This blog is the fifth in a series of posts about Mongolia’s 2016 parliamentary elections that were held on June 29th.

Mongolia’s June 29^th national parliamentary elections and Ulaanbaatar city elections acted as a multifaceted anticipatory device. The elections could be said to form a symbolically cumulative conclusion to a troubled political and economic period. The result was a vast overhaul of the state hural and the winning of an 85.5% majority for the Mongolian People’s Party (MPP). However, looking deeper into the temporal flow of the pre-election and post-election period reveals not so much a culminating electoral event and political regime change at the national and city levels. Instead, for many people living in Ulaanbaatar, this year has proven to be one of ongoing waiting and uncertainty. This period has been punctuated by waves of speculation and markers in time that produce stalling caused by changing groups of the political class.

The materiality of stalling

For many people living in Ulaanbaatar, this stalling has had considerable material repercussions that began well before the elections. One local official told me that the providing of certificates of temporary possession (ezemshih gerchilgee) of newly acquired pieces of land was stalled on the 25^th of May 2016 in the lead-up to the election. People claiming new land in the north of the city were attempting several times a week to try and process the right paperwork, but were consistently sent away to return ‘after the election.’ However, now almost three months afterwards, the processing of new land has not yet recommenced. In this period of bureaucratic stalling, people attempt to chase the right land official who visits on particular days, but are told that the land official is only currently dealing with ‘problem land’ and not new applications. However, to the average person, what counts bureaucratically as ‘problem land’ is opaque and not fully knowable. The fact is that many people in new plots of land are in varying forms of conflict with their neighbours as to the limits of boundary fences. Instead of waiting for bureaucratic decisions to be made in the meantime, people go ahead and secure their land in other ways.  For instance, they may stay on the land in an effort to hold it, and attempt to secure it with a fence before it can be officially recognised.[i]

 

Waiting amongst disrepair

One group of people in Ulaanbaatar have been particularly hit by post-election stalling. Again, their story began a long time before this year’s elections. They are a people who have been left behind after the last economic peak of 2011 and have borne the brunt of the subsequent departure of major investment from Ulaanbaatar’s construction sector. In the heart of Zuun Ail, an area close to the city core and a prime area for redevelopment projects, lies a collection of old niitiin bair – former construction worker dormitories built during the 1950s. Building No. 3, like the other niitiin bair, stands as a two story building that consists of one room apartments. These buildings have never had running water, and residents obtain their water from nearby wells. The one advantage these buildings had was heating. In the earlier days of the rise in construction development a construction company sought to redevelop these buildings into apartments. Excited at the prospects of gaining access to better infrastructure including running water, and increasing the value of their property, many owners in Building No. 3 signed contracts with the company to exchange their apartments for new ones to be built in their place.

Unfortunately, funding dried up, the redevelopment of Building No. 3 did not go ahead and the construction company is rumoured to have gone bankrupt.[ii] Before this was known however, the internal infrastructure of several of the rooms were removed, including the heating pipes, windows, doors and floor boards which were sold for scrap. Several different parties are blamed for this, including some residents claiming that owners were told to remove the infrastructure to display intent to leave and compliance with the upcoming redevelopment. Since then, the rooms have been further vandalised. The end result has been that multiple apartments on the bottom floor of the building have been slowly filled with refuse, as rubbish has been routinely disposed of through the gaping holes of former windows over the course of some time. The building’s heating has been switched off, the building itself is in a crumbling state of disrepair and is unsafe to live in.

Several people still live in this building and are unable to leave. Many owners, both living in the building and elsewhere, are desperate to find a solution to their problem – to find a different construction company deal, to receive compensation from the original construction company, or to simply find alternative housing. However, since the election period, simply being provided emergency alternative housing has become a main and urgent aim. Those still living in the apartment are working to a strict and unforgiving deadline: the looming onset of winter in an unsafe apartment building without heating. The situation is dire and resulted in Amnesty International Mongolia putting a call out to campaign for the former Ulaanbaatar mayor Bat-Üül to provide these people with alternative housing. This Amnesty International call-out has since been renewed and rebroadcasted since the elections. During the elections, election promises were made offering some solutions. This has meant that for these people, the elections acted as an important anticipatory device. However, as yet, the residents have not yet been provided alternative housing and cold weather is fast approaching.

Cleaning in defiance      

For the resident owners, this prolonged period of waiting has been a time of strategy, observation and flows of different types of actions. Just as the political stalling is prolonged and ongoing, so too are their different types of strategies. Here attempted ‘resolution’ of their situation, rather than an end point, is a maintaining device and important way to be heard. Residents have been involved in different court cases related to their situation. Much time is spent commenting on the ongoing situation while sitting in doorways of buildings and on the street, where updates are shared, compared and critiqued. They display an ‘active interaction’ between resistance and attempts to bring about change, while staving off the material flow-on effects of forced disrepair (Ortner 2016).

