The Kalash tribe is said to descend from Alexander the
Great's army, but now it is fighting to preserve its traditions in
a Taliban stronghold
I am standing on a roof in the mountains of the Kalash valleys.
Below me hundreds of men are screaming and shouting as two small
wooden balls are hit up the slopes by opposing teams of players.
Women in intricately designed, brightly coloured dresses are
looking on, talking and laughing. One player draws back his long
wooden club and hammers the ball onward. Cries of joy fill the
air.
"What just happened?" I ask the player. "We cheated," he laughs.
"The ball was lost in the snow so I took a ball from my pocket
and hit that one. Don't tell the other team. If they knew, we would
lose this point."
The ball flies on up the four-mile-long course, over rivers and up
banks. That night, the winning team will sacrifice an ox, paid for
by the losers. Everyone will get drunk. It is winter and there is
not much to do. The game is chikik
gal.
In February this year, the Taliban assassinated Pakistan's
Christian minister for minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti. He was the only
politician representing the non-Muslim populations of Pakistan. His
smallest ward was the Kalash, a 3,000-strong animist tribe living
in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, in Pakistan's wild northwest
frontier. A persistent myth tells of their descent from members of
an errant division of Alexander the Great's army, which ripped
through the mountains of northern Pakistan more than 2,000 years
ago.
In Rudyard
Kipling's time, the Kalash were known as the "black Kafirs" and
their land was Kafiristan, the setting for his tale of insanity and
idolatry, The
Man Who Would be King. The "red Kafirs", their neighbours, the
subjects of Kipling's story, were brutally converted at the end of
the 19th century. They became Nuristanis, "enlightened ones", and
their rugged mountain land is one of the centres of the war against
the Taliban.
The Kalash live in three valleys (Bumboret, Birir and Rumbur) by
the Afghan border in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In winter,
flights to Chitral, the nearest town, are routinely and
consistently cancelled without warning. My journey from Islamabad
was by road, through Mardan and Dir up to the Lowari tunnel and
then down the other side. In the winter, when the Lowari pass is
blocked by snow, the tunnel is the only way of travelling to
Chitral by road. Its construction began in 2005 and it is now open
for a few hours every day. It is less a tunnel and more a 9km-long
cave.
But in spite of the constant sense of peril it evokes, the tunnel
is changing Chitral and the Kalash valleys. Previously, getting to
the nearest city, Peshawar, meant a trip through Afghanistan. Now
the tunnel brings supplies from the rest of the country. With
access comes fear. "Extremists use the tunnel to come here," says
Taj Udeen, a local police commander. "We have to make sure we know
who is coming to our district."
They certainly knew we were coming. Tourism has dropped off steeply
since 9/11 – in the 1990s thousands of people visited Chitral
annually, now that figure is below 100 – and we were among few
outsiders to visit the Kalash valleys in the past year. Desperate
to make sure nothing happened to our four-strong team, 10 armed
policemen accompanied us. We spent a month in the valleys. They
never left our side.
For centuries, the Kalash have been fighting to preserve their
traditions. People are converted to Islam every year.
"Extremist Muslims prey on weak people and create internal
divisions," Imran Kabir, a Kalasha polymath (he reveals that he is,
variously, a butcher, teacher, writer and junkyard owner) tells
me.
A local teacher, Akbal Shah, recounts the story of his father, who
worked as a frontier policeman and converted to Islam because he
was the only Kalash man in an all-Muslim unit. "He was not
educated, so they said to him that if he didn't convert he wouldn't
go to heaven. He ended up believing them because he didn't want to
stand out. The Muslims are a big majority, they are pressing us
everywhere." Deathbed conversions are common and people talk of
being offered wives and money if they convert. When I interviewed
one of the local imams, Nasir Abdul, at his newly built mosque, he
spoke of the love he has for the Kalash people before going on to
say that he "hopes they will convert to Islam so that they can go
to paradise". He is a friendly man who does not pay people to
convert, but his objective is the same: the end of the Kalasha
religion.
Not all Muslims in the area feel this way. One convert who everyone
calls "Mullah" tells me: "Everyone should be free to believe what
they like." And while Muslims are not allowed to convert to the
Kalash religion, men like Mullah participate in Kalash festivals
and rituals in a way that makes you believe that if they could
convert back, they would.
Wali Khan, the Kalash headmaster of a primary school in Bumboret
valley and a charismatic and popular figure, has worked tirelessly
to improve the standards of schooling in the valleys (until the
1990s, there were no official schools). His family is typical in
that two of his three brothers have converted to Islam (the one who
hasn't is confusingly nicknamed Mujahideen). He tells me that for
"two years my brother was living like an imam. But then he got
bored and now he is drinking and smoking and dancing!" Drinking
means the local moonshine, tara,
which tastes like schnapps, or homemade wine, which tastes like
sherry. Kalash dealers routinely and illegally sell both drinks to
Muslims.
Another source of tension is the aid that the Kalash receive from
NGOs and the government. At the centre of this controversy is the
Kalasha Dur – a museum, small hospital, library, hostel and school
complex for the Kalash (which Muslims cannot attend), housed within
an absurdly Greek-looking palace built by the NGO Greek Volunteers,
with help from Greece's government body Hellenic Aid. Greek
Volunteers's director, Athanasios Lerounis, a long-time champion of
the Kalash and the man who raised the money to build the centre,
assures me that though there are "similarities to the Ionic style",
the building came from "the local architecture". The attempted
olive growing that goes on is, however, more likely to be an
ancient tradition of Athens.
