Nothing attracted tourists like the Gobi. Oyuna envisioned dinosaurs as central to Mongolia’s new age of tourism. Dinosaurs could lead the nation out of a recent tourism slump and its outdated ways. Mongolians loved their festivals—Ice, Camel, Eagle, Snow—but one could never be sure when the events would happen or how long they’d last. A noncommittal attitude toward scheduling made it difficult for tour companies to advertise and for travelers to plan. At a recent Mongolia Economic Forum event, everyone had agreed that dinosaurs held “vast potential,” and Oyuna was already thinking about a dinosaur-centric tourism route capitalizing on President Elbegdorj’s “retrieval operation” of the T. bataar. “Mongolia’s been criticized by world paleontologists and many science lovers that government didn’t do anything when smuggling was going on,” she told Al Jazeera. “But there was no particular case from which government could grab, and start stopping the illegal fossil dealing. So T. bataar was an ideal situation.”
It was Oyuna’s job to decide where to put the dinosaur once the United States repatriated it. The Natural History Museum wasn’t an option because it was in such bad shape. Oyuna decided to develop a new museum, with T. bataar as its centerpiece. When fellow cabinet members teased her about creating a whole museum around a single dinosaur, she told them, “Roy Chapman Andrews’s expedition took fifteen hundred pieces from Mongolia, and after that many other expeditions from many other countries took things. If you bring it all together it’s going to fill ten houses.” The government didn’t have the money for a new building, so Oyuna decided to repurpose an old one.
The Lenin Museum, honoring the founder of Russia’s Communist Party, opened in 1980, a two-story square monolith. Inside loomed a minor mountain of a pedestaled bust of the goateed old Bolshevik with his eyes closed like a death mask magnified. (“If they decided to use it as a permanent [dinosaur] museum, I would think Lenin’s head would need to be removed, because in terms of content it doesn’t really go,” Bolor Minjin told the press.) Other than the giant Lenin head the place was perfect: large, air-conditioned, with decent lighting and an excellent center-city location on Independence Square, where the first stages of the democratic revolution had unfolded barely twenty years earlier. The building had since housed high-rent restaurants, a karaoke bar, a florist, and a billiards hall, with the Mongolian People’s Republic Party as landlords. Previous cultural ministers had tried to claim the property for the state and always lost in court, but Oyuna believed she could win.
She did win. After renovations, the Lenin Museum would become the Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs and, in her vision, nationwide satellite museums would follow. “We have a wonderful dinosaur heritage but people are not aware of it,” she told the media in early 2013. In the meantime, she worked on finding the T. bataar skeleton a temporary home.
On May 6, at eleven a.m. a small crowd—Oyuna, Bolor, Philip Currie, the Painters—gathered in the Manhattan Room of 1 United Nations Plaza in New York. As news cameras rolled, John Morton, then the director of Immigration Customs and Enforcement, took the lectern. Customs had repatriated lots of crazy stuff over the years—an 18-karat-gold bookmark supposedly given to Hitler by Eva Braun; a chrome-plated AK-47 with Saddam Hussein’s image on it—but the dinosaur was something else. “In this business I hesitate to identify any particular return as the most unusual but this is clearly one of the most exceptional, if not the most exceptional, we’ve ever returned,” Morton had told the New York Times. Now, he said, “We simply cannot allow the greed of a few looters and schemers to trump the cultural interests of an entire nation.”
The crates of T. bataar bones were moved out of government storage and into a jetliner belonging to Korean Air, which had offered to fly the dinosaur home for free.
Ulaanbaatar’s main city square has been called Sukhbaatar Square, Central Square, Parliament Square, and, most recently, Chinggis Khaan Square, the latter honoring “every Mongolian’s pride and idol.” The limestone heart of the ancient city used to be all temple and palace. Where distinguished clergy and nobility once gathered to watch dancing and wrestling, children now zip around in electric toy cars. Chanting lamas in robes of red or gold still gather to pray. On auspicious days for weddings, brides and grooms materialize on the picturesque steps of the colonnaded Government House, at the gargantuan bronzed feet of Genghis Khan. The most distinctive, incongruous building on the square is the futuristic Blue Sky Hotel and Tower. Eighteen stories tall, the tower is a monolith of azure glass and steel whose shape has been compared to a shark fin, a sail, and, from the vantage point of Government House, female genitalia. Whereas Genghis once oversaw an empire that came to rule half the known world, he now enjoys an eternal view of the architectural equivalent of blue labia.
