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 PART
5
A new learning experience
Part 1: The last frontier: China's far
west
Part 2: The king of the steppes
Part 3: In pursuit of the snow
leopard
Part
4: Touching base
TASH RABAT and NARYN, southern
Kyrgyzstan - It's the ultimate Silk Road location, as
untold millions around the world dream of: a solitary,
fortified caravanserai, 3,500 meters high in the
mountains, dating from the 15th century (and restored in
the early 1980s), in a little valley off the main road
leading to the Torugart pass, the Chinese border 100
kilometers away.
Tash Rabat is arguably the best
preserved historic Silk Road caravanserai all the way
from Xian to Petra. As winter approaches, it is already buried in
more than 50 centimeters of snow. Nasriya, 17, fresh
from finishing high school, is the lone caretaker,
living in a small farmhouse along with her three dogs,
"and my friends" - an itinerant collection of ibex,
Marco Polo sheep, eagles and wolves.
It's easy
at Tash Rabat to time-travel and imagine the golden days
of the Silk Road, the valley dotted with nomadic
yurts (tents) in the summer and camel caravans
transporting silk, porcelain, paper, tea, lacquer ware,
medicinal herbs, perfume, gems, gold, silver, ivory,
jade, wool, Mediterranean colored glass, wine, spices
and much more.
The new Silk Road unravels only
15 kilometers away from Tash Rabat. There is a huge
Chinese market in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. Merchants
travel there via the Torugart pass loaded with dollars,
and come back loaded with avalanches of cheap Chinese
merchandise. Bandits know it very well: last March they
attacked and robbed a bus filled with flush Chinese
traders.
At the end of the 20th century, Kyrgyz
President Askar Akayev was extremely busy selling to
Europe the idea of a new, Great Silk Road - with the
potential to develop Kyrgyzstan as a key transit stop
between China and Russia and Europe. The problem is,
Akayev's drive at the time was on economic cooperation,
while the European Union was more interested in human
rights violations, the power of local mafias, growing
heroin trafficking across Kyrgyzstan, and Islamic
fundamentalism in the Fergana Valley - shared by
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
The
European Union - as well as the United States - is now
totally committed to the fight against drug mafias and
Islamic fundamentalism. Nobody talks about human rights
any more. But the New Silk Road commercial potential for
the moment remains unexploited: it is no more than a
one-way street for China to export to Central Asia its
unbeatably-priced, mind-boggling array of manufactured
goods.
Most of Kyrgyzstan still practices a
kiosk economy. The country needs foreign investment to
profit from its substantial reserves of gold, coal and
uranium. But as an unrivalled "Switzerland of Central
Asia", for the moment the most realistic source of
foreign exchange is via tourism - barring the hazards of
Russian operators fleecing foreign visitors considered
as no more than walking teller machines.
Lake
Issyk-Kul, "warm lake", high in the Alatau mountain
range, which is the northern arm of the Tian Shan, is
indeed warm, by a combination of extreme depth (more
than 800 meters), high thermal activity and mild
salinity: it has been an oasis for centuries. The lake's
northern shore is dotted with sanitariums, including the
delightful Soviet monster the Aurora - named after the
legendary cruiser that started the October Revolution in
St Petersburg in 1917 - where one can go to the beach as
far from the ocean as humanly possible.
Near the
town of Karakol lies the grave and a museum dedicated to
legendary Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky, who from
1870 to 1885 went to the farthest corners of Mongolia,
Tibet, the Tian Shan, the Lop Nor desert and the
Taklamakan desert. The Karkara Valley is the former
summer headquarters of super-conqueror Timur
(Tamerlane). And in summer the most spectacular
helicopter ride on the planet is available over the
central Tian Shan towards the Khan Tengri mountains,
near the Chinese border.
The town of Naryn is a
key New Silk Road crossroads. The local police chief,
over tea and a bowl of laghman - noodles with
meat and vegetables - says that he is not worried about
Islamic fundamentalism, but rather heroin trafficking
coming from Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The
garish-looking local mosque was financed by Saudi
Wahhabis - but there's not a hint of radical Islam in
these parts: just outside of Naryn, the stunning
landscape is pure nomad territory, dotted with the odd
solitary horseman roaming free and tending his flock
against the dramatic backdrop of snow-capped mountains.
Forget about Westerns in Arizona: this landscape would
have driven John Ford wild.
