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Walking the Afghan Pamirs
Trajectories
Cold streams carry through their slow shaping force. Alluvial drifts and deposits carve morainal ridges, peaks capt snow. In the center, next to the river, a green spot signals a summer camp. To the left, the valley leads to Pakistan, right to lowland Afghanistan, and behind to the Little Pamir, later China and Tajikistan. We move against and along the grain, sensing shifts on the ground, the accidents of the terrain. The ascent is steady. Winds clear the sky, but clouds are never far. The mist blurs our sights in a matter of few hours. Only paths remain then, they indicate a safe way because threaded so many times. They orient a trajectory no map nor words do settle, always in the making. We resemble monads, standing against countless junctions amidst an overbearing landscape.
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Lying at the northwestern end of the Himalaya range, the Pamirs have long been known and exploited for their outstanding pastures, as Marco Polo and other Chinese and European travelers have recounted. In the 1920s, a small group of about 2,000 ethnic Kyrgyz settled there when military forces progressively closed borders drawn from afar. Since then, desires of outmigration and participation in conflicting nation-al and international exchanges has fragmented their supposed ethnic cohesion. At the same time, their aspirations for relative autonomy are constantly thwarted by opposing and abrasive affiliations.
The Afghan Pamirs resemble typical colonial anomalies – they are contemporary leftovers from the original designs of a buffer zone between Tsarist and British empires. Primarily used as summer pastures, the climatic and political pressures that people face there are extreme. Winters are marked with lows easily reaching -40°C and the rugged and mountainous plateau lying above 4,300 meters failed to shield the region from war and the series of conflicts that have now ravaged Afghanistan for more than 40 years.
If Afghans count among the world’s largest refugee population, it is worth noting that no major outmigration has occurred from the Pamirs since its 1978 Soviet occupation. “Prisoners of the Roof of the World”, as a famous documentary title called them, the fate of these Afghans is commonly resumed through an enclosure within national, environmental or socioeconomic boundaries, and explained by the down-playing of greater forces.
Despite the impression of extreme remoteness conveyed by the Afghan Pamirs, the place is not disconnected from global flows. Major IOs and NGOs tie Afghan Kyrgyz livelihoods to global discourses through development, humanitarian and conservation initiatives. Being on many cusps opens opportunities that conventional analysis scales do not grasp. The Afghan Pamirs’ pastures constitute an important ecological niche; each national faction shares a stake in a pastoral economy that opens to China by Pakistani traders/intermediaries. Important marginal gains arise from a proximity with international borders, which are important sites of control and exchange.
Recently, a tiny door opened to Kyrgyzstan through a highly mediated and contested repatriation scheme. Despite expensive administrative hurdles, what new challenges in terms of migration will people face?
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