Mongolia's communist rulers killed more than 20,000 people in the first 18 months of nearly two decades of Stalinist-style purges that began in 1937, officials said on Wednesday.
"There is no family, no clan, no kin, no part in Mongolia that did not lose someone in the purges," deputy speaker of the Great Hural, or parliament, T. Elbegdorj said in a television address marking the official Day of the Oppressed on Wednesday.The government revealed for the first time that 20,474 people were killed in just the first 18 months of the purges that began on Sept. 10, 1937, he said in a 60th anniversary speech.
But that number only included those who had since been politically rehabilitated, Elbegdorj said.
Historians estimate 35,000 people died in the purges, which reached their peak in 1939 but did not end until 1953.
In the first 18 months, at last 5,106 people were sentenced to 10-year jail terms for political offenses, said Elbegdorj, who leads a commission on rehabilitating purge victims.
"The purges did not stop with those people," he said, adding that the killings affected thousands more relatives and friends. "The consequences are immeasurable."
The first arrests came on Sept. 10, 1937, when 69 people were accused of spying for Japan.
Thousands of people opposed to the then-ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party - intellectuals, nobles, religious leaders and ordinary Mongolians - fell victim along with family, friends and property.
Survivors tell chilling stories of disappearances and mass executions.
"One could see something yellow on the hillside," one old man said in an interview, referring to an execution site near the capital, Ulan Bator. "These were the robes of monks who were stripped naked before they were executed."
Mongolians must take responsibility for the calamity, Elbegdorj said, adding that the bloodshed could not be blamed on "foreign influences" - a reference to the former Soviet Union.
Mongolia was a Soviet satellite state from 1921, when it became the world's second communist country, until a peaceful revolution in 1990 gave birth to multi-party democracy.
"The bitter reality is that it was the Mongolians who sentenced their countrymen, ran the operations and who offered the country into the hands of others," he said of the purges, similar to those of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
The Great Hural is now preparing a draft law on rehabilitating purge victims, Elbegdorj said.
Mongolia last year set Sept. 10 as an official memorial day and is building a monument to the victims next to the Museum of Revolution in the center of Ulan Bator.
The ex-communist Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, ousted in elections in 1996, has never formally apologized for the purges, saying the party needed time to research the responsibility of foreign powers.