Commentary | Marissa J. Smith, “Quality, not Apology! Resign!": COVID-19 Response Exposes Issues of Governance in Mongolia
On November 1, 2021, the World Health Organization publicized and praised Mongolia’s COVID response. “Since the beginning of the pandemic, Mongolia has had no deaths and only imported cases with no local transmission.” Only days later, in mid-November, however, the country saw its first documented community spread. Just weeks later, in response to the government’s handling of the ongoing situation, a massive demonstration called for resignations from the State Emergency Commission in charge of COVID response on January 20, prompting the Prime Minister and his government to resign the next day. Though the process of installing the new Prime Minister and Cabinet have proceeded quickly, it is now unclear where Mongolia will go from here.
In this short write-up, I explore emerging and on-going issues within Mongolia’s COVID-19 response. While these are currently not getting much attention from Mongolian politicians, issues related to COVID-19 certainly demand attention in the context of not only a Cabinet reshuffle ostensibly responding to public dissatisfaction with the government’s COVID-19 response, but also the run-up to Presidential elections in June 2021.
Since the November community spread, Mongolia has been intermittently implementing heavy lockdown measures, increasingly struggling to prevent community spread beyond the most urbanized, heavily-settled, and transport-infrastructure-connected part of the country, the north-central regions adjoining Russia. The beginning of community spread was traced to a truck-driver who had entered from Russia and broke at-home isolation rules after being released from mandatory quarantine at a state-run facility attended a concert in the capital. Not long afterwards, a cluster emerged among employees of the Ulaanbaatar Railway, the joint Mongolian-Russian state owned “Trans-Mongolian” railroad that runs north-south across Mongolia between Irkutsk and Beijing. Border-crossings with Russia have since been heavily curtailed, shutting down important formal as well as informal trade that had been encouraged since the mid-2010s with a visa-free transit regime. Even the most affluent Mongolians and expatriates have reported on social media being forced to queue at supermarkets, and regularly exchange updates on where they have been able to purchase eggs that morning. At the time of the protests and government resignation, longtime politician and presidential hopeful Ts. Oyungerel told The Economist that aid to the population had been insufficient.
But there had already long been concerns about the Mongolian government’s handling of the global pandemic. For months, Mongolia has limited inbound flights to only a few monthly repatriation flights (in February 2021, there will be only four, to return 840 citizens). Concerns, voiced in the language of human rights, have been raised by thousands of members of the global Mongolian diaspora effectively barred from re-entering the country and facing difficult conditions in enforced quarantine facilities, if they are able to return to Mongolia. These issues affected some of the most affluent of Mongolians, who also shed light on the extreme hardships facing more average Mongolians, such as members of the large Mongolian migrant labor force in South Korea. As the global COVID crisis has continued into summer 2020 and beyond, the economic impacts have become more visible from views of econometric data and donor-involved policy conversations. Worryingly, there has been little coverage of COVID-related hardship in the Mongolian media, and the little data available from researchers on the ground has been concerning. Days before the protests, a young Mongolian returning from South Korea was charged and fined for “spreading false information” after posting on social media about conditions in state-run quarantine facilities for those entering the country. According to a phone survey of households conducted by Ulaanbaatar-based Statistical Institute for Consulting and Analysis (SICA) at the beginning of December “over 50 percent of employed family members cannot work as usual which has impacted family income. Compared to pre COVID-19 curfew, household average income was decreased by MNT 529,000, or 40 percent.” According to another survey of 385 small retailers, beauticians, car mechanics, and other participants in the “informal” economy, SICA reported that between November 12 and January 11 these workers had lost 97% of their income. Meanwhile, 22.3% reported taking out deposit-backed loans, while over 55% stated that they were having difficulty making payments on loans.
