Korea, US and Strategic Relations: Mongolia
October 6, 2011
Speakers:
Dr. Christopher Atwood
Associate Professor
Central Eurasian Studies Department, Indiana University
Ambassador Mark Minton
Former U.S. Ambassador to Mongolia (2006-2009)
President of The Korea Society
Moderated by
Dr. Stephen Noerper
Visiting Professor
National University of Mongolia and The Asia Foundation Resident Representative (2000-2003)
Senior Vice President, The Korea Society
STEPHEN NOERPER:
Good evening. We're delighted to have you join us. It's a special evening as we kick off the first part of what we call our MIR series (Mongolia, India and Russia). Mir is also the Russian word for peace. Over the course of this series, we'll be looking at the United States and Korea's mutual and perhaps respective interests and relations with three key, strategic partners: Mongolia, Russia (in two weeks' time) and then India two weeks after that.
This evening we have the preeminent academic and diplomatic United States voices in Christopher Atwood and Mark Minton to discuss the relationship between Mongolia, Korea and the United States. We will be focusing on issues of policy, business, investment, and research opportunities. We'll be talking about people-to-people connections and soft power projection.
We'll return in two weeks' time to sit down with Alexander Mansourov from Washington, D.C. and be welcoming Dr. Vorontsov from the Russian Academy of Sciences to discuss Russia's relations with both the Korean Peninsula and the United States. Finally, we'll move to Dr. Satu Limaye from the East-West Center, who will discuss relations between India and the United States and Korea.
It's wonderful to welcome Christopher Atwood here. He's an Associate Professor of Central Eurasian Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of Indiana. You can see from his brief biographical description a listing of a number of his very remarkable works, and he will be offering us a modern historical perspective of the relationship between Korea and Mongolia.
Then we will turn to Ambassador Mark Minton, who served as the United States Ambassador to Mongolia from 2006 to 2009. Ambassador Minton, as you all know, is the President of The Korea Society. We'll first turn to Professor Atwood and then to Ambassador Minton. Afterwards, I will throw out a few points for discussion and questions, and we'll get feedback from both of our eminent observers. We'll then turn to you. We very much want this to be a foreign policy dialogue and would love to hear your observations and thoughts.
We'd also like to give a nod to Renova USA, who is the corporate sponsor of this series. They are very keen on this subject given their investment activity and in terms of Russia's projection abroad, and also what we here, at The Korea Society, are doing through this series. So, thank you to them. Thank you, as well, to Niki Desai, who many of you met on the way in. She has spent a great deal of time organizing this series.
Without further adieu, we now turn to Professor Christopher Atwood from Indiana University. Thank you. [Applause]
CHRISTOPHER ATWOOD:
Thank you very much for that kind introduction, Steve. Thank you, Nikki and Mark. I'm very honored you invited me here to speak to The Korea Society. It's a wonderful opportunity to talk about the relationship between Mongolia and Korea. I was told to focus on the modern. Being a historian, however, it is of course my belief that the modern has resonance with the ancient and the ancient has resonance with the modern. So, let's go back to Chingiss Khan or Genghis Khan.
Why not earlier?
Well, because Chingiss Khan is the most important. He was the center of it all. Chingiss Khan had a wife, Khulan. Some Mongolian chronicles from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe Khulan as Chingiss Khan’s Korean wife. The story talks about Chingiss Khan going to conquer Korea and ending up staying there with his Korean wife Khulan. He spends three years there while forgetting about his homeland. He has to be brought back by Arghasun Qorč.
This is an interesting legend, and it's an important legend that many Mongolians mention when they're asked why Korea is important to Mongolia. However, it is just that; a legend. In reality, Khulan was not a Korean princess nor a Korean wife. She was actually from a group within Mongolia; but it does bring up part of the historical background of the Mongol-Korean connection.
This historical background begins with the Mongol conquest of Korea, but we can take that back even further. When Koreans look at Mongolia, the common aspect of linkage is the idea that Korean language is linked to Mongolian language. Now those of you who have studied Korean and Mongolian together know that the grammar is strikingly similar, as well as a number of patterns. Koreans who learn Mongolian (like Japanese who learn Mongolian) generally tend to learn the language very rapidly, even though the phonology is very different. The Korean accent, however, is frequently less perfect than the grammar.
I will move into the twentieth century very shortly. I am going to leave most of the diplomatic aspects (and things like where high security clearances are needed) to Ambassador Minton, but I would like to just bring in some historical and human context.