The earliest
residents of Kyrgyzstan were the famous Scythian
warriors - who fiercely resisted Alexander the Great's
march towards Central Asia in the 4th century BC. There
are many Scythian burial mounds around lake Issyk-Kul,
where archeologists have found extraordinary gold and
bronze treasures. The ancestors of the Kyrgyz came from
Siberia to the Tian Shan in the 10th century - with the
migration picking up speed with the expansion of Genghis
Kahn's empire in the 13th century. Kyrgyzstan was part
of the inheritance of Chaghatai, Genghis Khan's second
son.
It's easy to romanticize it, but every-day
life for Kyrgyz nomads has always been extremely harsh.
This is still a country 94 percent composed of mountains
- 41 percent of them higher than 3000 meters. Less than
5 million people are outnumbered five to one by their
flocks of horses, cattle, sheep and goats. As much as
the Kazakhs, the Kyrgyz were progressively pushed by
Russians settlers to the far corners of the mountains.
Most Kyrgyz nomads resisted the Soviets until 1929. They
were forced to settle down in the hardcore
collectivization drive of the 1930s. Joseph Stalin's
pogroms devastated most of the Kyrgyz elite. Very few
nomads joined the Communist Party afterwards.
Even with progressive urbanization, it's
traditional ceremonies that reveal the inimitable
version of Kyrgyz chic: Guests and government
bureaucrats in suits and ak kalpaks - the
traditional Kyrgyz white felt hat - at a moment's notice
climb on a horse and go hunting with a golden eagle or a
white falcon perched on their shoulders.
The
traditional nomadic yurt - bosuy in Kyrgyz
- warm in winter, cool in summer, light and portable,
remains the ultimate feat of nomad engineering.
Urbanized Kazakhs have forgotten about their
yurts, but Kyrgyz, whenever they have the chance,
especially in summer, run to the jiloos (summer
pastures) and set up their yurts.
A
master craftsman in Naryin still takes three months to
make a mini-yurt that is an exact replica of the
real thing. It takes one year for a family of five to
build all the components of a collapsible yurt.
It can be expertly assembled in two hours. A yurt
would look great on the green White House lawn. With the
added benefit that if the going gets tough, its
proprietor can pack up and go at a minute's warning.
While the commercial new Silk Road does not
materialize, the new Silk Road of education is fast
becoming a viable proposition, thanks to the University
of Central Asia (UCA), which bills itself as "the first
private institution of higher education to be
internationally chartered". The idea springs from the
Aga Khan, the top Ismaili authority and his Aga Khan
Development Network, based in Geneva, which promotes
"the social conscience of Islam through institutional
action".
This initiative beats any convoluted
World Bank project. The solid aim of the UCA is
"sustainable development of economies and societies in
mountain regions", working to prevent a catastrophic
scenario that is already happening all over Central
Asia: capital cities exploding with millions of new,
involuntary immigrants, mostly young males, unskilled,
unemployed, impoverished, disoriented and prone to
violence.
UCA directors stress that "the losses
in mountain areas would be equally tragic. Ancient
communities that have maintained worthy traditions
throughout the millennia would die. Rich bodies of
practical and philosophical knowledge would be
destroyed. Mountain regions, which whole countries
depend upon for water and other resources, would lose
their natural and most knowledgeable protectors.
Sensitive environments would be exposed to new rounds of
degradation. Those few who remain in the mountains would
become ready recruits for drug traffickers, religious
extremists, or warlords of the kind who nearly destroyed
both Afghanistan and Tajikistan in recent decades."
The main UCA campus is being set up in Khorog -
high in the Pamir mountains, in Badakhshan, southeastern
Tajikistan. The other two are in Kyrgyzstan's Naryn,
close to the Tian Shan, and Tekeli in Kazakhstan. The
presidents of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akayev; Kazakhstan,
Nursultan Nazarbayev; and Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmonov,
have all signed with the Aga Khan an international
treaty, ratified by their parliaments, establishing the
university. The Aga Kahn has donated US$15 million. But
more investment is sorely needed. The World Bank should
get involved - as well as the Asian Development Bank,
the US Agency for International Development and the
European Union.
The UCA is private, independent,
secular, adhering to international standards, and all
admissions are merit-based. Students will pay the
tuition fees that their families are able to afford.
John Herring, an American, the dean of Tekeli campus,
has enthusiastically signed for three years with the
project. On a visit to Naryn, he says this is either
"the most visionary project in the whole of Asia, or
total lunacy". This is in fact Islam at its best and
most creative, tackling the root of all problems - lack
of education - instead of its inevitable consequences,
drug-trafficking and terrorism.
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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