A landlocked republic between Russia and China in eastern Asia, Mongolia was formerly known as Outer Mongolia. Area: 1,566,500 sq km (604,800 sq mi). Pop. (1995 est.): 2,307,000. Cap.: Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator). Monetary unit: tugrik, with (Oct. 6, 1995) a free rate of Tug 449.10 to U.S. $1 (Tug 709.98 = £ 1 sterling). President in 1995, Punsalmaagiyn Ochirbat; prime minister, Puntsagiyn Jasray.
For the first time since the ruling Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) won the 1992 general elections with a massive majority, a real possibility of cooperation between the parliamentary political parties emerged in 1995. Pres. Punsalmaagiyn Ochirbat cobbled together a pact between the MPRP and the opposition National Democrats and Social Democrats under which 24 of the 76 members of the Great Hural (national assembly) would be chosen by proportional representation at the June 1996 general elections; the other 52 would be elected as before, by simple majority vote. If the Great Hural adopted the necessary amendment to the Law on Elections, opposition parties were likely to be more fairly represented.
It was unclear whether the 70 MPRP members who dominated the Great Hural would approve the amendment. The parties differed fundamentally in their attitudes toward the country’s communist past and its democratic revolution of 1990. To distract attention from Mongolia’s 1992 constitution, the MPRP inaugurated a November public holiday to celebrate the anniversary of Mongolia’s 1924 constitution. Ochirbat called the 1924 constitution socially divisive and ruinous to Mongolia’s independence and appealed to all Mongols "to give a correct assessment to history and work harder and with greater unity to build a new democratic society in keeping with the new constitution."
The MPRP raised new doubts about its claim to have given up Marxism by rehabilitating (posthumously) the "Mongolian Brezhnev," former MPRP general secretary Yumjaagiyn Tsedenbal, who was ousted in August 1984. The MPRP combined nostalgia for the communist past with the search for a new national ideology based on state monopoly to satisfy the government model of an "economy with state regulation and a social orientation."
Such a model was already coming into conflict with the bodies that funded Mongolia’s debts. The UN Development Programme noted that many "privatized" enterprises were still partly state-owned, while the government was not promoting new private-sector businesses. The International Monetary Fund was critical of state interference in the allocation of bank credits, which tended to crowd out private-sector activity. Despite these concerns, grants and credits for Mongolia in 1995 amounted to $210 million.
The U.S. Congress issued a statement in May supporting Mongolia, and the president authorized U.S. military assistance.