This legend about Chingiss Khan having a Korean wife appeared after the Mongol empire was formed and they had conquered the Yuan dynasty of China in the mid to late 1300s. The empress of the last emperor (Toghan Temur) of the Mongol dynasty in China was a Korean. Her name was Madam Ke. And for reasons that are not fully understood, this appears to have become an extremely important aspect of the Mongol-Korean relationship.
From around the middle to the second half of the 1300s (from around 1340 to about 1400), Korea and Mongolia had a very interesting, almost triangular relationship with China. As you may know, during that period the Mongol empire was being overthrown by the new Chinese Ming dynasty, and the Ming dynasty was kicking out the Mongols. Korea and Mongolia had retained a kind of alliance against the Ming dynasty for a while, and that alliance became the setting for the peculiar Korean-Mongolian relationship.
That relationship eventually lapsed. There were some relations between Korean and Mongolian rulers in the 1400s and 1500s. We can now fast-forward up to the twentieth century, as there was relatively little going on between Korea and Mongolia. Korea did maintain its space in the Mongol imagination, much more so than the Middle East (and in particular Iran). The word Iran doesn't appear in Mongolian empire legendary histories, even though the Mongols conquered and ruled Iran.
The Mongolian empire's traditional historiography and geography includes Mongolia at the center, China, Korea to the east, Tibet to the west (it's a little bit skewed from the southwest to west). There is also the group called the Sartaγul, which were Central Asians to the north. The Russians, Europeans and Middle East are missing, but Korea is present.
This presence of Korea in the Mongol imagination led many Mongols in the twentieth century questioning where to find a patron. Given that at this time Mongolia was subject to China and the Chin dynasty (and from the late nineteenth century on was increasingly unhappy with that connection) what started off as an alliance with the Manchus turned into subjugation by the Chinese. The Mongols were looking for somebody else, and many looking towards Russia and Japan.
An interesting aspect of Korea's place in the Mongol imagination is that many pro-Russian Mongol nationalists (those who had formed the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party) pointed to Korea as an example of why Japan could not be trusted. Korea had been colonized by the Japanese. This, therefore, was an illustration of the fundamentally colonial nature of Japan. In that sense, Korea played a fairly important role in the anti-Japanese propaganda and anti-Japanese viewpoint among many Mongolian nationalists.
Let's fast-forward again to 1948, the year Korea and Mongolia established diplomatic relations. As you have probably guessed, these relations were with North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and this is a very interesting story which I don't think has fully been told. From a historical point of view it's very curious, because all other Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe waited until the People's Republic of China officially recognized Mongolia in 1949 before officially recognizing Mongolia themselves.
The two countries that jumped the gun, so to speak were Albania and North Korea. Exactly how that happened hasn't been investigated to this day, but that relationship did exist. However, Korea and Mongolia at that time were very distant economically and had very little complementarity. To a certain extent, I think that is still true today with North Korea. As part of their Socialist alliance, Mongolia delivered about 200,000 head of livestock to North Korea during the course of the Korean War as assistance to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Needless to say, at this time Mongolia was a Soviet satellite. Its foreign policies were shaped by the ideology of belonging very closely to one bloc or group. Fast-forward to 1956. Kim Il-sŏng visited Mongolia and did so again in 1986. Those are some of the highlights of the relationship between Mongolia and North Korea.
In reality, both economically and in terms of people-to-people ties, there was very little substance to this relationship. They happened to be allies—not exactly within a bloc, because as you know North Korea's policy was never to simply follow China or Russia—but Mongolia saw North Korea as a sort of fraternal country. Of course, the relationship was generated more by both political and ideological needs than person-to-person or economic interrelations.
Fast-forward again. One of the striking things about Mongolian history is that it seems to almost proceed by phases that never seem to be congruent from one period to the next. It's now 1990, and Mongolia has peacefully transitioned from a one-party Soviet-style Communist state to a multi-party democracy which is aiming towards establishing a prosperous market economy.
And again, Korea occupies a very prominent place in the imagination of Mongols, but this time it's a different Korea. It's South Korea, the Republic of Korea, that occupies this place as one of the "Asian tigers." I'd like to remind you of the way people viewed the world in the 1980s. This was the 1980s when people were writing books about Japan becoming the most prosperous country, and they were also talking about the Asian tigers. Nobody was talking about China just then. The world view was different than it is today.