At nearly 82,000 square feet, the square is large enough to accommodate military parades (1920s–1950s), a democratic revolution (1990), small-plane landings (a theory; it could happen), or, as transpired in late May of 2013, the frenzied construction of a pop-up dinosaur museum. The dinosaur would go on display for three months, then move temporarily to Darkhan Province, 75 miles south of the Siberian border.
Oyuna’s new cabinet position appeared to bode well for Bolor, who still struggled to find her place within paleontology. “She’s mostly castrated while she’s in Mongolia,” Oyuna later said. “The paleontological community is very envious or negative about her because her primary subject is geology. They’ll say, ‘Okay, we will give her permission to observe the area geologically but not permission to dig.’ When Bolor got credit for T. bataar the paleontologists were envious, saying, ‘Well, she didn’t actually do anything.’ We said, ‘Bolor’s input was crucial.’ They said, ‘No, it was you and Robert Painter.’ They tried to limit Bolor all the time. If you ask Mongolians they will say, ‘Oh, I admire Bolor.’ But if you ask a scientist they’ll say, ‘Bolor did nothing.’ It’s a club that never let Bolor enter.” Even though Bolor lived on Long Island, Oyuna put her in charge of the pop-up museum.
The dinosaur arrived in Ulaanbaatar at midnight on May 17, a year to the day since the publication of “Dinosaur’s Dreams,” Oyuna’s “nice article” that ran in the newspaper President Elbegdorj had founded. In a khaki trench coat and a bright yellow scarf, Oyuna met the plane on the tarmac. As the plastic-wrapped crates of dinosaur bones were rolled out of cargo, TV cameras followed along live, as if the shipment contained the mortal remains of a head of state.
Bolor arrived a few days later, facing the daunting prospect of erecting the pop-up exhibit within her mandate of two weeks. The building went up before the fixed eyes of Genghis: a large, prefabricated rectangle with a high ceiling, a platform, lighted display cabinets, and LED screens. As an exterior touch, Oyuna commissioned her own brother to paint a mural—it showed T. bataar as a grinning cartoon figure making tracks from the Statue of Liberty to the green hills and gers of Mongolia, holding balloons and a Mongolian flag. The museum’s theme was “I am home.”
Oyuna planned an unveiling befitting the prime minister. But the day before the event, he backed out. Mongolia’s death-related sayings involved bones, so to attend the T. bataar ceremony loosely meant that you were “dying on the square.” Oyuna’s critics already called her Bone Oyungerel or the Dinosaur Minister, but she kept explaining, “It’s not bone. It’s just stone.” She told the naysayers, “If you hate bones, all of Sukhbaatar Square should be peeled off, because it’s also bones—limestone.” Turning to the leaders of the largest lamaseries she said, “Please come and contribute to science by your appearance and admiration. People have very wrong understanding about bones. Please come and say that you admire this paleontological finding.”
On the morning of June 8, hundreds of spectators queued in Sukhbaatar Square, including the lamas. White-gloved dignitaries cut a green ribbon. Oyuna made opening remarks, but instead of giving a bureautic speech, she told a fairy tale, made up on the spot, about T. bataar reuniting with his mother.
Inside the pop-up museum, visi
tors found an exhibit more efficient and informative than in any museum in Mongolia’s history. The T. bataar stood on a bed of Gobi sand. Spectators circled the skeleton, their cameras and phones held aloft. Onto one wall, a video loop projected the U.S. government’s repatriation ceremony and the dinosaur’s arrival by plane. Displays held photos of the New York City auction, including Robert Painter with his BlackBerry, squaring off with Heritage’s Greg Rohan. When Painter arrived from Texas and donated the phone to the exhibit, a news station interviewed him live on national TV for eighteen uninterrupted minutes. Persistent rumors about vote-rigging and public corruption had followed Mongolian officials all the way to the dinosaur exhibit—in one version, the American government, backing Elbegdorj for reelection, had engineered the entire T. bataar matter, with Robert Painter working as a CIA asset. Until officials saw the dinosaur in person, some assumed it had been “made up.”
