From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
Show Mongolia Some Respect
It shouldn't be reduced to envying Afghanistan.
NEW YORK--If you want to be heard, it helps to have a hook, and when the Mongolian ambassador to the United Nations phoned recently, he was trying hard to humor the press with a peg to the current headlines. Mongolia, he told me, was "just like Afghanistan"--a large, landlocked country trying to recover from a difficult past. Given the similarities, he wondered, and given that the prime minister of Mongolia would be visiting New York for the World Economic Forum, perhaps I would like to interview him?
I choked back the observation that, unlike Afghanistan, Mongolia has not recently done anything nearly as riveting as playing host to a huge internationally active terrorist network bent on the destruction of the United States. Actually, since the days of Genghis Khan and his kin, whose world conquest was the big news of the 13th century, Mongolia just hasn't been home base to anything world-threatening or even modestly irritating enough to grab the global spotlight.
Lest I had overlooked some potentially newsmaking bit of wickedness, however, I phoned a friend, University of Pennsylvania sinologist Arthur Waldron, who takes a strong interest in such matters. Had Mongolia done anything really bad lately? No, said Arthur. Together, we ran down the list. Mongolia, with its largely Buddhist population, has a small Muslim minority, but as far as we know it harbors no lethally militant political or religious movements. Mongolia hasn't produced any known suicide bombers. It isn't building missiles, like North Korea; it isn't trying to acquire nuclear bombs, like Iraq. It isn't collapsing, like Argentina. Mongolia doesn't have an aging anti-American communist tyrant still in power, like Cuba. It isn't even a font of anti-American rhetoric, like France.
So why care about Mongolia?
Mr. Enkhbayar has a point. Mongolia's 2.6 million citizens have at least as much claim to poverty, suffering and a horrific past as many of the angry folks in the more troublesome nations on which the U.S. lavishes loads of attention. Wedged between China and Russia, Mongolia perforce deals with the world mainly via the two unenviable hubs of Beijing and the Siberian city of Irkutsk--routes that entail a high surcharge for travel and trade.
Absorbed as a Soviet satellite in the 1920s, Mongolia endured communism for almost 70 years, emerging in the 1990s maimed by decades past that included murderous purges, hideous repression and brutally inefficient attempts at central planning. Nomadic herders had been forced onto collective farms, where they had lost their old survival skills and acquired nothing much to replace them. What little industry there was had been designed to depend on Soviet oil subsidies, and held out little promise for the future. When Soviet control collapsed, and the oil dole dried up, Mongolia shook itself loose--only to face the 1990s as a nation with no foothold in the modern age, and little to build on.
Then came two of the worst winters in living memory, in 2000 and 2001, when much of the livestock died in blizzards and more dropped dead of starvation. This meant that some of the people, in turn, went hungry. The Mongolian authorities estimate than one-third of all Mongolians right now live on less than $1 a day.
In July 2000, frustrated voters turned away from fast-track reform and gave a landslide victory to a more cautious, left-leaning government, with 72 of the 76 seats in parliament going to Mr. Enkhbayar's Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party. This coincided with a global economic slump. The result has been the stalled privatization of large enterprises and the damping of what little global investor interest there ever was in Mongolia--leaving China as the main player.
Mr. Enkhbayar, offered little else right now, has welcomed China's bid to buy into Mongolian development. But his rhetoric, and Mongolia's struggle to reform over the past decade, suggests that Mongolians would welcome partners of a more enlightened political stripe. Mr. Enkhbayar explained last week that his goal for Mongolia is still "to get rid of this totalitarian past" and build "democratic institutions." He adds that it would help to have a few good roads--which Mongolia, almost the size of Alaska, still lacks.
I would not advise smothering Mongolia in aid, which too often warps and corrupts the development of the economies it is meant to boost. But certainly the West can spare the time and attention to help see that Mongolia does not simply slide right back off the democratic map, forgotten by the Free World it hoped to join. It takes grit to stand up after a century as brutal as the one Mongolia has just suffered through--and then make a leap of faith toward free-market democracy. It takes more courage than we have seen so far from governments in many of the countries to which we devote far more attention and, in some cases, care, including--to name just a few--China, North Korea, Cuba and a slew of anti-Western nations in the Middle East.
Mongolia still has far to go, but it has come very far already. Mongolians have done this not in anger, or with violence, but with a genuine longing to join our world. That may not play as big in the headlines as countries producing threats to our way of life. But it deserves our highly visible friendship, and our audible praise and respect. Here's to Mongolia.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."