Many Mongolian leaders, economists and political scientists were desperately trying to find the key to Asian "tigerdom," to become Asian tigers. Again, one of the roles of a historian is to remind you of the way people used to think before the present scheme of things. Mongolians were very optimistic about their ability to, within a relatively short five or ten years, achieve "tiger" status. They had many objective things going for them, such as higher education; but, as we all know, it proved to be much more complex than that.
By the early 1990s, Mongolia was in a desperate situation with the sudden removal of all Soviet investment and aid. They suffered from economic dislocation, inflation and all sorts of other things. Mongolia was desperate for assistance. At the same time, South Korea had just begun relations with China, and there was mutual cross-recognition between the countries. South Korea was also looking for a role in what seemed to be a very rapidly evolving and liberalizing Communist world. And so, South Korea and Mongolia established a very strong relationship in the early 1990s. South Korea became a major donor of aid to Mongolia, and that relationship continues. Today, South Korea is the third largest aid donor to Mongolia.
The relationship continued to develop. By 1996, the North Koreans had actually closed down their embassy in Mongolia. There's differing stories (as there often are in diplomacy) as to whether this was because the Mongolians were openly in favor of South Korea or whether the North Koreans simply didn't have the money to keep up the embassy. It's is very curious that it was in 1999 that the New Democratic Party came into power in Mongolia. They were the ones who actually went out and reestablished relations with North Korea.
Since then I would attempt to say that the Mongolian government (and Mark will talk more about some of these aspects) has been fairly consistent. Informally their relations with South Korea have infinitely more substance in terms of people-to-people relations and economics than they do with North Korea. And, of course, to a large degree the Mongolian government has been very interested in closer security and political relations with the United States. In fact, my impression is that Mongolia has been more interested in the United States than the United States has been with Mongolia, at least until recent years.
The striking thing is that the Mongolian government has generally tried to maintain (at least in terms of its public statements) a relatively evenhanded position between the two parties. For example, they refused to explicitly condemn nuclear types of activities in North Korea. Perhaps Mark will want to talk about that.
I'd like to also talk about the importance of the turn toward Mongolia of South Korea. I'm not a Koreanist (and I may have a slightly distorted perspective because the Koreans I know are mostly Koreans interested in Mongolia) but I believe Korea and Mongolia have a relationship that, on the people-to-people level, is different from any of their relations with other countries.
One of the largest labor migrations from Mongolia is that of Mongolians to South Korea (there are approximately 32,000 Mongolians currently working there). The South Korean labor shortage has resulted in a number of groups from Asia migrating to Korea; in particular, the Koreans of China along with the Mongolians. It's interesting that, that relationship has developed. And like Japan, the South Korean labor policy has generally focused on bringing in people that, to some extent, they feel akin to. The Koreans of China would be a classic example of that.
The scale of the Mongolian migration has something to do with the general Korean feeling that the Mongols are in some sense a little less foreign than the laborers from Southeast Asia. It also, of course, reflects the great desires of Mongolians to be a part of Korean culture. As you all know, Korean soap operas are extremely popular in Mongolia. You can live in a yurt and watch Korean soap operas about the Yi dynasty. It's a very interesting kind of experience.
From the point of view of Korea, Mongolia has a large Korean expat community there. I've seen estimates of approximately 3,000.That sounds small, but in Mongolia, everything that looks small is really big. Remember, there's now somewhat less than 3 million Mongolians in Mongolia as a whole.
The Korean expat community in Mongolia is different from every other expat community (like the Westerners or Japanese) in that it is largely petty bourgeois. There are, of course, diplomats and aide figures from large companies; but there's also hairdressers and restaurateurs. As you walk down the streets of Ulaanbaatar, you'll see a lot of Korean signs. You also see a lot in English, but most of the English is from stores run by Mongolians, not Americans or the British.
You see relatively little Chinese. In Ulaanbaatar, Chinese signs are considered illegal and will probably have stones thrown at them. It's actually illegal to have stores with non-Mongolian signage, but Korean and English is tolerated where Chinese is not.
One big aspect of the large Korean presence is due to missionary activity. Korean Christian missionary activity is very extensive in Mongolia. Again, the fact that Koreans learn Mongolian much better than English speakers is a big part of that. There's also Korean archaeologists and academics. Those are the kind of people I meet who also participate in person-to-person human contact.
There's also an amazing explosion of Mongolian studies in Korea. Dongguk University has very impressive Mongolian studies programs that have been created within a decade or two. In terms of turning out people who speak Mongolian, they are much more impressive than results achieved in the United States. The turning out of peer-reviewed academic research is still in its infancy; yet there is this very strong connection.
