My last visit to Daghestan was in 1995, after which the neighbouring Chechen situation became more of a threat to Daghestan and I was told by my local friends that the authorities genuinely felt that ‘they were unable to guarantee my security’. This phrase is usually a euphemism for a refusal. Perhaps both applied to me.

In the intervening period two of my important official supporters had died: Rasul Gamzatov the national poet and a former member of the Supreme Soviet, in 2003, and his wife Patimat Saidova director of her fine art museum, in 2000; and Ramazan Khappoulaev director of the Kraevecheskii state museum under the ministry of culture, also in 2003. Other friends in the administration had retired, so it fell to my 21-year long academic collaborator Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov to try to get me a visa, which was well outside his previous experience.

Relations between UK and Russia had been in sharp decline with the UK ambassador hounded by Putin’s brown-shirted (Nashi) youthful thugs, in response to his mild speech about environmental damage in Russia at the G8 conference in June 2006. President Putin enriched by the rising prices of Russia’s oil and gas exports has gained in assertive confidence which had resulted in a series of clumsy international actions which avoided the niceties of diplomacy. Then former KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, who had just gained UK citizenship as a refugee, was murdered in London in November 2006 by slow poisoning from radioactive polonium which is only produced by Chernobyl type reactors in Russia, and because of delivery problems is unlikely to be available commercially. It left traces everywhere. In particular there were traces on airplanes which had flown another KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi who had met him back to Russia. Attempts by UK police to interview Lugovoi in Moscow were refused.

The Russian government also attempted to link any help with the extradition from UK of two well-known refugees: Boris Berezovsky formerly the Russian media tycoon, known as an oligarch who continues to oppose Putin (another former KGB officer); and the senior Chechen rebel international spokesman Ahmed Zakhaev. In mid-winter of 2006 Russia cut Ukraine’s gas supply which in turn affected its transit pipeline supplies to Europe, a warning of what surely will happen in future. Russia also abrogated from the 1987 arms limitation treaty and was now moving troops into recently restricted border areas. Furthermore, in response to what Russia states is a threat of US and NATO proposals to site rocket-early-warning bases in Czech Republic and Poland, Russian TU-54 bombers have been over-flying North Sea British and Norwegian off shore oil fields. In addition, the chief Russian admiral demanded access by Russian warships to the Mediterranean. Russia was gradually returning to its sphere of influence Former Soviet States which gained independence in 1991. The usual method was for Russia to use its oil and gas hegemony and other trade relations to impose an economic dominance in concert with, or followed by, continuation of Soviet period military bases.

Against this background it should not have surprised me that my visa took 40 days of uncertainty to appear, which a staffer from Aeroflot in London where I bought my ticket said was now the norm. Also UK applicants had to pay double other EC citizens were charged for their visas. A same-day visa cost me £95. On the other hand I was personally treated well and was not obliged to queue outside. I had given the cultural attaché a copy of our book Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan and did my business in Russian. Just when I thought that all was well, they told me that the rules had changed and in addition to my invitation from either the Academy of Sciences or Magomedkhan’s carpet-weaving business, I needed an invitation from OVIR, which is the public face of the FSB secret police. OVIR controls registration (propiska) which continues although it is illegal according to the new Russian Constitution. I needed a one-page form signed by the single authorized officer in Makhachkala in Daghestan. He had to authorize it and the application was then sent to Moscow, where it was eventually agreed and then sent back to Makhachkala for reauthorisation.

On previous visits I was always met in Moscow and taken to the next airport or put up for the night. Times had changed and I was now on my own. The flight arrived at Shermetievo airport north of Moscow about 6 in the morning. I was determined to use public transport to find out if it worked. There is no train shuttle or inter-airport bus, so I waited for an hour in the warm morning sunshine for a crowded local bus which took me standing to the end of the Moscow Metro. There I joined the rush hour to go to Paveletskaya on the inner circle. There, after a 15-minute walk to another overland part of the station I caught the wide-gauge new express train to Domodedovo the internal airport in south of Moscow. This has recently been impressively rebuilt to European standards. It is indeed a pleasant airy place with many facilities. Although I was unable to buy the connecting ticket from Sibir-7, also doubling with Daghestan Airways, at the Aeroflot office in Piccadilly in London, Magomedkhan bought it for me with my credit card number. When I reached Domodedovo, it was a rapid task to present my email confirmation in exchange for a valid ticket. Moscow-Daghestan return cost about $US 280. For unexplained reasons we got an old Tupolev 154M plane from Daghestan Airways where the seats lurched back when you sat in them and then a bar in the seat stuck into you when you tried to sit up. They dispensed with the statutory safety drill presumably in tacit acknowledgement that any accident would be fatal. The same day as my return ten days later, there was a report of a similar Daghestan Airlines plane engine bursting into flames on the runway in Domodedovo at 4am. Happily, no one was killed or seriously injured and the plane duly flew off at 6.50am.

I liked the brightly-coloured emblem on the airplane’s tail with a sun-bird or simurgh, wings flapping against a golden disc, presumably the sun, over the green-blue-red stripes of Daghestan’s flag in a designer’s pretence of independence from Russia. Since 1992 the Russian-Chechen wars closed virtually all of Daghestan’s trading routes with its largest customer, Russia. Until the Daghestani economic boom began around 2004, it was very difficult to start up a business in Daghestan, with as much as a year’s turnover required as a deposit up front, as decided by the authorities. There was a baffling array of taxes and extortions by officials. The economy was stagnant and the result was and continues to be that Russia subsidizes over an estimated 80% of the Daghestan State expenditure.

At the nearly deserted Makhachkala airport, which had not been modernized, there was the same creaking carousel and long wait for my luggage. I was met by Magomedkhan who had been brought by Gussein in his new VW saloon car.

We wanted to see the difference not only within Makhachkala so we needed transport. It took a couple of hours and help from Magomedkhan’s son-in-law to find Abakar, an ex-army officer aged about 30, whom I hired as driver for $80 a day (£36) plus petrol, which cost a third of UK prices. He had a lot of experience in war zones, so he was suitably cautious on the new asphalt and the old dirt roads.

