Oyun

The name Oyun is known across Mongolia, greeted with a nod, and it belongs to Sanjaasurengin Oyun, a Cambridge-educated geologist who was working for Rio Tinto in 1998 when her older brother, Zorig, Mongolia’s bright young transport minister who was considered a likely Democratic Prime Minister one day, was stabbed to death in his home in Ulaanbaatar in an unsolved political murder that bothers the country still. “I was thrown more or less into politics,” she said in her office at the end of a long day of debates and votes in the Hural, the national parliament. Did she wish she had stayed out of it? “Everyone has dilemmas about their life all the time,” she replied. Oyun has black hair, touched with grey, that stops above her shoulders. She is 42 and a beautiful woman. But she is tired. On the wall above her desk was the apparently voluntary-obligatory portrait of Chinggis Khan you see in nearly every office in Mongolia and on the conference table was thicket of documents from BHP Billiton, the mining company. Oyun told me about her work as the head of the standing committees on poverty-reduction and anti-corruption. As just one of two MPs in her Citizen’s Will party, Oyun is considered a valuable dealmaker between the Democratic Party, a rowdy, fragile coalition, and the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, the more orderly but still fractious successor to the Communist party. Her integrity makes her influential, but she is an outsider. “We’ve had 17 years of so-called transition that we are struggling to finish,” she said. “For the majority of people life is not much better than it was in Soviet times. People knew that transition would be difficult but it is time to get moving. We need to make some clear and right decisions.”

Oyun seemed impatient for change. She outspokenly supports massive administrative reform in Mongolia: shrinking the number of aimags from 21 to four, combining empty rural soums, condemning towns so small they are not going anywhere. She wants the big mining deals with foreign investors to go through. “It is bad to focus all your interests in mining but this is the only game in town,” she said. “First we should be getting into mining and then diversifying afterwards. You can be clever and theoretical about it but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be brave, instead of just dragging on and dragging on. We need to come up with a solution and get on with it.” Her words conveyed activity but her voice sounded like it made these arguments before and was not sure they were being listened to anymore. It was after seven o’clock by this point. It was her son’s birthday. It had been a long day. I said I couldn’t tell whether I was just tired, or she was just tired, or whether the frustration ran deeper. “We have had a lot of challenges and debates here,” she said. “And most of the decisions we were making were done more or less in the right way: reason prevailed. I thought that until a couple of years ago, that common sense prevailed. But it looks a little different now. Now politicians here have learned you can use power for your vested interests.” She talked about the need for more research facilities, think tanks, more evidence in parliamentary debates. I asked her again whether she was tired of it all. “I’m actually tired,” she said. “After nine years it’s been very interesting, but if I can compare my life as a geologist and my life as a politician I will say this: as a geologist I saw bright colours, but it was on narrow spectrum. Now as a politician I have seen the full spectrum, from the very dark to the very bright. Maybe I am getting tired from the dark.”