I speculate that to a certain extent Koreans in Mongolia feel similar to the Yŏnbyŏn Koreans, the Koreans of China. Although it's not exactly the same thing (they're not actually ethnic Koreans) there's a sense I get from Koreans that Mongolia gives one the same kind of colonial adventure feeling that the Japanese and Westerners felt in Latin America. You can go to Mongolia as a Korean and in a sense, it's not entirely foreign. There's certain interesting parallels. (I certainly hope this is not taken in the wrong way.)
On the other hand, you play a role of one giving instruction, aid and assistance. I don't think there are that many other countries where South Koreans can find that interesting combination of both giving instruction to people seen as somewhat akin; yet who are clearly very much in need of South Korean assistance, whether that be economic or intellectual assistance, programs from model villages, spiritual assistance for becoming Christian, building of churches and the like.
I'd like to conclude by saying that Mongols are also very nationalistic, and there is always this sense that Mongolia is being exploited by foreigners; even foreigners who are seen as relatively less threatening and dangerous. The Chinese are frequently seen as being the most threatening and dangerous. Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and Koreans are generally seen as less threatening.
Even so, there is a very common trope of antiforeign discourse in Mongolia. An example would be going to a restaurant (usually a Chinese restaurant) with the fear of being poisoned. You'll also see stories about being poisoned in Korean restaurants. However, this is oftentimes a deliberate refusal to distinguish between being poisoned and simply eating at a restaurant that has low standards, which could happen at any restaurant.
Another aspect of anti-foreign feelings is related to land ownership or land investment, with the sense that this type of investment is taking over Mongolia. There is an interesting case of Korean entrepreneurs renting (at least it's not illegal according to the Mongolian constitution) so that foreigners can actually buy land in the Halhgol area. This was a site of a major battle between Soviet and Japanese forces with the Mongolians on both sides. Koreans are probably purchasing or renting this land in order to create grain that might then be exported to North Korea, and this is raising a lot of nationalist hackles among Mongolians.
To conclude, the relationship, overall, is an important one emotionally for both sides, and far more important than you would expect from the relative size. Economically there are trade ties. South Korea is the fourth largest trade partner for Mongolia, but this is a very distant fourth after the much larger and more important trade entities such as China, which is receiving the vast majority (probably two-thirds) of Mongolia's exports.
Strangely enough, although they're very distant, their people-to-people ties seem remarkably strong and vigorous; and in a sense, South Korea and Mongolia seem to fill needs within each others' world views, geographical concepts and economic needs that no other countries do. And with that, I will turn it over to Mark. [Applause]
MARK MINTON: Thank you, Christopher, for sharing your vast learning and insights with us. I learned much from listening to your talk today and gained many insights. I now understand why there are no McDonald's restaurants in Mongolia. The Mongolians are afraid of the Whopper and what it might do to them, as Americans well might be, too. Please don't quote me on that.
I would like to just serve as a footnote to Christopher's fine and very insightful remarks, drawing upon my comparative advantage which is working inside governments and talking about some of these issues. Some of you may not know that for many years I was a U.S. diplomat (until the end of 2009). I worked both in Mongolia and the Republic of Korea. In fact, I went from being deputy ambassador in Seoul to ambassador in Ulaanbaatar.
Through no particular virtue of my own, I had the opportunity with this range of assignments to talk to fairly high-ranking U.S. officials about both relationships, and to Mongolian leaders about their relationships with both the United States and Korea. I knew a fair number of Korean officials such as the foreign minister of Korea, Yu Myung-hwan, when I was ambassador in Ulaanbaatar. This gave me the opportunity to understand the perceptions that government leaders in all three countries had about these relationships. Perhaps explaining a bit of that would be useful.
These perceptions, by the way, are in almost all cases newly minted. Despite the very long history of contact between Koreans and Mongolians, and the very short history of meaningful contacts between Americans and Mongolians, political leaders and diplomats tend to see relationships in terms of there being an immediate payoff either today or tomorrow, and what the national interest is in any relationship with another country. Perhaps I should start there.
The U.S. perception has always been (and this is shared by both Mongolian and Korean leaders) that there are many common interests among the three countries. The first and most obvious, of course, is that all three are democracies. It's very strange, because the word "democracy" is a very large tent that covers a lot of different experiences.