The first things I noticed driving back from the airport was the new dual carriageway and the endless vista of new two and three-storey stone-built houses. The population of Makhachkala had increased from about 350,000 to 500,000. This is partly because of more migration from mountain villages; partly because with the house-building allowed there was more room, and partly because in Daghestan the birth rate is high at over 20% population increase over a decade. There is plenty of food with relatively far more choice, but correspondingly more expensive than 12 years ago. There were more rich people as well as I strikingly saw when we visited Academician Gadji Gamzatov’s house in Kaspisk. Even with a third storey which he had built onto his house, which used to stand in splendid isolation, it was now somewhat dwarfed and quite surrounded by a large estate of palaces by the sea with its private beach and restaurant where we had a leisurely shaded lunch to the lapping of blue water and squeals of children bathing. They had so many hard and punishing years that I could only feel happy for them, that they had found some contentment and leisure. It is still reported that Daghestan alongside Ingushetia is the poorest republic in Russian Federation.

In contrast, it’s more tense financially in Magomedkhan’s home. His wife Raziat, a trained economist who works as the chief bookkeeper accountant for the Academy of Sciences, carries on after work until midnight to 3am, and at weekends, to make pasta and sweet cakes and pastries for sale in their apartment. This is needed to supplement their incomes with Magomedkhan’s stipend as a senior academy of sciences researcher with a small surplus from his carpet weaving enterprise. His finances were dangerously in disarray after his daughter’s wedding that came to over $10,000; his nephew required a payment of $12,000 to get into police college, having passed all the exams; and his sister needed over $5000 of medical treatment in Moscow to halt a cancerous growth behind her nose, near her optic nerve. In spite of all other dramatic changes there is still no affordable health insurance or consumer banking with credit cards and overdraft facilities. In 1995 average wages in Daghestan were a quarter of those in Moscow. In December 2002 CJES (campaign/ committee for journalists in extreme situations) reported that journalists in Daghestan were paid an average of 2000 to 2500 r ($625 to $780: @ 32r =$1) per month. Energy in Daghestan is mainly provided by hydro-electricity, for example from the new dam beneath Gunib. This also draws attention to the widespread neglect of pollution with the water near the dam entirely covered in discarded plastic bottles, and the scars of dumped garbage on steep mountain slopes in villages.

Everywhere we went there were new houses – Archi mountain village and hamlets at over 2000 metres; Levashi, the lowland centre of cabbages grown for the Siberian market and connected to Makhachkala by a new highway cutting through the mountains that saves 1 ½ hours over the old drive via Buinakst; Gapshima village, where as plant-hunters we picked cat’s pears the purple tattoo dye plant which grows in the cemetery; Gunib Avar, former stronghold of Shamil; Dargi towns: Tashpinar; Khajalmaki; and Akusha; Kumukh the Laki capital; Karakh village of Tabassarani weavers. We found nowhere without new buildings. Reporters and others told us that Makhachkala was the most rapidly developing city in the Russian Federation after Moscow. The strangest development was in the village of Shukti near Gapshima. A close associate of President Gorbachev Mr Magomed Chartayev was the former chief of the Sovkhoz state farm there, and built the locals a new village as a philanthropic act. It was true communism appearing during capitalism. During 1993-1996 he knocked down all the small old one-storey houses and replaced them with all different three-storey carved limestone stone houses. Each family was given a house according to the number of children and the ground floor was provided ready furnished. He died seven years ago and his smaller than average house is dwarfed by his son’s unfinished house with rusting scaffolding. The bank is now coverted into apartments. The whole village infrastrucure was never completed and his name does not even appear on the peeling Soviet sign at the entrance to the village. It has the only unfinished mosque in Daghestan. The portrait of Stalin that remains on the war memorial is colourfully painted and the old Communist administration centre stands with its front door effectively blocked by the Soviet neo-classical portico with its very odd three columns.

Daghestan is now the southern Russian border state with Azerbaijan. The main coastal road had been re-asphalted removing all potholes and random slopes that I remembered and feared from before. There are three main Russian military bases; firstly near the border with Azerbaijan; near Kizliar/ Khasavyurt; and a new base near Botlikh on the mountain road to Vedeno centre of Chechen rebels, with a new highway under construction from the highway to Botlikh, which will cut driving time by hours. In Makhachkala the dangerous driving is reminiscent of Turkey 20 years earlier before Draconian laws were introduced to calm down motorists. The number of cars has increased so that there are now frequent traffic jams in Makhachkala. There are large numbers of newly built petrol stations where I only remember the unavailability of petrol where it was sold in large glass vessels called ballon. The main traffic junction in Makhachkala was crowned by three or four large advertisement hoardings. Most noticeable was one for Harry Potter, celebrating the book launch on 7 July 2007 of “HP and the Deathly Hallows”.

The other more vivid form of communication is mobile phones. Even Magomedkhan’s mother Mayserat, who is a mountain woman of about 70 has her mobile hidden in the folds of her traditional costume. Did she visit neighbours less as she could now ring them? No, of course not. The phone was for talking to more distant people. There is email too in the larger cities.

Then there were everywhere wonderful strings of corner shops, selling for example a hundred varieties of beer. There are several wines from Daghestan too, as Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan are now independent from Russia. When Putin met the Queen in June 2003, in a formal exchange of gifts, she gave him a bottle of Scotch whisky, perhaps to remind him of how Britain has given Scotland some autonomy, and he gave her the best cognac from Daghestan. The many pharmacies were full of generic medicines far cheaper than UK, but still expensive by local standards. The women in the street looked striking taking advantage of the flood of cosmetics now available. There are a few supermarkets and private markets specialising in expensive delicatessen and imported foods, and at the same time the state market ‘number two’ is still vibrant and crowded. The restaurants had improved beyond recognition in Makhachkala but not for example in regional towns like Kumukh. “Briz” night club in Kaspisk was very modern and loud, with customers aged from 6 to 90. The teenage girls and boys followed tradition and danced separately in single-sex groups in circles of ten to twenty.

It appeared that I had become a sort of institution being the foreign link with many famous Daghestanis. Academician, Gadji Gamzatov, was delighted to see me. He told friends that I was his friend abroad and mutual complements flowed. The media was wheeled in. The state controlled main newspaper Novye Delo published a long interview of me with a photo, hooked on to the nomination of Magomedkhan and my book Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, which was voted second oddest title in the world 2006 by the Bookseller Magazine. It was almost an obituary. There was also a long Daghestan TV interview around my collaboration with Magomedkhan of over 21 years, being the longest between a Caucasian and a foreigner, except perhaps for Stalin and Derzhinski – our joke. Dagestan will become even better known next year with two TV films which I helped set up: Mentorn’s David Dimbleby recreating Lermontov’s journey with Magomedkhan explaining the Caucasus; and Discovery Channel’s Seven remarkable people from Russian Federation with Magomedkhan and his natural dyed carpet production enterprise representing the Russian Caucasus.

