www.unuudur.com: The latest news of Mongolia in the World

Тщательно инсценированные парламентские выборы в Казахстане закончились. Но остался один вопрос: зачем?

«Казахстан – страна единства и согласия», – гласит плакат у дороги в селение Бостандык на юге республики, в котором на прошлой неделе произошли столкновения на национальной почве между казахами и таджиками.

Казахстан не хочет, чтобы стремительно растущая напряженность между Россией и Западом ограничила Астане пространство для дипломатического маневра. Администрация президента Нурсултана Назарбаева, не желая, чтобы западные санкции в отношении России утянули вниз и Казахстан, развернула очередное пропагандистское наступление на международной арене.

China’s foreign minister has suggested that Mongolia could become the next full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, even though Mongolia has appeared far less eager to join the organization than other aspirants like India, Iran, and Pakistan.

Некоторым такой акробатический номер может показаться не воплощением грации и красоты, а чем-то странным и неестественным. Но в Монголии умение изгибать тело под самыми невероятными углами доведено до такого совершенства, что некоторые сторонники этого искусства считают его совершенно уникальной монгольской традицией и хотят добиться для него международного признания.

Когда преподавательница монгольского языка Национального университета Монголии Мунхцецег Энхбат (Munkhtsetseg Enkhbat) решила расширить свои знания в смежной дисциплине, а именно в манчжурском языке, она решила направить свои стопы за рубеж. Но отправилась она не в Китай, а поступила в аспирантуру в России.

When Munkhtsetseg Enkhbat, a Mongolian language instructor at the National University of Mongolia, wanted to expand her knowledge in the related field of Manchurian linguistics, she decided to go abroad. But instead of heading to China, she enrolled in a doctoral program in Russia.

Mongolia is in discussions to buy American-made military transport airplanes, and is getting U.S. help in learning how to operate the aircraft. That ambitious purchase appears to signal that Mongolia has mining money to spend, and it’s using some of it to upgrade its armed forces.

The lumbering and stubborn Bactrian camel might not be an obvious contender in a polo match, but a Mongolian initiative to save the two-humped beasts is taking a traditional sport of the steppes and giving it a new twist.

Foreign donors and the Mongolian government are pumping millions of dollars into cleaning up Ulaanbaatar’s smoggy winter air, which the US Embassy calls one of Mongolia’s most critical environmental concerns. But as yet another relief project draws to a close, the city has little to show but more stubborn gray haze.

KFC shocked the fast food world last month when it announced that it had plans to start selling its fried chicken in Mongolia, which has mostly remained terra incognita for global fast food brands. The previous international fried chicken chain to have tried its luck in Mongolia was Kenny Rogers Roasters’, whose gamble on the [...]

Many Mongolians were surprised when, one day in 2004, a corrugated-steel fence suddenly went up around Ulaanbaatar’s 35-acre Children’s Park. They were horrified six years later when only a tiny four-acre fraction of the park reopened to the public, and plans emerged for the construction of a luxury hotel and other private developments on the [...]

On a chilly morning recently, workers in Ulaanbaatar dislodged Mongolia’s last statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin from the downtown plinth where it had stood since 1954. A small group watched as the city’s new mayor recalled the repression that marked the communists’ years in power and denounced Lenin and his followers as “murderers.”

Reflecting Mongolia’s booming economy, Ulaanbaatar’s skyline has been transformed in recent years, with socialist-style low-rise buildings displaced by lots of steel and concrete structures. And as the towers go up, their owners seem to go into politics.

Starting just over two decades ago, tens of thousands of citizens started leaving Mongolia amid a wrenching economic transition from a planned-economy to a free market. Now, with the Mongolian economy poised to boom, many émigrés are wrestling with a dilemma – whether or not to abandon the new country for the old?

If all goes as envisioned on June 28, Mongolia’s parliament will no longer be a male bastion.