For the first four weeks, admission to the pop-up exhibit was free. An estimated 267,000 people visited. Oyuna had made the mistake of hiring only two guides, but when she saw the size of the crowd, she told the entire staff, “Okay, you guys, this is a new-era museum, a new kind of exhibit, a new kind of interest. You have to change your management. Everybody has to be guide, everybody has to be curator.” She asked a guard, “Have you heard about Protoceratops?”
“I can’t even say Protoceratops,” he said.
“Pro-toe-SERRA-tops,” Oyuna said. She turned to a janitor: “Okay, you, Cleaner. Say ‘Tarbosaurus bataar.’”
“Tarbosaurus bataar.”
“You. Say ‘Oviraptor.’”
“Oviraptor.”
“Learn to explain things in simple words,” Oyuna told them. “Learn this word and this word and this word, because starting tomorrow, everybody is an educator.”
When Oyuna returned to the pop-up, she barely recognized the employees. The staff was busy explaining what is T. bataar, what is dinosaur, what is paleontology. A tent bazaar had sprung up in the square, where vendors sold T. bataar trinkets, teacups, and pillows. People were wearing T. bataar T-shirts and baseball caps. Thirty mothers were raising money for their physically disabled children by selling handmade T. bataar toys. Drafting on the pop-up’s popularity, the city museum of Ulaanbaatar created an exhibit called “Indiana Jones: Roy Chapman Andrews in Mongolia,” showcasing photos from the American Museum of Natural History’s Central Asiatic Expeditions of the 1920s. In an accompanying photo book, the curator, B. Tungalag, wrote, “Those expeditions proved that Mongolia was a scientifically unique and important region with large amounts of ornithology, geology, paleontology, paleobotany, and archeological resources.”
By September, the pop-up dinosaur exhibit had taken in 200 million tugrik (about $80,000). By the end of 2013, the government claimed some 750,000 people had seen the T. bataar. Watching videos of the event in Canada, Philip Currie said, “This is the first time, really, that Mongolians have even been aware of their own [paleontological] heritage.” When the paleontologist Rinchen Barsbold saw the throngs of people lined up to see the dinosaur skeleton, witnesses remembered him tearing up.
There was still no national Paleontology Day, but there was a national T. bataar Day. It fell on October 17, the anniversary of Eric Prokopi’s arrest.
The day after the United States repatriated the T. bataar, the Democratic Party of Mongolia unanimously nominated Elbegdorj as their candidate in the 2013 presidential election. Ten days after the dinosaur went on display at Sukhbaatar Square, where the exhibit featured documents prominently showing Elbegdorj’s name, the president’s chief of staff said the return of T. bataar “enriched the true nature and spirit of the cooperation between the Mongolian and American peoples....America has once again shown to the world that it is a beacon of justice.” Thirty-nine days after that, Elbegdorj was reelected president.
Over four hundred outside election observers, most on behalf of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), had fanned out across Mongolia to monitor the election. While the election overall was deemed open and fair, the OSCE reported concerns. The General Election Commission had displayed an “overall lack of transparency in its decision-making,” structure, and procedure; and during a pre-election systems check of the new voting machines, testers had found a “programming error” that prevented the machines from “correctly calculating the number of invalid ballots.” Dominion Voting Systems confirmed the error but failed to provide the source code that would have allowed a fix: the company said the error had been discovered too late to reprogram the machines. Dominion issued assurances that the errors “would not affect the results,” but the OSCE reported that since Mongolian law required a winning candidate to receive the majority of all votes cast, it was “essential for the [vote-counting equipment] to accurately establish and report the number of invalid ballots cast.” The OSCE also had a problem with the media environment: the overwhelming majority of news outlets were reportedly “directly or indirectly owned by political actors.” Mongolian journalists told the OSCE that two big ethical no-no’s were common: people paid for news coverage and media owners interfered with editorial autonomy and attempted to discredit opponents with “black PR.” The OSCE reported, “A lack of transparency in media ownership leaves the public unable to fully evaluate the information disseminated by the media.”
