongnu were a multiethnic empire with high genetic diversity throughout the empire and within individual extended elite families. Women held the highest positions of power on the outskirts of the empire. The highest genetic diversity was found among low-status male servants, providing clues to the process of empire-building that gave rise to Asia’s first nomadic imperial power.

The world’s first nomadic empire, the Xiongnu empire, is finally being revealed thanks to archaeological excavations and new ancient DNA evidence. The Xiongnu empire arose on the Mongolian steppe 1,500 years before the Mongols. It became one of Iron Age Asia’s most powerful political forces, eventually stretching its reach and influence from Egypt to Rome to Imperial China.

The Xiongnu were famously nomadic and built their empire on the backs of horses. Their economy was based on animal husbandry and dairying. Their skill at mounted warfare made them swift and formidable adversaries, and their legendary conflicts with Imperial China eventually led to the construction of the Great Wall.

Juhyeon Lee, the first author of the study and Ph.D. student at Seoul National University, said, “We wanted to know how much genetic diversity was structured at different social and political scales, as well as in relation to power, wealth, and gender. We knew that the Xiongnu had a high degree of genetic diversity. However, due to a lack of community-scale genomic data, it remained unclear whether this diversity emerged from a heterogeneous patchwork of locally homogenous communities or whether local communities were genetically diverse.”

They discovered that the Xiongnu had a high level of genetic diversity. However, it was found that individuals in the two cemeteries displayed extremely high genetic diversity, comparable to that found throughout the Xiongnu Empire. This was revealed by the excavation of the Xiongnu Elite Tomb 64, which contained a high-status aristocratic woman at the site of Takhiltiin Khotgor, Mongolian Altai.

However, a lot of this variation was divided according to social class. The lowest rank individuals displayed the greatest genetic variation and diversity, indicating that they came from remote regions of the Xiongnu Empire or elsewhere.

Elite status and power may have been concentrated among particular genetic subsets of the larger Xiongnu population, as suggested by the lower overall genetic diversity and higher proportions of eastern Eurasian ancestries found in local and aristocratic elites interred in square tombs and stone ring graves. Particularly in Shombuuzyn Belchir, even wealthy families have exploited marriage to fortify ties to recently incorporated communities. We now have a clearer understanding of how the Xiongnu grew their empire by integrating many groups and utilizing marriage and concubinage.

Researchers discovered that high-status Xiongnu burials and elite grave goods were disproportionately associated with women, correlating with textual and archaeological evidence that Xiongnu women played particularly prominent political roles in the expansion and integration of new territories along the empire’s frontier.

They also discovered that the elite monumental tombs at Takhiltyn Khotgor were built for women, with each prominent woman flanked by a slew of commoner males buried in simple graves. The women were buried in elaborate coffins emblazoned with the golden sun and moon emblems of Xiongnu imperial power. One tomb even housed a team of six horses and a partial chariot.

Women occupied the wealthiest and most elaborate graves at the nearby Shombuuzyn Belchir elite cemetery. The grave goods included wooden coffins, golden emblems and gilded objects, glass and faience beads, Chinese mirrors, a bronze cauldron, silk clothing, wooden carts, more than a dozen livestock, as well as three items typically associated with male horse-mounted warriors.

Bryan Miller, project archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Central Asian Art & Archaeology at the University of Michigan, said, “Women held great power as agents of the Xiongnu imperial state along the frontier, often holding exclusive noble ranks, maintaining Xiongnu traditions, and engaging in both steppe power politics and the so-called Silk Road networks of exchange.”

Genetic analysis also provided rare insights into the social roles of children in Xiongnu society.

Senior author Christina Warinner, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said, “Children received differential mortuary treatment depending upon age and sex, giving clues to the ages at which gender and status were ascribed in Xiongnu society.”

They found that while younger boys were not, teenage Xiongnu males as young as eleven to twelve were buried with a bow and arrows. This shows that males were only assigned the gendered social responsibilities of hunter and warrior in late childhood or early adolescence.

Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan, project archaeologist and Mongolian Archaeology Project: Surveying the Steppes project coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, said, “Our results confirm the long-standing nomadic tradition of elite princesses playing critical roles in the political and economic life of the empires, especially in periphery regions – a tradition that began with the Xiongnu and continued more than a thousand years later under the Mongol Empire While history has at times dismissed nomadic empires as fragile and short, their strong traditions have never been broken.”

Journal Reference:

Juhyeon Lee, Bryan K. Miller, Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan, etal.Genetic population structure of the Xiongnu Empire at imperial and local scales. Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf3904

Thousands of education workers answered the call of the Federation of Mongolian Education and Science Unions (FMESU) and peacefully demonstrated on April 6th in Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar to demand increased salaries for teachers and education support personnel.

More than 5,000 FMESU members from preschool to secondary school, from scientific institutions to vocational education facilities, and universities gathered at the Sukhbaatar Square to demand fair and better implementation of the collective agreement on the salary increase agreed in 2022.

Education International (EI) member organisation in Mongolia FMESU submitted a threefold demand to the Parliament, to the Ministry of Education and Science, to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and to the Ministry of Finance:

Implement Article 2.1 of the collective agreement and increase the basic salary of employees in the education and science sector by at least 50 percent from April 1st, 2023.

Change the classifications and ranks of positions, increase the rates and number of allowances and additional wages by considering the specificities of positions and working conditions of the employees of the education and scientific sectors.

Implement Clause 2.3.14 of the Government's 2020-2024 Action Programme and provide State-owned universities with fixed expenses.

FMESU requested that the government respond to the demands by April 10th, 2023, and announced that they were ready to go on strike until the demands are met.

According to the governmental resolution 488 regarding the update of the salary range and minimum range of specific civil officers, education support personnel salary is only increased by 15,000 Mongolian Tugrik (5 USD), the public authorities said.

The Government insisted that, according to its Resolution 491 on the additional salary of the public administration employees and the increase in the length of service of the public service employees, the education workers’ pay is linked to the number of years in service. However, this salary increase is not applicable to teachers with more than 25 years of teaching.

FMESU criticised the fact that this decision had been made solely by the Government without consultation with the Confederation of Mongolian Trade Unions (CMTU), which represents one of the parties to the tripartite agreement of the social council.

The union also deplored that the rising cost of commodities, inflation, big class sizes, increasing workload, and shortage of education personnel, mean that the current salaries that teachers and education support personnel receive are deeply insufficient. It also recalled that the basic minimum salary for ESP in Mongolia is of 565,000 Mongolian Tugrik equivalent (161 USD)/month as of January 2023.

EI campaign “Go Public! Fund Education”

FMESU is joining the Education International (EI) recently launched “Go Public! Fund Education” campaign, an urgent call for governments to invest in public education, a fundamental human right and public good, and to invest more in teachers, the single most important factor in achieving quality education.

EI brings its full supports FMESU and education workers of Mongolia in demanding better salaries and working conditions.

We urge the government of Mongolia to respect the collective agreement signed with FMESU, stressed EI General Secretary David Edwards.

Deploring that teachers are overworked and overburdened and many of our colleagues are leaving the professions as a result, he, adding: “Teachers stood behind governments and their students during the pandemic and ensured that teaching and learning continued. It is high time governments acknowledge and guarantee that the teachers and education support personnel have decent working conditions, decent and fair wages, as well as adequate professional support and development.”

Mongolia's National Agency for Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring on Monday issued a warning of strong winds and dust storms.

"Starting from tomorrow afternoon, strong winds and dust storms are expected to hit the western part of Mongolia," and continue to affect large parts of the country in the coming days, the weather monitoring agency said.

The agency asked the public, especially nomadic herders and drivers, to take extra precautions against possible disasters.

Mongolia has a harsh continental climate as strong winds, snow and dust storms are common during the spring.