Dreaming of the Alaskan Wilderness

IN GILGIT, a small town at an altitude of 4000 feet or so in a remote, seldom visited part of northern Pakistan, a tribe of Kirghiz mountaineers ekes out a precarious existence. It is a strange land to them, and they are among strange people. This tribe of about 280 families--over 1000 people--left their homes in the towering Pamir mountains, to the north in Afghanistan's Wakhan corridor, after Soviet troops invaded in December, 1979. Fighting hit-and-run battles against the better-equipped Russians, they soon had to sell their livestock and slip over the border into Pakistan. Now they want to come to America--possibly Alaska--and settle permanently.

The Kirghiz--long accustomed to tending their herds at altitudes over 10,000 feet--have found the climate in Pakistan particularly inhospitable, confronting diseases they never suffered in their homeland. Already, 160 people--mostly women and children--have died as a result of conditions to which they are unaccustomed, according to a Boston Globe reporter who has written about the Kirghiz. The remote land where the Kirghiz now live offers them no means to support themselves Forced to leave behind their animals when they made the trek into Pakistan, the tribesmen have no other skills beyond herding. And even if they did, there is no work to be found in the region around Gilgit. The tribe must live on a meager subsidy paid by the Pakistani government, itself burdened with the responsibility of playing host to an estimated 2-1/2 million other refugees. Without their livestock--yaks, goats, and sheep bred especially for high altitudes--the Kirghiz have little to do but wait.

The greater part of the Kirghiz live in and around the Kirghiz Soviet Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Thousands of Kirghiz fled across the mountains to China after the Soviets began their program of forced collectivization and settling of nomads in the 1930s. More fled from China to Afghanistan in the 1940s when the Communists came to power in China. The mid 1970s finds 25,000 Kirghiz in Afghanistan and more than three times as many in China. An Islamic group speaking a language related to Turkish, the Kirghiz are by tradition herders or farmers, depending on the land the individual tribe occupies.

In Gilgit, members of khan Haji Rahman Qul's tribe see their culture disappearing even as they themselves are dying. For their very culture is wrapped up with their animals. Providing food, shelter, clothing, and goods for barter, livestock sustains the tribe's all-too-precarious existence. The women of the tribe--who must still cook, sew, and care for their families--have become the barers of the tribe's culture. But to survive, the tribe must have enough land at the right altitude to raise their animals in peace and carry on their nomadic existence.

Qul first applied to bring his tribe to the United States in April, 1980. Accompanied by Alan Jones, an American relief worker, Qul went to the American embassy in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. The two ran into a brick-wall of bureaucracy. In fact, all they managed to achieve was confusion--whether Qul was actually applying to immigrate to the United States, or not just informing the embassy of his intention to apply.

Qul submitted a list of the people in his tribe who wanted to come to the U.S. Nothing was heard until Jones, then running a medical assistance program for Afghan refugees under the New York-based International Rescue Commission, inquired about the matter, and found out that Qul's petition could not serve as formal application for immigration. And so Qul went back to the embassy in April 1981, and filled out what he thought was the proper form. Told by the vice counsel that she would send the application on to Washington, Jones returned to Washington and inquired at the State Department about the application. He says he was then told it had not been received.

It was a tenet of U.S. immigration policy, not bureacratic incompetence, that blocked the path of Qul and his people to Alaska. U.S. immigration law considers only individuals, whereas Qul had intended to apply for the entire tribe. And no provision existis to justify treating a group of people as a single entity. This--an official from the State Department's Bureau of Refugees, who wishes not to be identified, says--is the only fair way to run immigration.

He would find, however, those who disagree with his contention. The entire system of immigration is at odds with the tribal idea of self, according to Louis Dupree '49, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University who has done field work in Afrghanistan. A friend of Qul, Dupree has set out to see that he and his tribe do get to Alaska. The immigration authorities look at individuals as individuals and deals with them as such, Dupree says. The individual in a tribal society considers himself part of this group; this, Dupree says, has led to mistakes on the part of immigration officials when dealing with tribal societies.

But such is the law, according to Paula Lynch (another official in the Bureau of Refugees Affairs); and under it each individual in Qul's tribe wanting to come to the United States must show up in Islamabad and file a formal application.

Even if everyone in the tribe were to apply, there would be no guarantee that everyone would receive permission to immigrate, Dennis Murphy, an official on the State Department's Pakistan desk, says. Murphy hastens to add that the member's of Qul's tribe would be considered along with several thousand other people applying for refugee status from Afghanistan and Iraq. From October 1980, to September 1981, more than 3000 refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq--the majority from Afghanistan--were admitted to the United States. The Bureau of Refugee Affairs, Lynch says, has been using the definition of refugee set by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which was incorporated into the Refugee Act approved by Congress in 1980.

A REFUGEE, according to both the UNHCR and the Refugee Act, is someone who lives outside his own country and unwilling to return home either because he was persecuted there or because he has a well-founded fear of persecution upon return. Every year the president and the Congress agree on ceilings for the number of refugees that can be admitted from any one part of the world. In 1982, for example, the ceilings limit entries from the entire region termed the Near East to 5000 people. Most of them, Lynch says, will be Afghan refugees.