Elbegdorj had been re-elected by only about twenty thousand votes. Yet there were no public protests. The peace held. On July 10, he was sworn in for his second and final term. Wearing full traditional regalia at Sukhbaatar Square, he bowed to the statue of Genghis Khan.
Recently, Hillary Clinton then secretary of state, had visited Mongolia for the first time in some twenty years. She had last traveled there as First Lady. The place was different now that a surging Chinese economy increasingly put its northern neighbor’s natural resources in demand. The fitful Mongolian economy had grown a staggering 17 percent in 2011, and an influx of foreign mining investments had given Ulaanbaatar a boomtown vibe. The potential windfall threatened to either bring Mongolia great riches or worsen corruption and the wealth gap, putting Mongolia at what Clinton saw as a “crossroads.” She later wrote that Mongolia would either “continue down the democratic path and use its new riches to raise the standard of living of all its people, or it was going to be pulled into Beijing’s orbit and experience the worst excesses of the ‘resource curse.’”
Some thought democracy wasn’t “perfectly at home in Asia,” but Clinton said Mongolia proved otherwise. She praised the fact that nine women had recently been elected to parliament, and in a public speech she obliquely criticized China for its human rights violations. Her support of Mongolia’s democratic struggles offered “hope that the U.S. pivot to Asia will go beyond simple muscle-flexing and become a multilayered approach to match the complexity of China’s rise as a modern superpower,” the Washington Post editorialized.
While in Ulaanbaatar, Clinton had met with Peabody Energy executives and Mongolian leaders to speak privately about Tavan Tolgoi, the Gobi Desert coal deposit, whose development contract Peabody ultimately did not win. She and Elbegdorj spent some time talking in the ceremonial ger inside Government House—“our Oval Office,” as the president put it. Later, Eric wondered if they talked about the dinosaur. In the one and only statement he released to the public, he had complained that federal authorities had had “political” reasons for bringing actions against him.
The idea seemed farfetched. Why would any U.S. government entity beyond law enforcement care about a dinosaur case? There was no evidence that anyone other than Homeland Security and the Department of Justice had taken an interest in the Mongolian matter. Yet less than twenty-four hours before the Heritage auction, Homeland Security Investigations had received “information” that “the auction of a Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton from Mongolia” was to take place the following day. The tip, noted in case officers’ internal files, came from the State Department.
The State Departm
ent’s mission is diplomacy, a crucial adjunct to military strategy, peacekeeping, and intelligence. The agency exists to “shape and sustain a peaceful, prosperous, just, and democratic world and foster conditions for stability and progress.” If Mongolia was to withstand pressure at the borders, and if the United States wanted a continued presence in a difficult region, the two countries needed to maintain their “friendly relations.” After all, it wasn’t easy pushing toward direct democracy when your neighbors were Russia and China, Elbegdorj explained weeks later during a public appearance at Harvard.
Standing before a small audience at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, he recalled telling Clinton a story during her visit to Ulaanbaatar. The story involved “dinosaur bataar,” which had “slipped away from Mongolia” and ended up in the United States. “That dinosaur actually lived seventy million years ago,” Elbegdorj said he told Clinton. “Now, in these days, in these years, we got one dinosaur, called corruption.”
That year, a study commissioned by USAID and the Asia Foundation found that corruption in Mongolia had worsened since 2005, not improved. “Opportunities for corruption have increased at both the ‘petty’ or administrative and ‘grand’ or elite levels,” the report noted. “Both types of corruption should concern Mongolians and investors, but grand corruption should be considered a more serious threat because it solidifies linkages between economic and political power that could negatively affect or ultimately derail or delay democracy and development.”
The Dinosaur Artist Page 29