Of course, the United States has asserted a democracy for over two hundred years. An interesting fact is, though, that the real development of Korean democracy (I'm not saying it didn't have antecedents) almost exactly parallels, in time, the rise of Mongolian democracy; that is, the last twenty years. It was in the early nineties that both countries made a decisive turn toward more open political systems that involved the rule of law, fair elections, and some degree of accountability from leaders elected by the people.
But the experiences, of course, were very different, even though everyone called themselves democracies. Korea is a prime case of a very poor country that was not a democracy; yet in a number of very short decades was able first to rise to developed country status and then to develop very quickly an impressive functioning set of democratic institutions.
Mongolia, on the other hand, started with almost no economic development; no middle class and very few bright economic prospects in the early nineties. However, it immediately decided it was going to be a democracy and made impressive progress despite the fact that it didn't have the economic basis, unlike the Korean example where many people thought Well, to develop real democracy, you need a middle class. The Mongolians have demonstrated that that's very helpful and it's developing in Mongolia, but in essence you can make real progress simply by setting up a democratic arrangement for a change of leaders by election and a court system. You could do all that while still being fairly poor. It's an interesting contrast.
No matter how this has emerged historically, however, all three countries recognize themselves as democracies. That is a common link that has been of immense value to the Mongolians in their relationship with the United States. As Christopher said, the United States has started paying attention to Mongolia in the last two administrations; both the Bush administration and the Obama administration. One of the most fundamental reasons for this was that Mongolia was becoming a credible, functioning democracy. This was appreciated in Korea, as well.
Korea and Mongolia, as well as the United States and Mongolia also have overlapping, compatible economic interests. These economic interests have both diplomatic and political dimensions. Mongolia, we now know, has an enormous amount of minerals and natural resources to sell, and Korea is a county hungry for resources like minerals (with very little in terms of local stocks of minerals) but a very large industrial structure which is the basis of a successful exporting economy.
Korea has to secure in an evermore competitive world all sorts of minerals and natural resources at a reasonable price (including food) which is what Christopher was alluding to earlier. Koreans have been attempting to raise food in other countries to bring back to Korea, because Korea doesn't have much land that can be used for agriculture. There's a certain economic complementarity there.
For Mongolia, Korea serves as an example of how you can succeed at developing an economy along with all sorts of useful and successful world-class business practices. Mongolians hope to sell some of their mineral resources to Korea and they hope, of course, to buy Korean manufactured products. They're very attractive to Koreans, and as Christopher has also said, the cultural products of Korea are especially popular in Mongolia. There's complementarity there.
There's a diplomatic dimension to economic cooperation that also drives the two governments (the Mongolian and Korean governments) to want to promote economic relations. Both of them want to diversify their economic contacts. As I said before, the Koreans want to secure reliable sources of raw minerals and resources for their industrial plants at prices that they can lock in with reasonable contracts. The Mongolians want desperately to develop political and economic ties and receive investment from countries other than the countries on their borders.
If you look at the map, there are only two countries on Mongolia's border: Russia to the north and China to the South, and a lot of Mongolian diplomacy is focused on escaping being trapped with just those two bilateral relationships. Don't misunderstand me. Those relationships are very necessary to Mongolia. They're extremely important to Mongolia's economy and, indeed, to its political stability. Mongolians, however, perceive they need more than that. They really need a set of balanced relationships with a great number of countries, especially neighboring countries in East Asia. In addition, this would include the United States, European countries and countries like Australia.
The Mongolians even have a name for this policy. It's called the "third neighbor" policy and Korea is definitely one of the major countries for the focus of this third neighbor policy. There's both an economic and diplomatic complementarity going on there, as well.
In the larger strategic perspective and related to what I just said (I'll put this as diplomatically as possible) both countries are struggling with finding the right formula for dealing with a rising China. In the case of the Mongolians, their economic development through the exploitation of mineral resources is now taking place. They need investors and they need customers. It would be fairly easy for China to be the only customer. China is more than ready to make all the investment that's necessary in Mongolia, and to buy all the contracts for all the minerals.
The Mongolians, however, want to diversify their relationships for political and economic reasons so that they have some leverage, quite frankly. If they only have one partner and that partner is much more powerful, they have no leverage either politically or economically. The Mongolians have to figure out how to do this without offending China, and indeed by also enjoying the benefits of China's attention and interest so they will become involved in investment and resource development in Mongolia.