Chechnya remained the elephant in the living room. Ever since the repulsed invasion of 1998 there had been an additional tension in Daghestan. In the whole world where there is Islamist terrorism, Daghestan is virtually the only country which has almost eliminated the Wahabi/Taliban/Al-Qaida threat. It is because Daghestan is made up of psychologically strong moderate Naqshabandi Sufis who can stand up to the Islamists far better than the ‘moderate’ Islamic ‘communities’ in other countries, which lack leadership and a focussed voice. This is backed up by massive Russian forces. There are frequent road blocks in place, even if not always operative. On a local Constitution Day on 26 July the authorities had organised a rock concert in Revolution Square, still presided over by a statue of Lenin. The OMON special police militia had been flown in and bussed in from Volgograd, and in Makhachkala every car was stopped and searched. It didn’t make the news, and I was told that it was a common occurrence. Our ex-officer driver passed through quickly, mainly eliciting a request for where he had obtained his sun-shaded windscreen from. Any attack on the televised rock concert was avoided. However soon after on July 27 the moderate deputy mufti Magomed Albogachiyev and his driver were killed by an explosion in Makhachkala. Magomedkhan said that he was a popular man with many friends. By August 3 five militants had been killed and three arrested in separate operations in Makhachkala and Sergokala, a local police spokesman said. There is an apparent contradiction where women can walk alone in the dark streets at night, but officials are targeted by extremists who wish to destabilise the region. We visited OVIR to register my arrival and we were treated politely and relatively quickly, even though we were sent outside to make some photocopies. It is not usually so simple for the locals. Magomedkhan a trained sociologist-ethnographer had also gained experience in this process during the past two months of delays.

Daghestan’s prosperity is relative to its poverty a decade ago, but it is still one of the poorest places in Russian Federation. Its current prosperity is a sort of delayed and seemingly reluctant reward from Putin for not supporting the Chechens when they invaded in 1998, and in general submitting and cooperating with Russian rule. The boom only began in 2003. On 15 July 2005 Putin had briefly visited Derbent, the oldest inhabited city in the Caucasus and Russia – the first Russian or Soviet leader to visit Daghestan in living memory. He also pledged half a billion dollars to be spent on strengthening the southern border with Azerbaijan, a perceived gateway for arms and drugs trafficking, money laundering and terrorist infiltration.

I was told that in 2007 the complicated business regulations, which were in consequence open to official extortion, were being simplified. In particular it would be simpler to register a new business without paying a year’s projected sales as an advance tax; and one overall tax would be charged instead of several. If it happened, in concert with air and rail routes being reopened in Chechnya and an increase in ease of travel in the region, prospects looked to improve.

Author – Robert Chenciner

“The Georgians have built a funfair in the neighbouring village, I can see the ferris wheel from my balcony”, says 20 year old Alik Gassiev.

There are also rumours of a hotel, a fitness centre and a swimming pool being built on the nearby village. In any case, there’s bigger certainty about the brand new cinema, this one very close to Alik’s house.

But Alik lives in Tskhinval, the capital city of the non recognised state of South Ossetia, and the only cinema in the area is in Tamarasheni, one of the handful of villages still under Georgian control within South Ossetia. Both Tskhinval and Tamarasheni are more than just close to each other: it’s as simple as a checkpoint blocking Stalin Street, Tskhinval’s main avenue.

The South Ossetian soldiers in grey camouflage won’t lift the barrier unless you are a member of the Russian peacekeeping troops, or you happen to live in the couple of houses that lay today in no man’s land. Looking is not forbidden, though, so you can see the straight road passing the Russians and the Georgians’ post. You can even spot that big yellow crane on the other side, and try to figure out what’s the whole construction thing about. That’s Tamarasheni: just at the throw of a stone, but still a world apart. The checkpoint will prevent Alik from going to the cinema today and there won’t be any Georgian couples strolling along Stalin Street either. Little wonder here, as it’s been like that for the last 15 years.

Today, both communities live divided by a number checkpoints like that one at Stalina, but also by a complex web of roads. Not content with the physical obstacles, they even have different time zones: Moscow’s one for the Ossetians, and Tbilisi’s for the Georgians. If there’s ever a chance to go to the cinema in Tamarasheni, it will be wise to remember that it’s always an hour later on the other side of the checkpoint.

With the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, Georgia, as well as many other republics from Estonia to Tajikistan, formally declared its independence from the Soviet Union. “Georgia for the Georgians” was Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s slogan, Georgia’s first president. The Ossetians didn’t fancy the idea of being citizens of a country whose president considered them as “newcomers”. Besides, they would be split from their fellow North Ossetians, who have remained until today as part of Russia. War erupted when South Ossetia broke away from Georgia with a cost of thousands of lives a displaced. Today the conflict is an open sore in relations between Georgia’s Western-backed government and its neighbour Russia. Moscow has peacekeeping troops in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Tbilisi accuses them of siding with the separatists.

Re-elected last January, Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili has a two-pronged approach. In a direct challenge to South Ossetian president Eduard Kokoiti, he has set up a rival government, led by Dimitry Sanakoyev, a former independentist prime minister who switched sides. At the same time, Saakashvili is funnelling large sums of cash into the cluster of villages inside South Ossetia that remain under Tbilisi’s control. “There’s a battle for hearts and minds going on” he says, very often.

“Tbilisi is making huge investments as the funfair and the cinema in the villages are under their control”, tells Alik “They want to split South Ossetian society, but I’m sure such a thing will never happen”.

The last episode in Tbilisi’s “charm offensive” was a gig last October by Boney M’s former member, Marcia Barret. As many of the improvements going on are in the handful of Georgian villages of South Ossetia, the concert also took place in Tamarasheni. Ms Barrett admitted there that she didn’t know much about the situation in South Ossetia, but that she felt “honoured to be invited to a peace festival”.

Needless to say, the Ossetians couldn’t get there. The train has been out of work for more than a decade, and checkpoints as well as “mono-ethnic” roads are all built on purpose. Alik’s help is most welcome when it comes to understanding the intricacies of South Ossetian roads. He uses a map, one of those which links both North and South Ossetia, and that are so popular in Tskhinval.

“The Trans-Caucasus highway built in the eighties to link Tbilisi with Moscow, is now closed, as it criss-crosses Georgian and Ossetian villages”, Alik says. “We fully depend on the Russian supplies we get from North Ossetia, so we built a by-pass road northwards on the west of the republic. The Georgians have built their own one on the east side that goes south towards Tbilisi”.

Such is South Ossetia today; that buildings are in a state of crumbling dereliction, where neighbours use different stairs and go out at different hours, with the sole purpose of not meeting each other.

