Democrary and Dictatorship

"UB Post"

August 20,2010

Prisoners of Granit village jail, near Kazakhstan capital city Astana went on mutiny last week. Prisoners demanded to improve prison condition, stop beating and torture them, and to let them meet the representative of human rights international organization and some of them have injured themselves. Three day mutiny has been suppressed by 300 soldiers of special force and 2 prisoners were dead and over 80 injured, according to BBC news.

1200 prisoners were kept in a jail with capacity of 800 prisoners and they have to sleep in turn in bed, according to the news. According to Manfred Novak, officer of UN special agency against interrogation under torture, there are 65 thousand prisoners in Kazakhstan, which is three times higher than in European average and much higher than in the former SU states.

Situation outside the prison is completely different. Kazakhstan’s indicator for economic growth and living standard of the population is clearly higher compared to other post-Soviet republics. There are many countries, which have high indicator for both the number of prisoners and economic growth. Major source of economic development of these countries is usually natural wealth.

Political power and natural wealth is concentrated in the hand of a single person and his family and accordingly individual rights and freedom is restricted. Chile of A. Pinochet time, Persian Gulf countries, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan are among those countries. On the other hand, there are countries where state power is concentrated in a single person, yet no positive results in economy and continued fights among the population on the ground of territory and religion and becoming target of civil war, which are handled only through consistent military regime.

To name just some of them: Kirgizstan, Zimbabwe, Sudan and etc. According to the latest edition of “Foreign Policy”, in general there are 40 dictators globally and of which 23 are keeping almost two billion people under their iron hand.

But, there are also numbers of countries, like Mongolia where the natural wealth is not in the hands of a single person and the population has experienced the advantage of democracy in their lives yet every one could not be the beneficiary of the economic growth, and could not invest substantially in infrastructure, yet the state and government leaders profiting through conspiracy under the name of infrastructure investment. As for our country, in the capital city, where more than a half of the entire population resides, the authority is making profit from almost all land and community purpose assets.

Mayor of the city is appointed by political party and therefore no system of reporting to the residents. Main “responsibility” of them for many years has been speculating in selling land of UB city parks, and coastal areas of only river through issuing permissions for construction. Permissions for construction of houses were issued to the accomplices of the city authority in almost all valleys of the so called protected area by getting bribery. Houses have been built and people moved in, yet these people cannot get certificate of their property and creating thousands of illegal occupants.

Now they have to accept that they were lying about the protected area and what is left for them to do is to annul the law. This is just one example of how those who comes to power by turn is making our democracy valueless and turning Mongolian laws into nothing.

Democracy should not be blamed for the concentration of state power and management of natural wealth in the hands of few groups and their sponsoring companies. Institutions, so called political parties have to be blamed for that. The reason is that in a democratic country, only election winning political party takes the political power.

But the political parties instead of taking measures against their swindler members have turned their parties as nest of conspiracy and means of getting rich and further harming the society seriously. Gist of everything is that political parties cannot lead the country and ensuring economic growth, like those countries of a single dictator.

People of Mongolia are agitated because we are losing too much time waiting any outcome from election to next election and when election comes then the political parties buy the votes of their poor citizens by money and empty promises and the worsening of people’s lives by every passing day and people have now no confidence in their future.

Therefore, there is a ongoing talks among the people who are in the depths of despair that instead of too many dictators” it might be better to have just one dictator, which might be cheaper. Development of political parties, actually could be only answer against the establishment of one man dictatorship.

There is an urgent historical need for Mongolia to guarantee its democratic accomplishments by economic development.

We want to live in democratic and developed country. This could be achieved only by ourselves and we wish if the political parties could not help then please do not make matters worse.