The Koreans have economic problems of a similar nature. China has moved to the head of the pack in the last decade. Ten years or so ago, the United States was the largest trading partner of the Republic of Korea. Now the U.S. has dropped to number four behind China, Japan and the European Union community. This is not healthy for the bilateral U.S.-Korean relationship, and both countries are desperate to raise the economic profile of the bilateral relationship.
That's what the Free Trade Agreement, which I believe will be passed in the next month or so, is all about: to see the U.S.-Korean economic relationship take off and move upward again. For the time being (and probably for the future, as well) China has become Korea's major trading partner and business partner.
Korea wants to diversify, as well, and there's also the question of North Korea. Chinese influence has grown in North Korea, and so the Republic of Korea (South Korea) has to use every political and diplomatic lever it can find to maintain influence in North Korea economically, diplomatically and to work with others to promote their own interests in the development of the future of North Korea. In this respect, the Mongolians are extremely useful because the Mongolians, as Christopher has explained, have proper and even warm diplomatic relations with the DPRK, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
There is quite a lot of information, advice and experience that is passed back and forth between the government in Seoul and the government in Ulaanbaatar about what's going on with North Korea and how best to handle it. That's very useful to Korea; and Mongolia is very interested in doing that because Mongolia wants to raise its diplomatic profile. The more it can be involved in the general diplomacy of Northeast Asia, the more the Mongolians feel they have anchored the larger regional and world role that they seek as a way of underpinning their own national independence. Those are some general themes.
To show you the importance of this just in terms of simple, diplomatic contact, the amount of high-level contact that has gone on between Mongolia and Korea, and Mongolia and the United States is quite extraordinary. President Bush had three summit meetings with the Mongolian president.
He was the first American president to visit Mongolia. He entertained the Mongolian president at the White House in a return summit, and spent half a day with him, starting with an Oval Office meeting, going to an aid-signing ceremony and then lunch in the family quarters of the White House. It was a full four hours. That was half a workday in the Bush White House. That was an extraordinary amount of time to spend on the relationship with Mongolia.
The Koreans also are almost constant in sending high-ranking officials to consult in Ulaanbaatar. The Korean foreign minister has been there a couple of times. President Yu Myŏnghwan visited Ulaanbaatar and some of you may know that President Yi Myŏngbak visited Ulaanbaatar on a visit lasting several days in August. A communiqué was issued (I won't bore you by reading a whole diplomatic communiqué) but it gives you a sense of the scope and ambition that the two governments have for the relationship.
The resources ministers of South Korea and Mongolia signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) calling for greater cooperation in natural resource development, electricity, renewable energy [and also] to jointly explore and develop uranium ore and earth materials.
Mongolia has very significant deposits of both of these.
They also agreed to set up a joint commission to discuss resources and energy cooperation, and the health ministers also signed an MOU on cooperation in the medical sector. [Korea agreed to investing in] Mongolia's infrastructure and construction sectors, including a project to build 100,000 apartment units in Mongolia, and expanding air routes and simplifying the visa process between the two countries.
As Christopher said, South Korea is Mongolia's fourth largest trading partner, and bilateral trade now amounts to about $250 million a year. That's an eighty-five fold increase over twenty years ago. They also said all the right things to show that their position is compatible on negotiations with North Korea. They also agreed to expand defense cooperation.
The Koreans used to be a little reluctant to get too involved in defense cooperation with Mongolia under President No Mu Hyun. I personally know that a possibility of having joint exercises was turned down a couple of times. But in 2009 for the first time, Koreans decided to send Korean troops to Mongolia for joint military exercises, which is quite a small but significant symbolic breakthrough.
It was certainly noted by the Chinese and the Russians unfavorably, I might add. This joint training is being done under the rubric of training for UN peacekeeping missions, and some of you may know that Korea and Mongolia are both extremely active in providing troops all around the world for UN peacekeeping missions.
Korea has taken on a very large role in this respect, and the Mongolians, in the last several years, have sent peacekeeping troops to Afghanistan, Iraq, to several places in Africa, and to the Balkans. Mongolian peacekeepers have died in action in UN peacekeeping missions, so significant is Mongolia's growing role in training peacekeepers in Mongolian joint exercises.
In 2009, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Korean Secretary General of the UN, visited Mongolia and specifically discussed the possibility of even greater Mongolian participation in UN international activities, including military activities, as well. You can see that there's some reason for cooperation also in the security area between the two countries.