Events escalated after the New Year, as residents took to the streets to voice their disapproval with the government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. On January 19, major broadcaster EagleTV televised footage of a young mother and her newborn being transferred to the National Center for Communicable Diseases hospital, as two individuals in full PPE escorted her outside in the Mongolian winter wearing only slippers and a light gown. By evening the next day, the central square of Ulaanbaatar, a massive space in front of the Parliament Building constructed during the era of the Mongolian People’s Republic in the mold of Red Square and Tiananmen Square, had filled with demonstrators. Earlier in the day, while the Parliament was in session, the Chairman of Parliament, G. Zandanshatar, made an apology. The protests continued however, calling for resignations from the National Emergency Commission, tasked with COVID response and headed by the Deputy Prime Minister, Ya. Sodbaatar.
Sodbaatar and the Minister of Health, T. Munkhsaikhan, submitted their resignations to the Prime Minister, U. Khurelsukh. Hours later, the Prime Minister announced he would resign, and as mandated by the Constitution, his entire Cabinet did as well. But many Mongolians reacted stating that this is not what they had demonstrated for, and it is widely believed that U. Khurelsukh has thus positioned himself to run for President in June 2021. The new Cabinet is made up largely of members of the previous Cabinet, and the new Minister of Health S. Enkhbold is, like his predecessor T. Munkhsaikhan, a younger doctor who has headed the #2 State Hospital only since 2019.
The latest actions of the State Emergency Commission have been to intensify the lockdowns, with discussion of economic relief continuing up to the final day of the fall session of Parliament last week. Though a strong “curfew” in Ulaanbaatar had been largely lifted by January 23, movement in and out of the capital has been heavily restricted, and transportation to the countryside has been largely available only with special registration, testing, and transportation arranged by the government. Given the extreme centralization of Mongolia’s infrastructure in the capital Ulaanbaatar, along with restrictions on official migration put in place in 2017, such measures have placed many if not most Mongolians in positions of further hardship, creating great obstacles to their obtaining medical care, education, and critical components of their cash-generating livelihoods. During the protests, some demonstrators also cited cases of people in need of medical attention dying while waiting to be admitted to the capital, which had been previously reported in the news media.
On February 3, at a press conference led by the new Deputy Prime Minister and Head of the State Emergency Commission, S. Amarsaikhan, the State Emergency Commission announced that Ulaanbaatar would again be under “curfew” from February 11 to February 23, from the day before the start of the three-day Lunar New Year through over a week after the holiday’s conclusion. While COVID-19-related restrictions were also in place during last year’s Lunar New Year and additional measures this year were also expected, the version of measures announced is a particularly heavy one, and dismay is already emerging on social media. A tweet on the new measures by a member of the State Emergency Commission, highlighting that “one person each from 420,000 households in Ulaanbaatar” will be given a PCR test, quickly elicited many replies. The mayor of Ulaanbaatar (and until July 2020, Cabinet Minister), D. Sumiyabazar, who had already faced calls to step down during the last heavy lockdown, had already claimed that there would not be another lockdown over the Lunar New Year.
From these latest events, it appears that the expectation of further political turmoil around COVID-19 measures in Mongolia, that may or may not address the dire situation facing many Mongolian citizens, is warranted. This will likely include further reshuffling of government officials competing for prominence within the overwhelmingly dominant Mongolian People’s Party, as well as mass demonstrations, which in the past have become violent. It was a similar development, a Mongolian colleague reminded me, that the Mongolian government sought to deter with the sudden resignation of government at the end of January. Satisfaction with the new government is not yet apparent.
Marissa J. Smith, PhD is an anthropologist and Research Associate at the Institute for East Asian Studies, UC-Berkeley. She may be reached at smithmarissa(at)berkeley.edu. Dr. Smith’s research focuses on politics of knowledge and development in between urban and rural spaces, particularly in Mongolia.
To cite this essay, please use the suggested entry below:
Marissa J. Smith, “‘Quality, not Apology! Resign!’: COVID-19 Response Exposes Issues of Governance in Mongolia,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, February 15, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/GVHN2150.