At the checkout counter of my grocer is an attractive magazine for
New Age shoppers entitled Shambhala Sun. This evocative name refers
to the mythical mountain realm of the Tibetan Buddhists, a hidden
place symbolizing purity, truth and wisdom. It is also what James
Hilton had in mind when he created the land of Shangri-La in his 1933
novel, Lost Horizons. As it happens, just last summer I was camping
on the Kazakstan-Russian border in the shadow of Beluka, a
16,600-foot peak that local people have long associated with
Shambhala. It is indeed an awesome sight, altogether worthy of the
symbolic role assigned to it by Buddhists and assorted mystics such
as Henry Wallace's friend, the Russian visionary painter Nikolai
Roerich. But the deep valleys of the Altai Mountain range that
surround Beluka are more notable for another characteristic: the
peoples who inhabit them are desperately poor and increasingly
frustrated over their circumstances.

For modern urbanites, the world's high mountain zones are symbols of
unspoiled nature and timeless truths that, we often presume, somehow
escape the lowland denizens of the global marketplace. They are
places depicted on gorgeous calendars, locales for "trekking"
(formerly known as hiking) and other forms of eco-tourism. But for
the people who actually live in them they are all too often places of
neglect or persecution, economic and cultural breakdown, and
spiraling violence. Indeed, a disproportionate number of the world's
bloodiest zones of conflict today are in mountain regions.

The majestic Andes highlands of Peru, for example, were for years the
scene of a relentless battle between local campesinos and the
intellectuals who led them, on the one hand, and the Peruvian army
and security forces on the other. The fighting pitted ethnic Indians
against the Spanish culture of Lima, and coca planting against the
economic uncertainties of legal market crops. It turned entire areas
of the Incas' enchanting mountain home into a killing zone. The
Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru are less in evidence today, but few
if any of the problems that gave rise to them have been solved.

A world away, the Caucasus region presents an equally romantic
picture of towering peaks and brooding ruins, a region celebrated by
Russian poets, Lermontov and Pushkin among them, and by the young
novelist Tolstoy. But beginning in 1989, fighting in the small
territory of Karabakh ("The Black Garden") cost thousands of Muslim
Azeris and Christian Armenians their lives and led eventually to a
million displaced Azeris, one of the largest groups of refugees
anywhere in the world today.

Chechnya, one of several Muslim provinces in Russia's North Caucasus
range, presents another struggle in the mountains, but this time
between central and local rule. Several hundred thousand Russian
troops, tribal guerrilla fighters and civilians have perished there
in two vicious phases of warfare, with no end to the fighting in
sight. The Russians' best hope is that the violence can be kept from
spilling over into the neighboring mountains of Dagestan and
Ingushetia. Meanwhile, in the South Caucasus, independent Georgia
faces armed independence movements in Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In Mexico's inaccessible and mountainous Chiapas state yet another
struggle against central rule proceeds. The fact that no religious
differences divide the parties, and that the Indian-Spanish ethnic
split is only partial, may make this conflict less bloody. But it
poses as serious a challenge to Mexico as any that country has seen
in decades. The struggles in Chechnya and Chiapas are in some
respects similar to the generation-long conflict over Turkey's remote
and still undeveloped southeastern provinces, where ethnic Kurds,
peripheral to Turkish culture and political geography, have waged
armed struggle for greater control over their own affairs. Episodic
Kurdish struggles against Iran, Iraq and Syria fit a roughly similar
pattern.

An undeclared civil war in Nepal pits Maoist insurgents against an
ineffective and discredited central authority in half of the
country's 75 districts, with the rebels now in full control of five
districts. Like Afghanistan's Taliban, the rebels forcefully impose a
puritanical order wherever they go, and are often welcomed in
mountain huts for doing so. For the insurgents promise stability and
a government attuned to the needs of impoverished mountain peoples,
rather than to the urban middle class of Kathmandu.