In 2009, a Taliban unit stole into the valleys at night and
kidnapped Lerounis. They had been tipped off by locals sympathetic
to their cause and came to the Kalasha Dur during a night when
only two security guards were posted. One guard fled while the
other stood his ground and was killed. Lerounis was taken swiftly
across the Afghan border to Nuristan. The Greek teacher's ransom,
thought to be up to £1m, was paid and he returned to Greece. The
security services will not let him return to Pakistan because they
believe his presence in the country is dangerous. Lerounis, who
wants to come back to the valleys, tells me he does not want to
talk about the kidnapping because doing so would endanger the
Kalash people. Whatever they think of the Taliban's policies, the
Kalash stress their neutrality: they are too vulnerable to court
trouble.
The kidnapping highlights the security risk presented by the lavish
Greek building: in a small, rural community, it sticks out. Locals
say that there is a Taliban plot to blow up the Kalasha Dur. The
building's detractors say that the exclusion of Muslims from the
school only adds to the resentment felt by those who feel that the
Kalash get too much money from outsiders.
Wali Khan used to work with Lerounis compiling a Kalasha alphabet,
but left because he didn't like the division the Kalasha Dur had
created. "The Kalash and the Muslims have to get along; they have
to live side by side," he says. "So why make a school in which only
one kind of person can be taught?" Lerounis argues that the school
was built in response to a need highlighted by the Kalash
community: "I asked them what they wanted and they told me they
needed a school… There are many Muslim schools and many madrasas.
The Kalash need this. There is a division because of their
tradition, not because of our building."
The Kalasha Dur's first-aid centre treats Muslims, and Greek
Volunteers have also built Muslim schools and secured a clean-water
supply that is used by everyone. Yet the suspicion remains that
they do as much harm as good. Imran Kabir believes that Lerounis
created a culture of dependence so that in the end people "treated
him like a God". Instead of praying to their maker, Kabir told me,
they would pray to Lerounis. Since he has been gone, the Kalash
have started helping themselves again, something Lerounis would
probably approve of.
Nabaig (like Prince, he has no second name) is the first Kalash
lawyer. He works in Chitral and, when he is in court, wears a suit
and tie that makes you think of Reservoir
Dogs. Back in the valleys, in his traditional clothes, he
tells me that the United Nations Development Programme money that
comes to the valleys "goes in the pockets of the politicians and
higher personalities". The same is said of the international money
that came to the country to help relieve flooding in 2010.
"None of the money came to us," says Nabaig, who points out that
food is now twice the price as a result.
Almost all accounts of the Kalash fixate on the tribe's
mythological descent from Alexander the Great. The romance of
Alexander's tribe is a key part of Kalash tourism, although "they
did a DNA test and they found no connection" is a familiar
refrain here. Lerounis calls the area an "open museum"; the
valleys' reputation as a Garden of Eden, a lost land of innocent
people, meant that a summer stop to see the Kalash used to be
an adventurous part of the hippie trail. But another form of
tourism has developed: young Muslim men from the south, deprived of
contact with women their own age, come here to chat up Kalash girls
and watch them dance.
The government has a confused relationship with the Kalash. Wali
Khan says it "protects the Kalash people very well now because we
are a unique culture". But there is also worry that this kind of
cultural tourism can be exploitative. Abdul Sattar, a village elder
who has converted to Islam, tells me that "before, when I was
Kalash, I was very happy. But the government and people from the
rest of Pakistan were coming here and making us dance and perform.
I became a Muslim because I couldn't enjoy performing for
outsiders."
The government's press office in Islamabad sent out a string of
mixed messages, telling me the trip was "very dangerous" yet
repeatedly talking about how wonderful the Kalash were and how
thrilled the government was to see journalists coming to the
country to cover something other than the war with the Taliban. The
constitution protects minorities and the law safeguards the customs
of the Kalash. This is how Nabaig wins most of his cases, which
involve Kalash alcohol and drug traffickers and disputes between
Islamic and Kalash property laws. Still, the lawyer remains
unconvinced by the authorities. "I am worried about what is
happening because we are isolated. We are in the minority. We are
worried that our traditions won't survive."
This survival is being safeguarded in interesting ways. There has
been a concerted effort in recent years to reproduce as much as
possible in order to bolster numbers. That way, if a couple of the
children end up being converted, the pain will be less sharp. And,
in the end, it is this spirit that will see the Kalash through.
Free-minded and intensely aware of their "unique culture" they
appear to be getting stronger rather than weaker. New roads and new
technology often kill cultures such as theirs but the opposite
seems to be true.
That they have had problems moving from a barter economy to
a monetary one cannot be denied and that their traditional
dependence on goats is becoming less valuable is also true, but the
Kalash are using their increased contact with the outside world to
educate others. Their language has, for the first time, been put
into a written form (they use the English alphabet). Nabaig, who is
29, says that his generation is "very keen to be Kalash, to
preserve our culture. With trade we are gaining facilities. We are
feeding our families". One Kalash teenager told me his culture "was
over". Almost all his friends contradicted him. Those who go to the
big cities to work want to return to the valleys. One of the
villagekasis ("guardians
of knowledge") told me that now "education is very good. When I was
younger there were no schools, no roads and no Jeeps. We had no
clothes. We had no shoes. Now it is better." The Kalash are
learning about their culture in order to preserve it. As we look
out over the valley and up to Afghanistan, Imran Kabir looks up and
says: "The future is bright. The dark ages are gone."
Wild Frontiers (wildfrontiers.co.uk)
is running a 16-day adventure to the Hindu Kush spring festival,
departing 7 May and costing £2,090 land only. Eithad Airways
(etihadairways.com)
flies London to Islamabad from £591. The FCO advises against all
travel to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and much of
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa