Mongolian Association of the Blind

to: Mr. N. Bagabandi, President of Mongolia
Mr. S. Tumur-Ochir, Speaker of the Mongolian Parliament
Mr. Enkhbayar, Prime Minister of Mongolia

Notification

On September 19th, 2003, addressing the heads of Mongolia as above the Mongolian Association of the blind and the Provisional Committee organizing the Struggle for protection of human rights of the Blind adopted the Petition containing 8 issues which needs urgent solution of problems encountered in the life of the blind, requested the Government to take appropriate measures resolving them and declared a hunger strike.

The Government accepted our request, promised to take needed measures and set up a joint working group therefore we postponed our struggle until March 15th, 2004.

Currently the Government has not kept its promises an tried to dissolve some issues and there have been left still issues not resolved or indefinite to be resolved at all. That is why we have decided to recover our struggle from April 12th, 2004 and put on the agenda the issues as follows:

1. to improve the pension for those who were not convered by welfare benefits to the lowest level of living standard,
2. to resolve the issues on housing and providing the blind with apartments,
3. to sperarate the secondary school for visually impaired children (school n. 29) from the school for children with hearing impairment and issue an official decision on establishment of it as an independent school,
4. to grant land close to the city center and in the area with well-developed infrastructure for ownership to those blind who are homeless,
5. to exempt from customs duties, sales taxes and VAT goods destiend for the Training Center for the blind in order to create new work pleaces for the bilnd and introduce new technology,
6. to permit the Mongolian Association of the blind to use wave line for setting up FM radio station in order to provide the blind with needed information, assist them to socialize and change social attitude to them to be positive,
7. to allow them to use local or mobile phone on the basis of discount with no discrimination in order to assist the blind to participate actively in social relations.

In case if all these requests are met with no delay we will end our struggle completely.

We notify that if you do not accept our above-mentioned requests or use them among public as a negative clue against us, we will continue to fight for the interests of the blind transferring to heaviest forms of sturggle.

Head of the Mongolian Association of the Blind - Z. Boldsaikhan

Coordinator, Provisional Committe organizing the sturggle for protection of human rights of the Blind - M. Bayasgalan.