Not all mountain conflicts pit indigenous locals against the armies
of remote central governments. For four years in the early 1990s a
civil war raged across the newly independent Central Asian state of
Tajikistan. Ninety-five percent covered with mountains, Tajikistan
produced a many-sided conflict in which regional interests, rival
Muslim religious factions, clan and ethnic groupings, and a weak
central government all played a part.

Other mountain-based conflicts combine ethnic, religious,
central-local and cultural issues in ways so complex as to make the
factors inextricable from one another. The Balkans (Bosnia, Kosovo
and Macedonia) are prime examples of how such diverse threads can be
woven into a web of strife, and are the more notable because during
the previous two generations the peoples involved had lived together
quite amicably.

No mountain zone has witnessed more bloodshed over the past two
decades than the Hindu Kush, Pamir and Kohi-Baba ranges that make up
Afghanistan. This crisis, like the struggle in Karabakh, began when
one state invaded another, in this case the Soviet Union's 1979
assault on Kabul. As in Communist Yugoslavia and Tajikistan, the old
state collapsed, leaving the field open to a range of local warlords
and their competing foreign supporters.

The one respect in which the struggle in Afghanistan surpasses all
other mountain conflicts is the impact of locally grown drugs on the
country and on its neighbors. Yet even though Afghanistan has been
producing 85 percent of the world's heroin--until this year--the
combination of drugs and mountain-based conflicts is not unique to
that country. It is a root cause of the ongoing fighting in the
mountains of Colombia's interior, and the reason President Clinton
committed $1.2 billion to stop it. The Balkans, Tajikistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Chiapas and Kurdistan are all important transit points
for drugs, as are Kashmir and the north of Myanmar, two more mountain
regions where strife prevails.

This cursory survey of three continents suggests an intriguing
correlation: While only about one-sixth of the world's population
lives in mountainous zones or areas immediately adjacent to them,
such regions account for a solid majority of the bloodiest and most
intractable contemporary conflicts. To be sure, other geographical
zones claim their share of strife, whether the arid lands of the
Levant and Arabia, the islands of Indonesia, or the coastal plains of
West Africa. Further, there is always the possibility that the
"mountain-ness" of Chechnya, Colombia, Afghanistan, Chiapas,
Karabakh, Kashmir, Peru and the Balkans is just a coincidence, or
that it is less important than any of a number of other factors,
whether ethnic or religious differences, demands for autonomy or
independence, or the putative "clash of civilizations."

The world press has been quick to ascribe virtually every instance of
bloodshed in mountain regions to "ethnic tension", "age-old religious
differences" or some other potted phrase acting as a substitute for
thought. Governments, including that of the United States, have
tended to shy away from direct, hands-on involvement in most such
conflicts because they are deemed to be ipso facto irreconcilable,
like a Rubik's cube with no solution. Yet not one of these standard
factors is present in all the conflicts enumerated above, let alone
in others not mentioned. The fact that serious conflicts occur in
mountain regions where one or several of these factors are absent
should counsel us to search more deeply for their true causes. So if
something negative is happening in the world's mountain regions that
goes beyond "ethnic and religious strife", what might this something
be?

The simplest explanation for all this conflict in mountainous
territories draws from an old folklore-embellished argument well
known to every American: mountain people are naturally scrappy. North
Carolina's feisty mountaineers managed to strike adversarial poses in
nearly every conflict facing their state from the Revolution onward.
The Hatfield and McCoy families may have confined their
multi-generational grudge match to the area of Tug Fork in the
Appalachians, but they are enduring symbols of mountain folks'
tendency everywhere neither to forgive nor forget. Nor should we
neglect to mention the old-country home of many American
mountaineers--the Scottish Highlands, whose clans have fought and
feuded their way into indelible legend.

