Mongolian President Ukhnaa Khurelsukh begins a visit to France Tuesday during which he is expected to discuss uranium mining and sign deals on energy and telecommunications. He will also open a controversial exhibition.
The visit, which lasts until Saturday, follows a trip to Mongolia by French President Emmanuel Macron in May, during which the two countries pledged to expand ties.
They will also hold talks on Mongolia's rich deposits of uranium, which French nuclear firm Orano is seeking to exploit in a deal yet to be approved by Mongolia.
French-Mongolian cooperation on uranium is not new. Areva Mines has been involved in exploring the Dornogovi province since 1997. The World Nuclear Association says that the Zoovch Ovoo deposit has resources of over 54,000 tons of uranium.
In 2015, nuclear cooperation between France and Mongolia took a step forward with the creation of Badrakh Energy, a joint venture that is controlled by Orano's subsidiary Areva Mongol (66 percent) while Erdenes Mongol, through its subsidiary Monatom, holds 34 percent.
🇲🇳🇫🇷 President of Mongolia Heads France for a State Visit https://t.co/FgU2FN9ZFb via @montsame_en
— Ambassade de Mongolie (@DeMongolie) October 10, 2023
Erdenes Mongol, states that total investmentwill be one billion euros over 22 years, with an expected income of €5.5 billion.
A flyer by Orano sclaims that the two-year pilot deal with new mining processes that was launched in 2021 will generate 20 tons of uranium.
Macron now hopes to speed up the paperwork on this so that full production can start in the autumn.
Controversy
According to Mongolia's Montsame News Agency, Khurelsukh will also open the six-month lasting exhibition "Gengis Khan - how Mongols changed the world," .
It focuses on Mongolia's founding father and the expansion of the Mongol empire - the biggest the world ever knew and will be open to the public on 14 October. The exhibition, hosted by the History Museum of Nantes in the Chateau de Ducs de Bretagne was initially planned for 2020.
The original exhibition was named "Son of heaven and steppes - Gengis Khan and the birth of the Mongol Empire" was first postponed due to measures taken as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
After that, and according to a statement by Bertrand Guillet, the director of the museum, dated 30 October 2020.
However, it was again postponed because of a "hardening of the Chinese authorities vis-à-vis the Mongol minority" living in China.
The Chinese were also due to provide artifacts from a museum in Hohhot, capital of the Chinese-ruled "Autonomous Region" of Inner Mongolia.
In exchange, it demanded that the museum change the name of the exhibition and delete the words "Gengis Khan," "empire" and "Mongol" from the title of the exhibition.
Beijing also demanded editorial control over texts accompanying the artefacts, maps and catalogues that would be part of the exhibition.
Guillet then postponed the exhibition "until 2024" on "ethical grounds."
The result is that according to the museum's website, the current exhibition does not contain any artifacts from China, but only objects "from the national collections of Mongolia, including a significant number of national treasures, supplemented by the contribution of objects from major French and European museums."