Undoubtedly, one of the most fruitful areas, though, for cooperation between the two countries remains in future economic cooperation. The focus, of course, of this cooperation will be Mongolia's natural resources. In particular, there is a very large coking coal mine which may be the largest coal mine in the world when it's developed at a place called Tavan Tolgoi in Southern Mongolia. I won't bore you with the details of how the Mongolians are going about deciding how this coal mine will be developed, but part of the development involves foreign investors.
Now a few months ago, they decided to give these contracts to the American company Peabody, to a Russian-Japanese consortium, and to Shenhua, a Chinese company who got the largest share. This brought an immediate complaint from Seoul on behalf of South Korea and some Japanese companies from Tokyo. The Mongolians are now reconsidering this, and I think when this is retooled, the Koreans will be given part of the share of the development of this huge mine.
It's also true that for the Mongolians, there are very bright prospects, as Christopher also alluded to, for tourism in the future. Mongolian is sort of an exotic destination, which is comfortable for Koreans and close by. It's in anticipation of this growth of tourism in the future that Chairman Cho of Korean Airlines told me he has made an investment in Mongolia. Some of you may know that Korean Airlines flies most days of the week to Ulaanbaatar from Seoul, one of their major international connections.
Korean Airlines has also helped the Mongolians considerably in developing radar and other technology at Ulaanbaatar Airport. Quite frankly, a lot of this is in anticipation of tourism taking off, and indeed, it should take off. Mining is bringing attention, but the improving infrastructure in Mongolia, including hotels and destinations for tourism, is probably going to lead to a very rapid uptick in tourism. I think the Koreans will be in the forefront of people spending vacations in Mongolia.
Finally, I would just say that the United States and Korea both have a very strong interest in having the cooperation of another strong democracy in Asia. This is a democracy, not incidentally, which is rising very quickly economically because of the development of its natural resources, and can be another strong democracy and market economy in Asia that participates in the general diplomacy of the region. And so, both the United States and Korea have been advocates of a growing role for Mongolia in the region.
This has come out in our advocacy of Mongolia's role with the Community of Democracy. We both support Mongolia's becoming a member in the APEC organization, and we both promoted a role for Mongolia in the Six-Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear issue. Now these talks are in abeyance now, and suspension. We might even say that they are completely frozen; but when they were happening, Mongolia made an offer to host some of the meetings of the Six-Party Talks. On at least one occasion, all the parties took the Mongolians up on this, and the Mongolians did host one session related to the Six-Party Talk negotiations. That was something that we were glad to see in terms of finding a venue that North Koreans would visit and actually participate in talks; but it was also of great value in helping to introduce Mongolia to a broader stage of diplomacy in the region.
In summary, I would just say that the diplomatic story of interaction between the three countries and between all the countries involved bilaterally has really been a story, over the last several years, of increasing contact and increasing diplomatic transactions. The prospect is that such diplomatic interaction will increase even more in the future, and that Mongolia will join Korea and the United States in being, in the next twenty years, the foundation for a community of nations in the East Asia and Pacific region that will serve the interests and the values of all three of our countries very well. Thank you. [Applause]
STEPHEN NOERPER:
Thank you. I will be very brief with three observations/questions that Christopher and Mark may want to tackle. Then we would like to turn to you. We ask that you use the center microphone. Nikki will help guide us through the Q&A session.
I would first like to pick up on this very critical point that Mark discussed in terms of democracy and the importance of Mongolia's role. As you look at this map behind you, I think it adds even more emphasis to what the ambassador is saying. Essentially, if you look at any of these countries with the exception of India, you do not have another democracy on that map. You have near failed states. You have an autocratic Central Asia. You have a not so liberal democracy in Russia.
You've probably heard about the new Russian ballot, which is "Do you mind if Vladimir Putin becomes president?" And you have two options. One is, "Yes, I don't mind if Vladimir Putin becomes president." And the second is, "No, I don't mind if Vladimir Putin becomes president." It's actually a Russian joke. I should give them credit.
But it is important. I think that Mark brought up the issue of why there is no middle class, and I would just like to insert a minor footnote. I think that the tutorial effect of both the United States and Korea had impact at a very critical juncture (mainly in the 1990s). The amount of investment that both the United States and Korea put into parliamentary exchange, NGO development, and into women's NGO development was very key, and those connections back and forth between Mongolia and Korea and Mongolia and the United States were really important. Perhaps this is something upon which Professor Atwood can comment; the evolution of democracy or the liberal agenda.