This was clearly seen on May 22^nd 2016, when several residents spent a full day clearing all the rubbish out of the empty apartment rooms on the ground floor. This was a huge undertaking. The rubbish was putrid and some of it had even decayed to earth. This rubbish had been an invasion of their building, encroaching closely on their own small apartment rooms. Who had deposited this rubbish and what it actually consisted of was essentially unknowable. By cleaning it up, they were moving against the anonymity of an accumulation of urban waste disposal over a long period of time. They were rejecting the slow deterioration and destruction of their living space that had occurred through quests for bountiful profit for some, and a better quality of life for others:

Thanks to their amazing efforts, the rooms are now cleared. But the building’s current residents continue to wait. They plan to have everyone move upstairs, then seal off the corridors and the windows of the ground floor to stop further rubbish polluting their building. In this period of waiting, their only option is to carve out a better space and modify this building to their needs. However, in the last few weeks, residents have informed me that people are beginning again to throw rubbish into the building during the night.

Stalling in a far-from-normal election year

The promise of varying forms of assistance for residents of Building No. 3 is an election promise of severe personal, emotional weight. Providing emergency alternative housing can determine the health and well-being of a large group of people this coming winter. While some steps by new politicians have been taken since the election, alternative housing has yet to be confirmed. The failure to provide such housing puts these people into a dire and unknowable situation and has considerable material and felt ramifications.

Bureaucratic stalling in Ulaanbaatar at the height of summer was always going to have significant effects reverberating throughout the city. A land official told me, “it is normal for this [kind of stalling] to happen during an election year.” It is common for a new term of Mongolian national parliament to not be confirmed until September of that year. However, as Mongolia’s new politicians are aware, Mongolia’s recent economic oscillations mean that this year is no ‘normal’ election year. To address the looming decisions, the new state parliament was formed much quicker than usual.

What was described as a crisis in the lead up to the election has transformed to ever deepening gradations of ‘crisis levels’ without a clear end in sight. The course that Mongolia now needs to take given the government’s own economic assessment is by no means clear. Mongolia faces major economic decisions that, no matter which way they turn, will have significant geopolitical consequences. Mongolia is currently considering accepting IMF bailouts, while the Bank of China has set up an office in Ulaanbaatar, and waits to see whether Mongolia will open its economic borders to allow it to set up branches and commence operations in Mongolia.

While bureaucratic stalling is common during an election year, acts of stalling this year are especially critical given the far-reaching economic fallout that has affected so many groups of people. However, where there is stalling, there are also new possibilities. While people wait to see whether this ‘crisis ordinary’ (Berlant 2011:10 c.f. Rebecca Empson this blog series) will deepen into a chasm of economic disrepair that the country as yet cannot see an end to, some people see this interlude as the opportunity to divert their current course. Let’s just hope that the new political representatives of Zuun Ail at the city and national level will find ways to manoeuvre their newly acquired power to allow the residents of Building No. 3 to access alternative housing this winter. These are one group of people who simply cannot afford to wait.

 

For more information on Amnesty International’s campaign for this case, please see: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa30/4793/2016/en/

 

© All photos by Rebekah Plueckhahn

A sincere thank you to Doljinsuren and Erdenezayar for assistance with this research.

[i] Living on land as a way to ‘hold’ and prevent others from claiming it has long been a part of land access in Ulaanbaatar since 1990.

[ii] While conducting research on property in Ulaanbaatar, more stories emerged of other similar failed redevelopments of other buildings in different areas of the city.

This is the third in a series of posts about Mongolia’s 2016 parliamentary elections that were held on June 29th.

This post was written by Liz Fox, a UCL ESRC-funded anthropology PhD candidate affiliated to the Emerging Subjects project. Liz is completing the final stage of her doctoral research in Mongolia.

 

There’s a new road in Aglag District.[1]

When the diggers suddenly appeared one evening at the end of May, the area was filled with discussion over whether the road would be paved or not. What needed no discussion, however, was why, suddenly this May someone from the government had decided that the nearly impassable central artery through this Ulaanbaatar ger district finally needed attending to. That was obvious: the June election.

The arrival of trucks of gravel and sun-blackened workers was followed shortly by a sudden rush to open and occupy abandoned shops and office spaces. Flags and banners appeared outside these doors, as did flyer-distributing pairs in colour-coordinated baseball caps. The billboards at the bus terminals became decked with the photo-shopped faces of parliamentary candidates, micro buses topped with loudspeakers whirled around the open space and up and down the dirt roads. Election fever came fast and loud to Aglag, a dramatic transformation for the normally remote and dusty district.

The candidate selection in Aglag was remarkably diverse. Residents had the choice between household names from the world of television, film, music, and art, the children of big business figures, intellectuals educated abroad and a well-established political incumbent. The fundamental choice, however, was tripartite: to re-elect the ruling Democratic Party, to return the People’s Party to power after a 4-year absence, or to take a chance on a small party or independent candidate.

For the unemployed and chronically underemployed, election rallies are a good way to pass the time. Families attended meetings by both major parties, and those held by particularly famous independent candidates. The speakers were duly listened to, the disparities between their faces on the posters and in the flesh were commented on, the local drunks who dominated the microphones when the candidates opened the floor to residents were at turns held to be funny or embarrassing, and at the end, as we walked away on the half-finished new road, the same feeling was voiced: “Yes, they speak very nicely, but will they actually do anything for us?”

