The National Interest
Fall 2001

Altitude Sickness

by S. Frederick Starr

 

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 in the 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 the 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.