From Stalina to Moscow
But there’s definitely much more than just a checkpoint to Tskhinval’s main avenue. You could walk from there along its two kilometres of avenue to stop at the bollards that mark the end of the stroll. Nonetheless, you should spend some time at the theatre square, Tskhinval’s very centre. The place owes its name to the theatre building, today roofless due to a recent fire. Next to it lays the Iriston hotel, the only hotel in the city. Floors one and three are visibly abandoned, so any tourist paying the visit to Tskhinval is supposed to sleep on the second floor. And that’s also where the city’s only internet café is, so despite the lack of comfort, the occasional visitor will still have the chance to check his e-mail while still in his slippers.

But not every spot in the centre is in a state of crumbling dereliction. There’s a nice park devoted to Kosta Khetagurov, the father of Ossetian literature, which also hosts a statue of him handsomely dressed in a cherkesska. The Georgians beheaded the statue during the nineties war, but the first man to write poetry in the Ossetian language eventually got his head back when the conflict was over; for sure, a much easier and cheaper task than giving the theatre a new roof.

Theatre square is where the locals of all ages meet, mainly around the circular Soviet-styled modernist fountain covered by a colourful mosaic. There’s no water running from it but the teenagers sitting on its edge are far more concerned about new tones for their mobile phones. Just nearby, a handful of pensioners comment on the fire interchange last week at the checkpoint between Georgia and South Ossetia, just 15 minutes’ walk from here. That is, in fact, the main conversation in the area as the cluster of concrete governmental buildings is just on the other side of the road. Next to them stands an imposing billboard displaying a picture from Independence Day’s celebrations: It’s a very interesting parade indeed, the participants, dressed in medieval costumes, are riding horses representing the Alans. Both north and south Ossetians proudly claim their ancestry; they call their land “Alania” and, what is more, they still keep this old Sarmatian tribe’s language alive: a lingo close to Kurdish and Farsi, which has survived as a real oddity in the middle of the Caucasus.

The knights in the billboard are carrying the three striped Ossetian flag (white, red and yellow), but also the Russian one. In fact, it’s difficult to find an Ossetian flag without a Russian one escorting it in South Ossetia. Both of them wave together in governmental buildings, the national bank, the post office, and even in some of those tiny shops where you can buy almost anything; from a screw to an onion; the shops they call magazin across the whole Soviet world.

But if there’s been a day where both flags were almost as ubiquitous as on Independence Day, that was December the 2nd, the Election Day for the Parliament in Moscow. For yes, South Ossetia is officially Georgian land, but almost every South Ossetian holds a Russian passport. It gives them the chance to travel north and, of course, to vote too. Vladimir Putin’s party got an overwhelming victory among the South Ossetians who voted at the Russian peacekeepers’ compound. The huge numbers of posters with the former KGB leader’s face on Tskhinval’s walls were telling enough about locals’ vote intentions.

“Total independence is a utopia for us”, tells deputy minister of foreign affairs Teymuraz Dzodziev. “Our main goal is independence from Georgia, to join North Ossetians within the Russian Federation” explains a young bearded man in unaccented English. “We don’t suffer the embargo imposed to Georgians by Moscow, so we get all our supplies, our pensions… almost everything from Russia. Besides, almost every family here has a relative working in the north that helps to counterbalance the low local salaries. Those who can afford it have a son studying at the University of Vladikavkaz (North Ossetia’s capital city). If the Roki tunnel ever collapses, we can all say “bye bye” to South Ossetia”, admits the young vice minister.

If Russia is South Ossetia’s oxygen ballot, then the Roki tunnel is doubtless its “snorkel”: a 3.5km-long work of engineering that sections the High Caucasus range and connects both North and South Ossetia at an altitude of 3000m. Its flow of people, money and supplies is diverted afterwards to the by-pass road, of course.

Mixed couples
A sheepskin hangs from a tree next to Khetagurovo’s remarkable Georgian church, yet another reminder of how present the Pagan element is in the Caucasus. Despite somebody’s efforts to clear up the Georgian inscriptions on the temple’s solid stone walls, a good observer will still spot their traces. On the contrary, the hundreds of black graves on the snowy cemetery nearby are difficult to miss. The photographs of the deceased, many of them soldiers holding a Kalashnikov and a fiery look have been engraved on basalt. Around them, bottles of wine and vodka lie half emptied amidst the flowers left for the departed. The Ossetians might not be “100% Caucasian” for their neighbours’ standards but their graveyards hardly differ from those all over Georgia.

A handful of villagers gather on the strip of land that functions as the main square here, right in front of Khetagurovo’s only magazin. A pleasant chat under the winter sun, occasionally interrupted by an old Lada or a bus coming from the north. Unfortunately, none of those breaks the Vladikavkaz-Tskhinval journey here

“During Soviet times there was work for everybody. We wouldn’t care about anything”, says Vladimir Tarasov, a regular assistant to Khetagurovo’s busiest spot. “I never thought I’d have to struggle to survive after retiring. If it weren’t for the pension I get from Russia, I would starve to death”.

“Ossetians and Georgians lived together before”, adds Konstantin, Vladimir’s neighbour, “We would even marry each other. Actually, there were lots of mixed couples.”

It’s Saturday but the kids of Khetagurovo, are at school, the same as everybody their age in South Ossetia. A wide range of Soviet symbols still hang from the school’s walls: red stars, black and white photographs of the local heroes, and many other reminders of the Great Patriotic War (WW II). Only the South Ossetian hymn on a poster reminds us that there’s no Soviet Union any more, despite the disturbing presence of Stalin on a big canvas.

A bell marks the end of today’s classes and dozens of kids walk home under the threatening look of the Soviet leader. None of them witnessed Soviet times, not even its last years. Nonetheless, they all know that the man who bet the Fascists was an Ossetian, “despite her mother being a Georgian”.

“And how did Stalin’s parents get to meet each other?” may have asked one of these kids during today’s classes.

The same question might have been raised in the neighbouring Georgian village. Classes were over exactly an hour ago there.

Author – Karlos Zurutuza

“What’s this I asked myself, sitting up on my bunk. A mirage or the island of Tahiti? Or the heavenly lands of Samoa? That was Konstantin Paustovsky´s first impression when he first saw Abkhazia.

It was just after the Russian Civil war when the Ukrainian journalist and adventurer decided to move to the Caucasus from his native Kiev. The sea seemed to be the only feasible entry to Abkhazia, as roads and bridges had been blown up, but no one was allowed off the ship due to a quarantine that was being enforced against the typhus that was ravaging the neighbouring provinces.