Secondly, you brought up the issue of the nuclear front. I do think we should make quick mention that Mongolia is often mentioned in the context of its nuclear weapons free zone idea. While Mongolia wouldn't be ostensibly developing nuclear weapons, what's important about that initiative is that it would not permit fissile material back and forth between Russia and China, both of which are nuclear powers. Therefore, it's often linked conceptually to the idea of where the Koreans were in 1991 and 1992 with the basic agreement and the denuclearization accord by way of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. There may be a positive reinforcement effect there, if you have any thoughts on that.
Lastly, the idea of immigration and emigration. One of the things that wasn't explicitly mentioned is that South Korea is the number one destination for Mongolian labor, and that is a very complicated issue which has lots of positives on remittances and lots of negatives on realities sometimes of labor conditions.
And secondly, the idea of immigration by way of what was mentioned here in a refugee forum two weeks ago. There's an underground railway which sees refugees flee from North Korea, and the number one destination is Mongolia. Refugees also get to Cambodia and Laos, but Mongolia does receive a large number of refugees, and South Korea is very active in trying to facilitate the transfer of refugees to Seoul. Perhaps either one of you have some thoughts on the refugee issue. Then we'll open it up to all of you and we ask that you just queue up at the mic, as I mentioned.
CHRISTOPHER ATWOOD: Thank you very much. The comments Mark and you made about democracy are very important. During the Arab Spring, Elbegdorj placed in the Washington Post an editorial stressing, again, the universal character of democratic ideals and, to a certain extent, that Mongolia was an Asian country that has fully embraced democracy. You could say it is committed to an international profile of that sort.
At the same time, I think it's very important to understand that Mongolian foreign policy makers are anxious to not repeat the experience of ideologically driven foreign policy. Ideologically driven policy is a bad word in Mongolia, and it brings up very bad memories in which foreign policy was simply doing whatever the Soviet Union said and supporting whoever was Socialist, etc.
Mongolia is a nonaligned nation. As I said, it's a very interesting tightrope they walk, and in some ways remarkably successfully so. In the case of Korea, there is one hand having this very thick people-to-people and government-to-government (at all kinds of levels) relations with South Korea. At the same time, they're maintaining remarkably and fairly friendly (more than just correct) relations with North Korea. I think that there's an interesting kind of tension and interesting aspect there that perhaps you would like to talk more about.
MARK MINTON: No, that's perfectly right. As to the refugee theme, I should have mentioned that it's really a major success story with the help of UNHCR, the U.S. government, and the government of the Republic of Korea. Mongolia has an extremely humane and efficient program for receiving North Korean refugees. I don't know if people understand what happens here.
North Korean refugees get out of North Korea and as you can see, they have quite a lot of China to make it through to get to Mongolia. If they're in China and the Chinese authorities find them, they will return them to North Korea. It's very unfriendly. That gray area there is not great for a North Korean refugee. It's bad news. The authorities are after you.
If they get to the Mongolian border, unfortunately it's the Gobi desert, so you've got to find a Mongolian border patrol. There's hundreds and hundreds of miles of desert there. If you're lucky enough to run into a Mongolian border patrol as you stumble across the Mongolian border, you'll be taken in hand to a place where you can get warm, get fed, get clothed and get resettled as soon as that can be worked out. That has, indeed, become the preferred route (although a dangerous one) and the reception that refugees get in Mongolia is like no other transit country.
If they happen to go out the other major way, which is down here through Southeast Asia into Laos, I think it's diplomatic to say that "indifference" is about the best reaction you get, and it could be worse than that. Exploitation is a huge problem among refugees. Of course, there's sexual exploitation of the women refugees in China and in other places. But all that really doesn't happen in Mongolia. It's a very humane system, and that is another large degree of cooperation between the South Korean government and the Mongolian government for which the South Korean government is very grateful.
[End of session]
This business and foreign policy series explores commercial, political, and strategic relationships of interest to both the United States and Korea, with a focus this fall on “MIR:” Mongolia, India, and Russia. Mongolia enjoys deep ties with the United States, which has provided it with significant development assistance, investment, and political support, as well as Korea, the number one destination for Mongolian labor, a principal investor in Mongolia, and an early model for Mongolian democracy. This session, includes Christopher Atwood, Associate Professor from the Central Eurasian Studies Department of Indiana University, The Korea Society’s Ambassador Mark Minton (U.S. Ambassador to Mongolia, 2006-2009), and Dr. Stephen Noerper (Visiting Professor, National University of Mongolia, The Asia Foundation Resident Representative, 2000-2003), explores opportunities for business and foreign relations among the three players.