It cannot be denied that once aroused to battle, mountain people are
loath to give up. The sense of territoriality, independence and
cohesive social relations formed in isolated upland valleys are
perfectly suited to sustain conflicts over the long haul. One could
argue that relative isolation from the cosmopolitanism and culture
sharing of other regions has led to a general sort of illiberalism of
attitudes, as well as to an accentuation of the "mine versus thine"
mentality. In several cases, too, the relative isolation and
insularity of mountainous regimes has either contributed to religious
heterodoxy or provided a literal stronghold for it--Lebanon being
perhaps the most vivid example. And no one can deny that the martial
reputation of many mountain dwellers--Gurkhas, Druze, Hokka and
Pashtuns, for example--is well deserved.

The problem with this general line of argument, however, is that it
fails to account for the long periods of peace that have prevailed in
practically every one of the mountain regions now riddled by strife.
It is convenient to point in each case to some ineluctable point of
conflict that triggered the combative mountain psyche, but then one
must explain why for generations the same people managed to coexist
in peace.

Besides that, there is an even more compelling reason to discount
what we might call topographical-cultural arguments, and that is the
presence of a more pervasive explanatory factor. If one were actually
to visit all the various mountain territories where conflicts have
raged over the last generation, the one overwhelming impression they
would leave is not that of human belligerence but of human poverty.
With few exceptions, such as Taiwan, mountain people are on the wrong
side of the growing gulf between the world's haves and have-nots. Of
the billion people earning less than a dollar a day, three quarters
are rural, with mountain people forming a solid core of that
population. The UN's Millennium Summit may have vowed to halve
poverty by 2015 but the major international lending institutions' and
donor agencies' support for the entire rural sector, of which
mountain areas are an important part, plummeted by two-thirds between
1987 and 1998.

The exceptional poverty of most of the world's mountain peoples is
manifest by practically any measure. Their per capita income is
miserably low: from 60 to 80 percent of mountain peoples in
developing countries live below poverty levels established by their
own national governments. Abysmally poor roads, undeveloped or
nonexistent rail systems, and lack of air service deepen their
natural isolation. Electricity is often absent, as are basic
sanitation, public health and education. Telephones are few and
unreliable, even in district centers, and postal service is slow.
Despite their isolation, or perhaps because of it, mountain peoples
have been shortchanged in all the infrastructures needed to
participate in the modern world.

Not all mountain people live in misery, of course, and by no means
all the world's poor are mountaineers. But whereas many cultures in
the tropical jungles collapse suddenly with the destruction of forest
habitats, mountain peoples tend to endure, clinging to what remains
of their traditional lives in the face of intrusions from the
lowlands, even as they curse the lowland politicians who withhold
from them the benefits of modernity. The fact that many mountain
zones are on remote national borders and nearly inaccessible from
their capitals helps assure that their relative backwardness will
deepen over time. Worse, in many cases they are defined as security
zones, assuring that investments there are dominated by military
concerns rather than the needs of economic and social development.

At the same time, mountain regions are sufficiently linked with
lowland population hubs to feel what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal
termed the "backwash effect." Cheap and poorly made products reach
them by truck, cart or in bundles carried on the heads of mountaineer
tradesmen. The effect of this rudimentary commerce is to gradually
undermine traditional skills and to draw upland villagers into the
low end of the money economy. The need to spend on simple items like
cooking pots and kerosene diverts resources from agriculture and
animal husbandry. The quality of seed corn, barley and livestock
gradually erodes, which undermines local production of foodstuffs.
Little by little mountain settlements and other marginal communities
that were formerly self-sustaining are forced to turn to the urban
centers for basic provisions, beginning with kerosene and cooking oil
and extending finally to flour. Soon they begin sending their young
men to the cities in hopes that they will remit some of their meager
earnings to their families back in the mountains.

This process, common to all marginal communities, presents particular
challenges to mountain peoples. Their very distance and
inaccessibility from lowland centers means that they often hold out
longer before beginning the process of interaction with burgeoning
urban centers, dropping further and further behind all the while.
Once begun, however, the process often takes on a desperate
character, proceeding with a cataclysmic intensity that ends with
large-scale out-migration and the collapse of the community.