Roads and bridges have been reconstructed more than once during the last eighty years but things haven’t changed that much. Abkhazia still remains blocked since the tiny republic seceded from Georgia back in 1993 after a brief but brutal war. Paradoxically enough, it is now the sea route which is impracticable. The former “quarantine” has been replaced by the current trade embargo from the Georgian government, who, of course, doesn’t recognise any new country in the Black Sea region.

Leaving the Abkhaz de facto border behind, the exuberant vegetation pays contrast with the emptiness of the place. Silence is abruptly broken by the helix sound of a Mi 24 Russian combat helicopter flying low. Cows graze alongside the road, indifferent to the scarce road or air traffic; or even lie down in the middle of it as if they knew that asphalt is doubtless a safer surface than the still heavily mined forests of this border region.

“Cleared by the HALO trust” proclaims blue panels at the entrance of every ruined village. The British NGO not only takes anti-personnel mines off the ground, but also advises the local kids against the risk of playing football outside the school yard. Too many apples on a tree or too much moss on a graveyard may indicate the same as the international yellow triangle with the black skull inside that warns against land mines. Another fact Gali kids are aware of.

The eleven o’clock bus to Sukhum waits at Gali’s tiny bus station, the first real place of any size after the border crossing over the Inguri River. Despite the Russian ruble being the ordinary currency in Abkhazia, Georgian laris still come in handy in this sector to buy a drink or a khachapuri (a cheese filled pastry) at the handful of kiosks nearby.

The road reaches the Black Sea at the small village of Ilori just before the ghost city of Ochamchire, to wind along the coast afterwards all the way up to Sukhum, the Abkhaz capital. An old sign in Cyrillic at the entrance still keeps the Georgian name of the city: “Sukhumi”. Nonetheless, name changing is scarcely surprising here, as this has been a major trading port for centuries. The original Abkhaz name is “Aqwa”, but it was also called “Dioscurias” when the Greeks colonised this corner of Colchis more than 2500 years ago. A restaurant in downtown Sukhum is also named after Sevastopolis, the name given to the city by the Genovese sailors back in the XIV century.

The ruins of the ancient prosperous trade centre lie just offshore, so, very unlike those ones on the surface, they can’t be visited. In the “new” Sukhum, families pick their way through rubble en route to the beach, as the concrete debris seems to pop up from the soil alongside the climbing plants that struggle to hide it. The “queen” of the ruins is doubtless a burnt Stalinist building, which was the Presidential palace during the Soviet times. Edvard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet minister of foreign affairs, turned Georgia’s second president following a coup, personally commanded his troops during the war but narrowly escaped afterwards from this besieged building. Today it remains as an appalling symbol of the Georgians’ defeat.

Very close to the ruined palace stands a mural of a triumphant Vladislav Ardzinba in camouflage gear, Shevy’s Abkhaz counterpart during the conflict, and Abkhazia’s first president. Also telling are the bullet holes, still visible on façades or even park statues, as well as the pictures of the “martyrs” that hang from the walls of a centric building nearby the renewed Hotel Ritsa. Unfortunately, very little remains of the former Hotel Abkhazia, once a luxurious resort opposite the now empty harbour. So far, it seems that priority is given to accommodate the dead soldiers at a centric park facing the sea. A mosaic of a smiling Lenin looms out of the tropical vegetation at the entrance of a Russian R&R compound, which “miraculously” escaped the bombing back in 1993. Small wonder as it were the Russian fighters who shelled the city from the air. Deliberate or not, Mir Prospekt, the Peace Avenue, got the first bomb.

Still, Sukhum is a city of exuberant vegetation, where citrus trees hang heavy with ripe oranges. New shops have opened during the last year along Mir Prospekt; a necessary ball of oxygen in this suffocating war-torn atmosphere. Despite the embargo they don’t look in short supply, probably thanks to the “illegal” cargo ships that arrive from Turkey, but mainly to the fluent ground transportation from neighbouring Russia, via Sochi.

Leaving the capital behind, the road meanders northwards along the semi-tropical coastline, pressed close to the sea by the Caucasus range. Eventually it climbs up the slopes in order to avoid being pushed into the water, offering a remarkable aerial view over Sukhum before reaching Novy Aphon (New Athos) Monastery.

Back in the twenties, Konstantin Paustovsky took the same journey by coach with his close friend, Isaak Babel. The beauty of the place was then eclipsed by a young Russian nun at the monastery hostel: “the apotheosis of woman”, according to young Babel. Soon afterwards, this complex, built by monks from Athos in the XIX century, would be turned into a Soviet holiday camp and severely vandalized for years.

Today, Novy Aphon is the “must see” of the Abkhaz Orthodox Church, as well as a major tourist spot alongside the Anacopia gorge nearby. The numerous Russian tourists come on a day trip from neighbouring Gagra, and both sites get particularly busy in those grey days when sunbathing is not an option. Small wonder, as Gagra doesn’t offer much apart from its long beach, which is, on the other hand, what the average tourist from central Russia has been longing for throughout the year. Still, the curious traveller heading for the hilly streets up the Caucasus slopes is likely to hear a dozen languages: from Armenian or Pontic Greek to the north Caucasian family; Adygean, Circassian, Chechen, Kabardin…and Abkhaz, of course; “a language spoken in guttural voices, somewhat reminiscent of an eagle’s cry” according to Paustovsky’s perception.

Unfortunately, despite Abkhaz being the only co-official with Russian, it is still an endangered language. Besides, it’s written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which has proved almost useless for the North Caucasian weird phonetic system: Hardly 3 vowels but 56 consonants. Even Fazil Iskander, Abkhazia’s best known writer, wrote his whole work in Russian, which is, in fact, the language everybody understands here.

Gagra’s outskirts offer many more surprises: Here a Greek graveyard, there a tiny Armenian church, or even a restaurant in the heights where the tourists can take a picture of themselves holding a Russian machine gun or even a bird of prey for just 50 rubles.

But nothing compares to the beauty of Lake Ritsa. The road that climbs up to almost 1000m is crowded with tourist buses that make several stops at the gorges and waterfalls on the way before they reach the lake. Then comes the moment when everybody marvels at the blue water, topped off by the 3256m peak of Agapsta. Most of them will sit down afterwards at one of the terraces nearby, but those feeling more adventurous may take up some high altitude boating to reach Stalin’s dacha on the opposite shore. The Georgian dictator realised here that dynamite proves more effective for fishing than a simple rod, so it was easy to guess for the local shepherds if they were being gifted by the most powerful man on Earth. Shopping is also a choice up here, with souvenirs ranging from Abkhaz flagged cups and key rings to T-shirts with the same logo – green and white stripes with a white hand on a red background.

