TWENTY YEARS after Mongolia dismantled Communism, changed to a free market economy, and installed elections, the country is ranked by the Economic Intelligence Report (EIR) on a democracy scale as 69th out of 167 countries. Mongolia is a democratic beacon surrounded by authoritarian and hybrid regimes. Though not ranked as a “full democracy” as yet, Mongolia shares its category of “flawed democracy” with several developed countries, such as France and Italy. According to the Freedom House Index, the country has been rated “free” for the past several years, though problems have been noted in the area of gender, as women have had scant representation in parliament. However, the reinstatement of a quota system this year to twenty percent for electing women in parliament ushered in twelve percent representation in the 2012 parliamentary elections on June 28. The new parliament is in the process of being established.
Despite these impressive gains, the GLBT community still faces a great deal of repression in Mongolia. Freedom House detailed the difficulties the country’s first GLBT non-governmental organization (NGO) faced when trying to register with the government. The LGBT Centre—the first human rights-based organization of its kind in the country, founded in 2007—was denied governmental registration for two years, as its name was not seen as “Mongolian” in nature.
The group’s executive director, Otgonbaatar Tsedendemberel, recently told me about the NGO’s struggles for legitimacy at a popular coffee shop in downtown Ulaanbaatar. In 2009, he brought up the problems that GLBT people faced at a civil society meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The speaker ridiculed him, and a number of women’s rights activists present at the meeting stood up and challenged the speaker. The conflict put the budding NGO on the international map. While the registration issue was what the Centre came to be well known for, Ts. Otgonbaatar says the initial conflict “was not about the registration issue; it was about including GLBT rights issues in the NGO Human Rights Report for the Universal Periodic Review—UPR.” The LGBT Centre now has strong ties with women’s groups working in the area of gender equality. Ts. Otgonbaatar currently sits on the board of monfemnet, an umbrella organization for NGOs dedicated to gender issues within the human rights framework. The Centre uses social media to connect with the community and has a website. Mobile phones are used instead of landline telephones, as Ts. Otgonbaatar believes their previous hotline was tapped by the General Intelligence Agency in Mongolia. Problems still persist but their official status allows greater alignment with organizations like monfemnet and the United Nations’ Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (ohchr). For all this progress, free assembly of GLBT Mongolians can still be dangerous. While there are a few clubs to go to, they mostly remain private, as openly advertising their location could have negative consequences. After leaving a private party in 2007, Ts. Otgonbaatar and his friends were picked up by a corrections vehicle while trying to flag a taxi home. Having lived in Japan for seven years and being used to transparency with police officers, he openly questioned their reasons for detaining the group. He said that this angered the corrections officers, and they released everyone except for himself and a friend who also challenged the detention. At this low point, he said he found himself questioning his activism. He eventually moved beyond the experience to become executive director of the Centre, making the decision to be out to the public about his sexual orientation. Until recently, Ts. Otgonbaatar also hosted a TV show called We Are Youth that tackled mainstream social issues, which he had to give up temporarily due to workload constraints. However, he credits his success to his grounding in issues beyond GLBT causes, such as education, his previous media work, and professional legal training. He feels fortunate to have a supportive family as well. Yet for all his personal successes, he believes that the path to ending discrimination lies in establishing an anti-discrimination law—which Mongolia currently lacks. This law is necessary to establish due process for cases involving discrimination for sexual orientation—as well for as minorities, the disabled, the elderly, and women. Establishing this law would further enable the creation of legislation against hate crimes, a serious problem in Mongolia. Hate crimes committed against GLBT people in Mongolia have been instigated in particular by nationalist groups. The Centre shared this issue through a video created in 2010 and released that year at the annual “Through Women’s Eyes” human rights forum organized by monfemnet. The twenty-minute video, called The Lies of Liberty, details GLBT individuals’ lives, hopes, and expectations (available in seven-minute segments on YouTube). While the intention was to educate the public about GLBT issues, there were death threats against a transgender woman who revealed her identity in the video. Other people featured in the clip hid their identities. She eventually left the country due to persecution and death threats from nationalist groups. The perception that GLBT identities are a foreign import is an important obstacle to acceptance. Ts. Otgonbaatar has argued that nationalist attitudes are derived from Communism and not Mongolian culture itself, noting that Buddhism and shamanism in Mongolia tolerated homosexuality. A 2009 study—“Resisting Resistance: Women and Nationalist Discourse in Mongolia,” by Franck Billé—concluded that the Soviets used Mongolians’ fear of the Chinese as a method to keep them in line with Soviet expectations and designs. This process of threatening to leave them to their fate with the Chinese, Billé argued, created a hyper-nationalistic state of mind that enforced a norm of heterosexual procreation and a rejection of anything perceived as “other.” (Promoting population growth has been official government policy for decades.) Some international organizations have been highly supportive of the Centre’s work—including the UN’s Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (ohchr), COC Netherlands, Forum-ASIA, and Open Society Forum in Mongolia—sending Ts. Otgonbaatar to Geneva to learn and network at UN meetings. He currently documents cases of imprisonment and abuses using the unhcr human rights framework. When asked how many people have died due to anti-gay discrimination, he says it is difficult to verify suicides, while victims of violence tend to be covered up by their families. Ts. Otgonbaatar found his media presence to be highly useful in connecting him to a wider audience. The We Are Youth show has been running for eight years and he hosted it every Tuesday from March 2011 until the fall of 2012. Mongolia has a very young population, with the median age listed at 26 years. This demographic fact can be key to challenging the current political system. Although it focuses on mainstream social issues, he stated that the show “started focusing on human rightsissues [when]I took over. I sometimes address discrimination in a wider sense, not only on discrimination against GLBT people. Too much emphasis on GLBT rights and discrimination might distance the viewers from the show.” While no longer hosting the show, Ts. Otgonbaatar is still traveling on the behalf of the Centre, including travel to international conferences to represent the organization. When asked about his thoughts on the recent election, Ts. Otgonbaatar replied: “It was a significant election in the sense that the most powerful civil society representatives and pioneers ran for election from the Civil Movement Party. In the next four years, civil society will maintain its momentum and definitely run for the parliamentary election in 2016 with more experience and hopefully with a lot of success. Those candidates representing minorities such as people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities should be given a chance to reflect the views and needs of their corresponding communities.” With greater political representation, it is hoped that anti-discrimination legislation will come soon for Mongolians, representing further growth in the country’s standing as an Asian democracy. Michelle Tolson, MSc, is a journalist who has contributed to The Phnom Penh Post (Cambodia), The UB Post of Mongol News Group (Mongolia), Women’s International Perspective (U.S.), and other U.S. publications.