The downward spiral of dependence brings few, if any, positive
compensations. The growing impoverishment of mountain peoples is
clearly registered in declining indicators of human development.
Across the western Himalayan chain barely a third of adults are
literate and the percentage is falling, as it is also in the Balkans
and the Caucasus. In the Atlas Mountains of Algeria illiteracy is
near universal. Tuberculosis, hepatitis and drug addiction spread
unchecked in many upland populations. Mountain peoples' contact with
commercial centers in the lowlands is great enough to bring HIV into
their world, but not great enough to bring any treatment for it.

Looming over all these problems is the spread of malnutrition. In
parts of Nepal, Peru and Tibet inhabitants of formerly thriving
mountain areas now experience basic food deficits for up to 40
percent of the year. Many have no choice but to flee to cities in
order to beg. Malnutrition in turn brings high levels of infant
mortality and shortened life expectancy.

Many of these conditions have been created and sustained even under
capitalism. Switzerland, a few other west European regions, and
resort centers like those in Colorado, Canada's Banff or Japan's
Nagano prefecture are the rare exceptions. Large impoverished swaths
of the Appalachians from Maine to Georgia are more typical of the
situation even in the world's richest economy. Until recent times,
mountainous areas of Japan were analogously depressed. In each one of
these cases, national politicians concluded that mountain populations
were sufficiently remote and politically passive to be ignored.

If the capitalist world's record regarding mountain peoples is less
than perfect, that of socialism and communism is appalling, and for a
simple reason: Marxism's "labor theory of value" placed no value on
natural resources, including water, which are among a mountain
region's chief assets. The Soviet system viewed mountain communities
mainly as a source of cheap labor, and thought nothing of forcefully
resettling entire upland populations in lowlands as cotton farmers or
factory laborers. Since the fall of the USSR such populations have
often sought to return to their former mountain homes, only to find
them in ruins. Embittered, these mountaineers returning from forced
exile have generated many of the conflicts in Tajikistan and the
North Caucasus that the Western press prefers to blame on religious
and ethnic animosities.

Everywhere the message is the same: If you want to earn a decent
living and reap even the meanest benefits of globalization, you must
leave your age-old communities and your traditional cultures, with
all they represent, and move to the mushrooming squalor of lowland
urban centers. This is what once drove thousands of families from
Menifee County, Kentucky to the steel works of Pittsburgh and Lorain,
Ohio, and it is what today is driving mountain people to cities like
Lima, Islamabad, Bishkek, Srinagar, Novorossiisk, Istanbul and Baku.
Left unchecked, the worldwide failure to address the issue of
mountain poverty will simply transfer the entire problem to
ungovernable and volatile mega-cities.

Nor do those left behind in the mountains simply sink into passivity.
It is worth noting that the armed Kurdish rebellion broke out and
flourished in the mountains of eastern Anatolia precisely when many
hundreds of thousands of other Kurds were heading for new lives in
Istanbul or Ankara. Similarly, West Virginia's miners were at their
most militant at the very time that many of their neighbors were
heading to work in the mills of the Cuyahoga and Monongahela valleys.

Acknowledging the many forces that are gradually undermining mountain
communities and the economies that sustain them, the question remains
as to why these problems have reached the breaking point during the
past twenty years. The blame lies squarely with the ever-increasing
tempo of modernization and globalization. Even weak national
economies are strong enough to draw mountain people into their lowest
ranks. Communications are poor, but they are good enough to enable
millions of mountaineers to understand for the first time just what
they are missing. The rapid decline of many large and ecologically
primitive extractive industries, like the phosphate mines in
Kazakstan's Jungaria-Allatau range and the antimony mines in the
Kyrgyz Pamirs, have left millions of mountain people out of work, but
with no sustainable traditional life to serve as a refuge.

The collapse of totalitarian systems, too, and the weakening of
central control from Peru to Nepal, Pakistan, Iran and India, have
emboldened frustrated mountaineers to lash out against their fate,
even to take up arms when all else fails. Paramilitary groups and
warlords quickly emerge to fill the gap left by absent or ineffective
central governments. Inevitably, this leads to conflicts with rival
warlords, central armies or both.