What a candidate will actually deliver is a question that many Mongolians were asking as they came to a decision over who to vote for. However, I would argue that it is a question that those with socio-economic power were asking with some certainty, and those living in ger districts were asking with near total disillusionment. This assertion leads to the central working argument of this post:

The notion of voter ‘choice’ in Mongolia is complicated by three factors: 1. the disconnection of political ideology from the major political parties, 2. the forces at work that influence voting through semi- and non-legal means, and 3. a phenomenon I will call “the inverted logic of the vote-return exchange”.

 

Political Disconnection

Almost no one I speak to in Mongolia seems to think about the two major parties as distinct ideological entities: politics is just politicians. Especially among disenfranchised ger district residents, people see politicians as powerful people looking to benefit themselves and their relatives and allies. It doesn’t matter what party they are from. Joining a party is just a decision driven by personal political motives, not a demonstration of allegiance to any particular world-view.

Of course, there are people who are very passionately involved in a party here and may have always been. But, at least in Aglag District, people usually do not start in one camp or another or even know how to define one party from the other. There is no ‘package’ of related political ideals that people from one side or another cleave to with the near-religious conviction witnessed, for example, in the UK referendum and US election campaigns that were taking place at the same time. Instead, people ask the pragmatic question: what was delivered over the last four years? Who do we think will deliver more for us over the next four? In fact some families have voted for three different parties over the last three elections.

 

Locust Migration: Tricks of the Trade

Mongolians are well aware of the semi- and non-legal goings on that take place in the lead up to an election. The stream of leaked videos and audio recordings that fill the news reports and invite endless online discussion fuels the general disillusionment and disappointment in the country’s political situation. There are a number of tricky practices that are carried out in order to tip the balance of the election one way or another. One is well-known enough to have been given its own nickname: tsartsaani nvvdel, locust migration. This evocative term refers to the ‘moving’ of people from one district to another for the sole purpose of voting. Shortly before the election citizens are moved on paper and will be re-located after they give their vote. Although laws are in place that put a hold on registering a change of location in the run up to the election day, they only stop those that do move from voting in the new district’s local government election. The parliamentary election is still open to influence.

Institutions carry out wholesale address changes. On election day buses are ordered to take entire companies from one district to another, or even all the way out into the countryside and the ‘locusts’ are clearly instructed on which party to vote for. Some people brought into these schemes by their bosses say that they ‘know’ that they have a free vote in the district they have been moved into, whereas others say they ‘know’ that if they don’t vote for the candidate they’ve been instructed to, their bosses will find out someway or another and they’ll lose their job.

 

The Inverted Logic of the Vote-Return Exchange

In democratic elections, there is a logic to the relationship between pre-election promises and post-election action.  Usually, it goes like this: to win a vote you have to make the right promises about what you are going to do after you are elected. If the public gives you the vote, you return the favour by fulfilling your promises to them.  I argue that in Mongolia, things are currently working in reverse in terms of the timing and direction of ‘giving’.

Instead of exchanging promises for votes, which then are returned as political action, candidates here give things to the voters (the ‘return’) before the election. They spend vast sums of money to encourage a vote for themselves, and then once they are elected, it’s the public’s turn to give back so that the politician can recoup the loses s/he incurred during the campaign and build further power and influence.

One example of this reverse logic in action is the new road. It was promised years ago, but was only delivered just before the election. Local residents commented at length on the timing and speed of its delivery: “Look, this road could have been done in a couple weeks, years ago! They are doing it right now so that we’ll vote for them. But if we take the gift now, we’ll be the one’s who pay later; as we did for the last 4 years. The politicians made themselves richer and richer while we got poorer and poorer.”

In his speech at the opening of the 2016 Mongolian Economic Forum, President Elbegdorj also alluded to the effects of this logic when he criticised the trend of failed businesspeople going into politics. They do so, the president said, because the power they serve to gain will give them an opportunity to rebuild their own wealth. You will have to spend money to gain power, but once you do, it will be time to give back, not to those that voted for you, but your own network of relatives and allies.

 

Personal Pragmatic Voting

When politics is politicians, and voters are bussed from here to there, I would argue an intensely personal and pragmatic logic takes over. Most people in the upper socioeconomic brackets have a relative somewhere involved in politics and they are therefore both on the one hand obliged to vote for them, and on the other hand, have the most to potentially gain from supporting that relative into power. Even the rich who are disillusioned about the state of politics and complain that their own relatives seem never to be satisfied still admit that, when it comes down to it, you vote for who you have to. For the poorer ger district residents, what happens before the election may be more beneficial for them than what happens after. Due to the inverted logic, the disenfranchised serve to gain more while politicians court their votes. Once they are elected, people say they will only serve themselves.

In the end, they didn’t pave the new road in Aglag District and after only a few days of heavy rain, its surface quickly deteriorated.

But then again, one road wasn’t enough to get the Democratic Party re-elected there anyway.

 

[1] All names and locations have been changed.

Thank you to G. Gerelsuren for contributing research to the piece.