Packed tours stop nearby the lake but the road keeps climbing up to the border with Karachai-Cherkessia, another North Caucasian republic within the borders of the Russian Federation. Other groups, yet very different from these, took the same road down from the neighbouring republic during the war. Northern Caucasus battalions composed of Circassians, Adygeans, Kabardins and Chechens crossed the high border post to help the Abkhaz fight the Georgians, and laid the first brick to build a North Caucasian Confederation flanked by the Black Sea and the Caspian. Amazingly enough, the recently deceased Shamil Basayev fought alongside the same Russians who would shell Grozny a year later during the first Chechen war. He commanded the so called “Abkhaz Battalion” despite its members being Chechen volunteers.

War is still latent in this corner of the Black Sea, especially since Georgian troops took control of the Kodori Gorge in upper Abkhazia last July. Tbilisi made the symbolic movement of installing what they claim to be the “true Abkhaz Government” back in motherland Abkhazia, or at least on the heights of it. Furthermore, Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakhasvili said during his New Year speech that 2007 would be a decisive year for Georgia.

For the time being, tourists still flock every summer to what is left of the former “Soviet Riviera”. Buses and marshrutkas run full with sunburnt tourists along the Abkhaz highway, but, by no means go any further than Sukhum. Small wonder, for whatever happens near the Georgian border belongs to another world, yet in the same tiny corner of the Black Sea.

Author – Karlos Zurutuza.

“Oh, I cannot take you to Darra,” the Afghan fellow insisted. He ran a clothing shop in our hotel during the evenings, and specialized in shepherding around random tourists during the daytime; though, at this juncture, tourists were few in Peshawar.

Darra had been labeled off-limits for the tourist crowd for some time, though a few intrepid backpacking types had managed to find themselves there through strokes of random luck – and the Pakistani police would single them out at one of the checkpoints on either end of the town, arrest them, extort a pile of cash from them, then call their hotel and demand they send a driver to pick them up. It’s a town most indicative of the wild frontier attitude in the Northwest Frontier Province, a real smuggler’s bazaar for the twenty-first century rather than simply the fake one just west of Peshawar that only sells Chinese made appliances at duty-free prices.

So, we decided to head elsewhere and see if another hotel/tour company could assist us in our mission to visit the famed and secret town of Darra. We were bent on a private driver, though guidebooks stated it was not entirely necessary: one simply needed to find a public bus heading south and say they were going onward to the town of Kohat, then get off at Darra. However this plan was not foolproof, as the tribal police inside of Darra did not take kindly to those who arrived without first paying them off.

We found an eager group of gentlemen at another hotel in the old town, call the Rose, where the hotelier spoke English fast and furiously – chastising our countries’ governments, going on about Canada and England and Iraq, we sat and drank the sweetened green tea of the region while waiting for their fixer to arrive. He was a younger fellow, in his mid-twenties, attending university during the day normally and running off on occasion to assist stupid tourists in their mission to visit the sealed smuggling town of Darra. This was his home town, he said, and his tribe of origin – what the Afghan lacked was local connections that one who has grown up in Darra can offer. The price was not cheap for the region, at sixty US dollars – but he insisted it could not be negotiated, as the police needed to be paid off, both in the government regions and the tribal regions. Soon enough, away we went – and I was implored to take off my bright green western looking coat and look a little more….. local.

Darra is only twenty kilometers south of Peshawar, but the distance does not do justice to the complicated politics of the Northwest Frontier Province: made up of twenty-four tribal areas, crossing the internal border is like crossing a real border. Police have their checkpoints set up, and if they see tourists in a private car, you’re bound to get stopped. “Just tell them you were heading to Kohat, and never stopped at Darra,” he said. We nodded. I checked that I had a spare memory card for my camera, in case I needed to hand one over for confiscation – the blank one would go, naturally.

Rolling farmlands lined a well-paved road south of Peshawar, and soon we left the policed confines of the city limits and our guide/driver began putting his foot to the floor. The space in between the Peshawar canton and the tribal region five kilometres south was mostly lawless, a place unprotected by either tribal or state officials. Banditry was rife, he said, as the muddled administrative issues of who should follow up on a robbery in the area paralyzed most departments while emboldening criminals. It was rally racing all over again, though soon enough we passed through another checkpoint – the beginning of the Darra Adam Khel tribal region in Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan.

We had arrived in Darra, though our guide was hesitant to take us deeper into town. And aside from hash and guns and other exciting products for purchase, what made Darra such an attractive place? Well, it dates back to a hundred years ago – tribesmen in the area have a special proven talent for being shown the schematics for a firearm, and duplicating it exactly within five days. Their skills are widely renowned, and the quality of their weapons – at least for firing a few hundred rounds – is astounding. We were here to witness some of the last handmade, blacksmithed, guns on the planet.

I had expected some rustic black-powder weapons, but walking into the blacksmith’s shop proved that they were not interested in anything so ancient. No, they were busy replicating a Heckler & Koch nine millimeter pistol, complete with rifled barrel, full metal frame, beautifully manufactured wood grips and even a laser sighting device under the barrel! The quality was immaculate, and the smiths worked away at these things with just the most basic of tools – an electric buffer, a vice, and several tinker’s hammers. They were also busy replicating an MP5 submachine gun, with plastic frame and all. They offered to let us fire it – “just point it into the hills over there,” they said, and it fired immaculately.

I tried to press them on who, in fact, was buying such large numbers of submachine guns and pistols in this region. Who are their buyers? Who needs so many MP5s? They said that it was the local tribesmen, who supported the blacksmiths and their trade. Suspected Taliban insurgents? Not likely, they said – the range of these weapons is short, and Taliban need long range weapons to be effective against NATO Forces. Or do they?

Our guide showed us another workshop where the beloved AK-47 was being replicated, as well as a Beretta semi-automatic shotgun. The original Italian model would run you around five thousand US dollars, but here, they were selling this model for only three hundred and fifty. As well, there are more troubling weapons to be had in Darra – including pen guns, cell phone guns, knife guns – all of the reasons why it takes so long to get through airport screening these days. Rumour has it that when tourists visit Darra, the Pakistani police revel in catching them – they inevitably come back with a pen gun or two, a few ounces of hash, and are way up shit creek if they get caught with these things. Foreigners need permits to have firearms within Peshawar, though the laws are different in the tribal areas. They will let you buy one, no doubt, knowing that when the police confiscate it they will simply return it in the same condition as it was bought.