These developments set the context for the extraordinary growth of
narcotics production and the narco-trade worldwide over the past
twenty years. Trafficking in narcotics is often the mountaineer's
preferred method for participating in globalization. Both coca and
poppies are perfectly suited to the climate and isolation of many
mountain zones. Americans may regret the eagerness with which
Colombians, Pashtuns, Peruvians or Tajiks plunge into this burgeoning
industry, but are these people not making the same rational choices
that Kentucky moonshiners made during the Depression or, for that
matter, that Pennsylvania mountaineers made during Washington's time
when they participated in the Whiskey Rebellion?

Because the narcotics trade is driven by seemingly unquenchable
demand in the developed countries, production cutbacks in one place
lead almost immediately to expansion somewhere else. This is what
happened in the 1990s when reduced production in Peru and Bolivia led
to soaring production in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. It is
probably what will happen with the opium trade as well, now that the
Taliban have managed to radically reduce production in Afghanistan.

It is tempting to treat the crisis of the world's mountain peoples as
someone else's concern. Geopoliticians can cite good reasons for not
taking a hand in addressing problems in Karabakh, Kashmir or
Kyrgyzstan, or for treating the chaos in Afghanistan, the Balkans,
Chechnya or Colombia as beyond the capacities of any one country or
group of countries to solve. An extreme form of this approach is "to
build a fence" around the trouble spot, as the United States sought
to do with Afghanistan in the 1990s, or to let the conflict burn out
like a fire in an old mine. Considering the modest contributions of
many international agencies and donor groups to addressing these
issues, it is clear that many of them have also adopted this
strategy, even while cloaking their inaction with various and sundry
pieties.

The problem with this approach is that it underestimates the degree
to which crises in the world's mountain regions affect directly the
developed countries and the international order as a whole. Like it
or not, the various mountain-related crises have a way of drawing in
the major powers--witness how rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos
succeeded in eliciting the support of European countries in his
crusade on behalf of Chiapas' mountain folk, or how both China and
India are coming to see the struggle in Nepal's mountains as a test
of their own voice in that country's affairs. As outside powers are
drawn in, their separate interests often collide in ways that can
destabilize international relations on a global scale. Local problems
in the Balkans and Kashmir have turned those regions into
international flash points of the first magnitude. A similar process
may be underway in Afghanistan, as China and India both rush to forge
links with opposing sides in that conflict. China is now helping the
Taliban restore old power plants and is re-examining the possibility
of a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Taliban
territory, while India is actively supporting Ahmed Shah Masoud's
Northern Alliance with arms.

Even the most modern armies are poorly suited to wage war in mountain
regions. As every American "revenoor" found out to his regret, as the
British discovered a century and a half ago in Afghanistan, as the
czarist army learned during the decades it spent fighting the rebel
Shamil, and as the Russians are still learning in Chechnya today,
even large numbers of modern warriors can be fought to a standstill
by poorly-armed but mobile mountaineers doing battle on their own
territory. Any government that thinks it can bludgeon mountain people
into submission is engaging in a most destructive form of
self-deception.

Can anything be done, then? For most of the 20th century the typical
way to address an issue of this magnitude was to governmentalize it
and direct richly funded programs toward its solution. This is what
the United States did with the Tennessee River valley in the 1930s
with the Tennessee Valley Authority and then in the 1950s in
Afghanistan's Helmand Valley, where it successfully created a massive
system for water control and irrigation on the TVA model. It is what
Turkey is attempting to do today with its restive Kurdish
southeastern provinces. Such an approach can bring about fundamental
change, but such change is not necessarily for the good. It runs the
risk of leaving behind the affected populace, alienating people and
driving them into passive or even active opposition when what is
needed is to engage and involve them. Moreover, such a "top down"
approach is fundamentally undemocratic, treating mountain people as
objects to be acted upon rather than as the self-governing citizens
they aspire to be.

