AP reports:
About 2,000 people staged a peaceful protest Thursday outside Mongolia's parliament, demanding that the government resign and accusing lawmakers of corruption. A leader of the parliament reportedly said lawmakers would consider the demands.
It was the second protest in three weeks by activists who say they were inspired in part by events in Kyrgyzstan, where demonstrators forced the Central Asian republic's president from power.
The makeup of the protest is interesting:
The marchers included teachers, shopkeepers, unemployed workers and homeless people. They accuse parliament speaker Nambariin Enkhbayar, a former prime minister, of embezzlement and say graft is to blame for Mongolia's chronic poverty.
They also want the government to create a mechanism for voters to recall elected officials accused of corruption and to end the ban on protests outside parliament.
Read the whole thing here.
Here as in other former Soviet dependencies we see the lower and middle classes uniting against a corrupt elite that has monopolized political power since the breakup of the Soviet empire. This protest, involving only about 2,000 marchers, is much smaller than the one a few weeks ago and the reform impulse seems to be waning here, but dissatisfaction with the current regime is widespread and long-standing. There have been several protests in the past few years over land reform and political representation and in the past the government has made minor concessions. I doubt that there will be a revolution in Mongolia, but some progress toward truly representative government might result from the current round of protests.
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