With Mongolia’s economy poised for boom times, politics is taking a dodgy turn. The April 13 arrest of a former president, Nambar Enkhbayar, on corruption charges has some analysts in Mongolia worried about the formerly communist state’s democratization process. The timing of the arrest has raised questions in the capital Ulaanbaatar about political motives.

ULAANBAATAR, Mar 30, 2012 (IPS/EurasiaNet) – Twenty years ago, when a Dutch cyclist named Rik Idema first passed through Mongolia on a round-the-world biking trip, the country struck him as the most pristine place he’d ever seen. Captivated by the steppe’s stark beauty, Idema later returned to explore the country with a Mongolian friend, Tseren [...]

Mongolia is using its newly exploited mineral wealth to reform its social services. While the government should be applauded for looking to the future, it is a challenge ensuring the changes don’t come at the expense of the majority of people in this vast and rural country. Mongolia’s unique population structure creates especially difficult conditions [...]

A mining boom helped Mongolia’s economy grow by an eye-popping 17.3 percent in 2011, according to government statistics. But while investors’ hopes are riding high at the news, there is little rejoicing among the country’s lower-income households for whom rapid growth means worrisome inflation. At his shoe stand in Ulaanbaatar’s suburban Narantuul Market, Mongolia’s largest, [...]

When a new performance opens at the Mongolian State Academic Theater for Opera and Ballet, the hall sells out quickly. The country, which, according to some estimates, possesses as much as $1 trillion-worth of mineral reserves, can afford it. Some of those already reaping economic benefits from the anticipated mining-sector bonanza are fast becoming patrons [...]

Munkhtulga Tseveldorj is successful for a 22 year old. Author of two poetry books, he has a third on the way. He’s a good student in the library management program at the Mongolian Institute of Arts and Culture. And he is one of the very few physically disabled Mongolians working on a university degree.

Ulaanbaatar hardly registers as dream destination for study-abroad scholars. But for a handful of Afghan students, all-expenses-paid undergraduate scholarships to study in Mongolia’s capital city present a pragmatic alternative to life in war-torn Kabul. In the bustling canteen of Mongolia International University (MIU), 21-year-old Nasim Sahel, an ethnic Hazara from Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Province, admits that [...]

A shortage of Russian-supplied fuel is underscoring Mongolia’s dependency on its giant neighbor. Some experts and officials in Ulaanbaatar are now sounding like European Union leaders in Brussels in publicly speaking out about a need to reduce their country’s energy reliance on Russia.

Kazakhstan’s Afghanistan deployment may have been abandoned, but its (almost) neighbor Mongolia is increasing its troop contribution. Within the next couple of months, the country will be adding about 120 soldiers to its contingent in Badakhshan province, in Afghanistan’s far northeast (bordering Tajikistan) where the German military leads operations. According to AFP (in German), the [...]

Deep in southwest Mongolia, in the arid shadow of the Altai Nuruu Mountains, a little-known bear ekes out a perilous existence. The Gobi Desert has a host of endangered wildlife, but today the Gobi bear — a subspecies of the Brown bear known to scientists as Ursus arctos gobiensis — is one of the most [...]

Mongolia is the only formerly Communist state in the Caucasus and Central Asia that the report describes as a democracy.

Mongolia is proposing to send 1,500 peacekeepers to Cote d’Ivoire, in what would be by far its largest troop contribution to an international mission (and, if we want to be cute about it, the largest troop deployment abroad since the days of the Mongol Empire).

Inside a pulmonary ward for newborns in Ulaanbaatar’s bustling Maternity Hospital No. 3, Dr. Tungalag Lodon tends to a day-old infant just taken off his oxygen tubes. With relief, she notes progress in the little boy’s heartbeat. The prognosis for other patients with hypoxia — a shortage of oxygen reaching the tissues — is often [...]

As they ponder ways to develop Mongolia’s abundant natural resources, political leaders in Ulaanbaatar are opting for more expensive infrastructure options in order to bolster the country’s sovereignty. The leadership’s sovereignty concerns were evident in the recent announcement that a railroad spur leading from the country’s largest coal mine would link into the country’s domestic [...]