The fact that the same criticism can be leveled against governmental
social policies directed toward many other populations does not make
the resulting problem for mountain peoples any less severe. On the
contrary, the traditions of isolation and self-sufficiency that
prevail among mountaineers make them react all the more negatively,
and at times violently, to "top down" approaches.

Until the problems of mountain peoples are correctly diagnosed,
effective prescriptions are impossible. It cannot be denied that
differences over religion, political loyalties, ethnicity, inter-clan
rivalries, territorial claims and a hundred other issues as seemingly
minor as the cut of one's mustache or beard have all played a role in
the conflicts that rack mountain societies worldwide. But all of
these can and have been resolved in times when the people involved
are able to feed themselves, carry on their traditions, and
participate, if only minimally, in the good life as they perceive it.
For millions of mountaineers today these are merely dreams fed by
radio or television, and the prospects of ever fulfilling them recede
year by year. This is the bitter, rocky soil from which sprouts every
mountain conflict in today's world.

The solution to the global crisis of mountain peoples is therefore
startlingly simple to conceive, albeit hard to do: promote
development. Ask the most battle-hardened Colombian from the
highlands, an Afghan from Kandahar, or a Nepalese from Tansen, and
they will all agree that their first need is to escape from poverty.
As clearly as any economist from the World Bank, they understand that
this means development of their capacity to provide for their
families; development of access to education and training relevant to
their needs; development of their ability to tap even minimally into
the benefits of modern life while preserving valued aspects of their
local traditions and natural environment; and, above all, development
of their ability to fill or create jobs that will give them the
wherewithal to achieve these goals.

Few, if any, mountain people today think this can be accomplished by
returning to the past. Nor are they prepared, unless forced by
desperation, to throw over everything they know in order to start an
unknown life with unknown prospects in some far-off city. What most
want is the ability simply to adapt their traditional way of life to
modern circumstances, and thereby to build peaceful and secure
conditions for their families.

Can this be accomplished in remote mountain regions, especially in
grim conditions of economic collapse and civil strife? There are
ample grounds for skepticism. The United States has spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on large-scale rural development projects abroad
that apply a "one size fits all" approach to rural poverty, whether
it occurs in plains, valleys or mountains. So have other governments,
foundations and international agencies, and they, too, have little or
nothing to show for their efforts. Some schemes have been killed by
waste, corruption and outright theft, but far more have succumbed to
what might be called the disease of "grandomania"--the false notion
that there is a "silver bullet" that will transform basic conditions
in a single stroke. Such grand schemes usually take the form of large
and costly projects that look good in annual reports but accomplish
little on the ground.

Fortunately, a better model exists and has been successfully tested
in several mountain zones. This model often begins with emergency
humanitarian relief but then shifts into hands-on assistance carried
out at the village level. It works best when performed by carefully
trained and closely supervised local men and women with a minimum of
help from costly foreign consultants. They might rebuild roads,
install small hydroelectric generators, or create infrastructures for
eco-tourism, but the most fruitful efforts are focused on more modest
tasks, like helping to dig village irrigation ditches, setting up
self-sustaining tree nurseries, upgrading seed grains, improving
animal husbandry, or teaching rudimentary accounting to women who
manage credit organizations. Not surprisingly, the Swiss government
is one of the best practitioners of this work. Working with villagers
living near the impressive walnut groves in Kyrgyzstan's Jalalabad
district, they are creating the basis for a viable nut and lumber
business.

This hands-on, village-based model of mountain development has been
refined over two decades inthe forbidding environment of Pakistan's
Northern Areas, that part of Kashmir adjoining Afghanistan and China
that was assigned to Pakistan at the time of the Indian partition.
Here, in parched valleys beneath the 23,000 foot-high peaks of the
Karakorum Mountains, the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) has
wrought a fundamental turnaround. Where formerly there was abject
poverty, drug dealing and near-total illiteracy, there are now stable
agricultural communities, an honorable level of subsistence,
self-funded micro-credit institutions and cottage industries. Nearly
every village has its own school, built by the villagers themselves.
Not only do they collect money to pay the teachers' salaries, but the
villagers pay to send young men and women from the communities to
Karachi for further study so they can return and become teachers.

The AKDN has extended this work into the Pamir Mountain region of
Tajikistan, only recently the scene of civil war and the main transit
route for drugs from nearby Afghanistan. In a mere decade this
formidable area of somber granite and glaciers at 15,000 feet, dubbed
"The Roof of the World", has become self-sustaining in agriculture
for the first time in a century. Fighting has stopped. Drug
trafficking is down. Similar efforts have begun in the adjacent
region of Afghanistan.

All this costs money, of course. Fortunately, Japan, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, and major public and private donor agencies and foundations have been willing to invest in this transformation. Yet how much are these millions of dollars compared with the vast costs of fruitless mega-projects elsewhere, the billions the United States is paying to interdict drugs in the Americas, or the high price of conflict and misery that have been averted?

These successful initiatives prove that the key to successful development in impoverished mountain regions is not money but brains. To replicate these models in Afghanistan, Karabakh, Chiapas, the Balkans, Ecuador, Nepal, Chechnya, Kashmir or Colombia requires scores of men and women with practical skills, local knowledge--what James C. Scott calls metis--and subtle leadership abilities. It requires a kind of mountain development entrepreneur who is capable of filling existing jobs in mountain areas and of creating new enterprises and jobs for others. It is precisely such people who are lacking, and whose absence drives mountain people to take desperate and sometimes self-destructive measures.

Back in 1859 the founders of Berea College in Kentucky realized the need for such men and women and created the world's first institution of higher education devoted explicitly to serving people in that "neglected part of the country" defined by mountains. In August 2000, the presidents of Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and His Highness the Aga Khan joined forces to establish the University of Central Asia. Its mission is to prepare leaders and entrepreneurs in mountain development, not only for Central Asia but for all the world's mountain regions. When the day comes that Afghanistan, or any other strife-ridden mountain country, is ready to move forward once more, local UCA graduates will be there to help.

Critics ask if this focus on economic development makes sense so long as the political situation remains unresolved, as in Kashmir, when paramilitary bands roam the hills, as they still do in Tajikistan, and when terrorists from mountain regions imperil th01e peace in neighboring lands, as they do from Afghanistan in several countries of Central Asia. They claim that the politics must be set right first, so that economic renewal can follow. The problem with this approach is that it usually mires in unsuccessful efforts at peacemaking while the conditions fanning mountain conflicts grow ever worse. Far better is to pursue both courses together, or even to lead with humanitarian aid and economic renewal in mountain areas so as to provide living models of what could be achieved through self-help under conditions of peace.

We may blame the terrorist, drug dealer, local warlord, the farmer who raises coca or poppies, the head of an old-style mining firm that exploits equally the land and its people, or the regional governor who steals from the public till. But spending time and money hounding down every one of these purported villains will not improve the lot of most mountain folk. A fresh crop of villains will quickly emerge to replace those who are removed.

Nor will things change for the better until mountain populations themselves take the lead in improving their lives. As this happens, ethnic and religious assertion may lose its appeal as an answer to despair, the apocalyptic messages of religious extremists will fall on deaf ears, and flight to the city will cease to be the sole or best avenue to self-improvement. Practical experience has shown that bench-level programs of economic and social development can lead mountain people to this critical discovery about their own powers. At that point they will themselves become effective agents of improvement in the political and civic realm.

That is why the UN has proclaimed 2002 the "Year of the Mountains." It hopes to convince international agencies, foundations and donor countries that such programs work. If and when such programs of mountain development are extended to all the major zones of crisis, the world's mountain territories will cease to be regions of despair and conflict and become, if not Shambhala, then at least areas where healthy human communities can sustain modern economies amid settings of timeless beauty and majesty.

S. Frederick Starr is chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

Essay Types: Essay