With our fun completed in Darra, and losing a bit of hearing firing off their guns, we headed back north – but first I swapped out my camera’s memory card with a blank one, remembered the story that we were in Kohat, and breezed past the police checkpoints. While Darra may be something of a taboo tourist spot that gets all the media attention, the insidious fact remains about Darra Adam Khel and the Northwest Frontier Province: all of Afghanistan’s major offensives originate near the border area with Pakistan. Are tribesmen simply buying these things for storage in their home? Who is buying so many automatic weapons?

The connection between Northwest Frontier Province and Afghanistan’s continuing insurgency with the Taliban is more than coincidental, and Darra, at the least, hints at a few answers for this.

Author – Sean Rorison

The war in Chechnya has the dubious distinction of being Europe’s longest running conflict. In August I travelled to the war torn republics of both Chechnya and Ingushetia with the Danish Refugee council (DRC) to photograph internally displaced people (IDPs), who have fled the conflict; and to see how the security situation in the region has improved, if at all.

I flew into the North Ossetian Capital, Vladikavkaz, far later than expected, as the flight had initially been turned back to Moscow, due to engine failure, which is not at all uncommon when flying domestic routes in Russia. I was the only foreigner listed of the souls onboard and many of the passengers, mostly Russian, regarded me inquisitively. An elderly woman from Vladikavkaz, who was returning home, having visited her daughter in Moscow, asked me where I was from and why I was going to the north Caucasus. I explained to her that I was going to Ingushetia and Chechnya to take photographs. “Why on earth do you want to go there?!” she said, “It’s such a horrible place”. I was asked this question many times throughout my visit.

As we descended into Vladikavkaz, I peered through my window and could just make out the faint line of the Caucasus Mountains through the haze. Some of the higher peaks were still peppered with snow from the last winter. Once we had landed, the doors were opened and I was overcome by just how hot it was. The mid afternoon sun was verging on 50 degrees Celsius and the heat off the tarmac, as I stepped from the plane, was like a blast furnace. The terminal stood off at a distance, shimmering in the heat like a mirage, a good 10 minutes’ walk away.

At the terminal, the security guards immediately stopped me and asked me where I was staying, and if someone was at the airport to pick me up. I pointed to an Ingush soldier on the other side of the X ray, who was holding a scrap of paper with my name written in Russian. They then scribbled my name and passport number down in a book, wished me a good stay, and handed my luggage over to me. I dealt with the remaining formalities with the Airport security and the Ingush soldiers, armed with the Kalashnikovs, escorted me off to their car.

The windows on their new-looking Volga were padded up with bullet proof vests, although I was permitted to wind mine down by just 3 centimetres in order to get a bit of fresh air, seeing as the air conditioning inside the Volga was struggling even to sustain a relatively cool 29 degrees. We drove out of the airport and turned left at the sign for Nazran, the capitol of Ingushetia. We sped along the road, zig-zagging between the gaping holes and dodging the occasional lump of concrete. I was to learn that driving in the north Caucasus is a bit like playing chicken – You can drive on the wrong side of the road as much as you like, so long as you can dodge the drunks and the oncoming traffic.

As we approached our first checkpoint, I noticed some people that had gathered by the roadside. They were arguing with one another over what appeared to be a head-on collision between a tractor and a small, red Lada. Needless to say, the Lada was now a total wreck, but there was no sign of the driver. My guards looked out and started laughing, as one exclaimed “welcome to Ingushetia my friend!” We passed through the checkpoint and eventually reached the DRC headquarters in Nazran, where I was greeted by everyone. Most of who were glad that I had arrived without too many problems. No sooner had I arrived, however, I was then driven back out of the compound and taken to my hotel in Vladikavkaz, ingeniously named “Hotel Vladikavkaz”.

The Hotel Vladikavkaz sits in an idyllic setting by a small footbridge over the river Terek; a setting that is a little incongruous with the grey, run-down housing blocks and mosque that stand nearby. Drab shops and restaurants, too, line the streets through the town centre, although the restaurants are, in fact, of a very high standard, yet exceptionally cheap. North Ossetian food is rich and varied, usually accompanied with a strong, green herb, and served with chilled, local vodka.

When I arrived at the hotel my personal guard, Yogi, greeted me at the doors and welcomed me in. My room was sparse and looked as though it hadn’t been used in months, yet it was sufficiently clean. The room maid appeared from her room, wearing an old nightie and asked for my room key. As pointless and inconvenient as this service is, I handed her my key and she shuffled back into her room. I went back to my room and crashed out.

The following day I was collected and taken back to Nazran, where I was informed that I was to go into Chechnya to photograph a psycho-social rehabilitation school for Children in Goyskoe, a small village south of Grozny. We set off on the road to Chechnya and passed through four checkpoints, where my driver simply showed his face and the guards waved us on. The fifth checkpoint was manned by a group of about fifteen Russian federal troops. They stopped our convoy and asked us to pull over on the side of the road. They asked for all of our passports and documents, so I handed over my documents to our driver who passed them to one of the Russian soldiers. After checking my documents and my passport several times over, they told me I was ok to go, and to wait in the back of the car until we were cleared for entry.

We waited in the blistering heat for the best part of an hour, while the Russian troops deliberated over whether or not they were going to accompany us; most of them, fiddling with their rifles, looked fairly bored and looking for something to do. After much fussing and time wasting, the Russians decided that they would follow us into Chechnya. “Bugger” I thought to myself, “This really wasn’t going to be easy.” We got in our cars and drove on to Grozny. We drove straight on through Grozny, sirens blaring from the police car at the front of our convoy. “Fucks sake!” I thought. Ordinary people looked on at us nervously from the side of the road as we barreled through town. I could smell fresh asphalt through the peep hole in my window, as we passed through yet another checkpoint. The guards at the checkpoint saluted me, everyone in the car saluted back at them simultaneously just for a joke.

We finally reached the school later in the afternoon, and I photographed the children who immediately took a liking to me. They performed several traditional songs and dances for me and then invited me to join in. I politely declined and continued to take photographs. We spent a couple of hours at the school before the children waved us off down the road. Our next stop was in Samashki, another small town that took a battering during the first war. We made a visit to a women’s sewing workshop, which was set up to help people with post traumatic stress (PTSD). The women were very shy and most of my pictures show them hiding their faces.

By the end of the day, the Russians had decided to change the rules. Entry requests were to take ten days to process instead of three. That was about the same length of time I was to spend in the North Caucasus. Over the following days I spent my time in Ingushetia, photographing IDPs living in pre-fabricated box tents and in camps where people live more or less like rats in partitioned concrete rooms, underground with no windows, no heating and very little light. The IDP populations of both Chechnya and Ingushetia have largely been ignored by the international community, and now there are very few Aid organizations left in the region, as most have left as a result of failure to comply with strict regulations that the authorities have set.