Despite some reports that the Kirghiz had not been declared refugees by the UNHCR--the state department uses the commissioner's decision to fit groups under its own refugee heading--officials with the UNHCR in Geneva and with the Pakistani Embassy in Washington say the Kirghiz are indeed refugees, part of the whole body of people fleeing to Pakistan to escape the fighting in Afghanistan.

With this out of the way, the Kirghiz would have to meet any one of four conditions the State Department uses to decide who has priority in coming to the United States under the Refugee Act:

*people who have family in the U.S. with whom they want to be reunited;

*people who have been political prisoners;

*people who have been educated in the U.S.;

*people who might have suffered because of their ties with the U.S.

The Kirghiz, regardless of their suffering at the hands of the Russians, maintain no ties with the United States other than their involvement with Dupree, Jones, and Nassif Shahrani--an anthropologist at UCLA who has done field work with the Kirghiz in Afghanistan. As a result, Lynch says, Qul and his tribe do not stand a chance on earth of qualifying for the U.S. refugee program.

With their romantic appeal, the Kirghiz--fierce mountaineers left suddenly destitute--have drawn more attention than other Afghan refugee groups. They are also one of the few not wanting to return to Afghanistan. During the past 50 years, the Kirghiz have fled from the Communists twice: first from Soviet Kirghizistan to Xinjiang--Chinese Turkestan, whence they fled to Afghanistan at the time of the Communist take-over in China. The Soviets, according to Dupree, have annexed the entire Wakhan Corridor, the sprit of land jutting off to the northeast of Afghanistan, where they are busy building roads to consolidate their claim to the area.

Qul says, acording to Alan Jones, no one has heard from Kirghiz remaining behind in the Pamirs, or the families who returned home, unable to adapt to their new life.

The tribe's only choice is finding some place else to live. Despite the plentitude of high-altitude land in Pakistan, they can not stay in the country. The government does not want any single group of Afghan refugees sticking around, Dupree says. Also, if they were to stay, they would lose their status as refugees.

Qul and his tribe have one recourse under the law. An act of Congress could circumvent the immigration laws and allow the Kirghiz to come to America. Their cause is not hopeless, for the Kirghiz have generated considerable publicity: WGBH recently aired a television program about them; the Boston Globe ran a front-page story about them in December; Reuters News Service has carried stories about them, as has the Associated Press. Indeed, it is because of the AP stories that Qul and his two sons have received an invitation from the Institute for Alaskan Affairs, a non-profit group in Fairbanks, to visit Alaska during the last two weeks in March and discuss the possibility of settling there.

Marilyn Dudly-Rowley, who heads the institute, says she read the AP dispatches in he local newspaper a year ago and got in touch with Dupree. She has since won the promise from Alaska's two Senators and one Representative to consider sponsoring the bills that would allow the Kirghiz to come to America. Dudly-Rowley said the State Department recently issued visitors' visas to Qul and his two sons allowing them to come to Alaska at the end of March. Part of the two week visit will be spent talking to land experts about the best locations for the Kirghiz to settle. Qul would then visit those sites.

The trip might dispell any romantic notions Qul has of Alaska. It reached 30-below-zero in Fairbanks last Friday. Actually, Jones says, Qul got the idea of moving to Alaska from a picture book he saw in the Kabul, on one of his annual visits to trade, get supplies, and tell the new government things were fine in the Wakhen. (The last task was crucial, to keep the government from bothering them).

While the prospects are brightening for Qul and his people, several obstacles might still prevent Qul from accepting the invitation to Alaska. Getting permission to leave Pakistan might create the largest problem. It's not a matter of getting their papers in order, but whether they even have papers. The Pakistani Embassy, apparently, is looking into the matter.

Dudly-Rowley says the shortage of private land in Alaska might make finding a home for the Kirghiz difficult. The bulk of it, she says, is owned by--or under the control of--the federal and state governments and the native corporations. But she adds that the state's new landage laws probably won't leave the state closed to the Kirghiz.

The publicity the Kirghiz have received has brought in money. Along with unsolicited donations from Americans who have heard of their plight, the Kirghiz benefit from the approximately $500,000 the International Rescue Commission earmarks each year for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The committee has also helped out with the lobbying the Kirghiz desperately need to get to America. The Ford and Tolstoy Foundations and the Young Mens Christian Association have also expressed an interest in helping the Kirghiz. But all who are working on the project agree that it is difficult to find funds.

The State Department, which has come off as something of a cretin in this whole affair, is limited to what it can do by law. Murphy, with the State Department Pakistan desk, says the case of the Kirghiz has been "flopping around for about two years because of a lack of focus to it." He adds that he was "delighted" that the Institute for Alaskan Studies had taken up the Kirghiz cause. But the department, Murphy says, is a bureaucracy, and as such does not have the means to help beyond the processing the papers.