On the last day of my visit, one of the Ingush guards and my personal guard, Yogi, escorted me back to Vladikavkaz airport. After I had said my farewells I handed my passport and documents over to a woman sitting at a small fold-out desk, who then cross referenced my name and passport number with a list that she had in a large book, and sent me through to the departure gate.

Since 2003, the Russian and Ingush authorities have been putting considerable pressure on internally displaced people in Ingushetia to return to Chechnya. Many IDPs are unwilling to return because of the ongoing security issues or simply because they have no homes or family to go back to. Despite the Kremlin’s assertion that the war in Chechnya is over, the north Caucasus remains a very unstable and violent place.

Author and Photographer – Lightstalker.

An irate Saakashvili looks towards the lost land on the other side of the river from a big mural. This is the Georgian checkpoint, even if Georgia doesn’t recognise any border here. Nor does anyone else.

——

After a brief but savage war back in 1992, the Abkhazians beat the Georgian troops with the help of the Russians and a group of volunteers from other Northern Caucasian republics, such as the recently deceased Shamil Basayev. Eduard Shevardnadze commanded his troops personally but narrowly escaped death afterwards in the siege of Sokhumi. Quoting Neal Ascherson, the British writer and journalist: “The Abkhaz were finally the owners of their own house. But the house had no roof and they wandered alone in its devastated rooms”.

It has been more than 13 years since Abkhazia became a de facto republic, only recognised by other non-recognised countries such as South Ossetia or the Republic of Transdniester. Still, the Abkhaz have managed to produce their own flag, car plates and 11 ministries. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues visas to those non-CIS travellers willing to visit the former “Georgian Riviera”, but hardly any can be found among the refugees gathering at the Georgian post.

In 1999, only those refugees from Gali, the region near the border, were allowed to return to their houses, or what was left of them. Today, some of them wait for the UN-sponsored white bus, whilst some others prefer to take the stroll across the Inguri on foot. Most of them are women dressed in black; widows with the pictures of their lost relatives hanging in badges on their black clothes. They carry bags full of goods, most of them bought at the street market in Zugdidi, the closest city to the de facto border. Zugdidi is the capital of Mingrelia or Samegrelo, which is how the locals call their region. It has its own distinctive language, Mingrelian, but unlike the Abkhaz or the Ossetes, Mingrelians never showed any will to secede from the Georgian mainland. Famous Mingrelians are Beria, the KGB leader, and Gamsakhurdia, post-Soviet Georgia’s first elected president. Today Mingrelia is a meeting point of refugees and armed people, who want a military assault on the breakaway region.

After a 500m walk, the silence is broken only by the running water of the Inguri. A metal sculpture of a gun with its cannon tied in a knot marks the beginning of the bridge, controlled by the Russian checkpoint. The alleged peace-corps, most of them soldiers under twenty, stare at the widows with boredom. Flaxen blond soldiers stand by their Kazakh looking mates by the barbed wire, which marks the corridor between the armoured vehicles. They also wear blue helmets, although not the UN troops’ sky-blue. In fact, everybody holds two passports: the Abkhaz, which is only valid inside the republic, and a Russian one, useful to sell hazelnuts on the Russian side of the border, or to study at a Russian university. Besides, the ruble is the currency of Abkhazia, and Russian language is co-official with Abkhaz. Needless to say that any attempt from Tbilisi to break into Abkhazia would be taken as an aggression on Russian citizens by Moscow. The MI-24 flying low over our heads makes it clear. Surprisingly, though, there’s no requirement to show your passport here.

More than 200.000 Georgians, most of them Mingrelians, fled Abkhazia after the war. Added to the humanitarian catastrophe, Georgia had to face the collapse of its tourist infrastructure and the consequent economic disaster – Abkhazia had produced 50% of the tourism benefits of the country. Besides, the majority of the hotels spread across Georgia were suddenly turned into “vertical refugee camps”, like the former Hotel Iveria: Once Intourist’s “Jewel of the Caucasus”, the Iveria, in downtown Tbilisi, became the symbol of the terrible living conditions of the refugees. From this tower block, the 800 or so refugees could enjoy the beautiful panoramic vistas over Tbilisi, yet they preferred to sacrifice these by closing their balconies with wooden planks. At a ratio of one room per family, balconies became an unnecessary luxury, which had to make place for a kitchen, complete with portable gas burner, an extra double dorm, or both.

Leaving the “peace” tanks behind, the refugees walk in silence across the long No Man’s bridge towards the Abkhaz checkpoint. One cannot help thinking of Glienicke´s bridge in Cold War Berlin; no spies exchange going on here, but still a spot between two blocks: Putin’s Russia and the “Rose Revolution” Georgia, backed by Bush. Maybe due to the newly-acquired importance of a bridge, which just linked two provinces not long ago, workers with straw hats paint the banister in blue and white, and fill the potholes with asphalt in the humid, hot weather. Some of the pedestrians recognise a friend or a relative among the workers and stop for a chat in Mingrelian, and a gulp of water. I wonder which part of the border sponsored the rehabilitation. Maybe it’s just the UN again, who wants the bus line as clean as it can get.

A couple of grey cows graze right below a bullet-holed panel that tells in Abkhaz, Russian and English that we are already in the “Republic of Abkhazia”. More barbed wire, two barracks, a tattooed soldier wearing a Stetson hat and another one leafing through a Russian porn magazine.
A third one with an Abkhaz flag sewed to his shoulder checks that my passport data matches that one in today’s visitors list.

“Dabai”, he says in Russian, “go ahead”.
Not “welcome to Abkhazia”, no football chat, no pleasantries. Maybe it’s just too hot.

Taxi drivers gather next to their Lada Zhigulis. Just nearby, a white “Marshrutka” with a “Gali” signal on the dashboard gets filled with refugees in black, carrying the images of the dead.

Author – Karlos Zurutuza

When Claudius Bombarnac, Jules Verne´s imaginary hero in The Adventures of a Special Correspondent, arrives at the Apsheron peninsula on the shores of the Caspian he is appalled by the pollution, but thrilled at the same time by the naphtha that seeped out of the ground.

——-

“A marvellous phenomenon indeed! Do you want a light or a fire? Nothing can be simpler; make a hole in the ground, the gas escapes, and you apply a match. That is a natural gasometer within reach of all purses”

Map courtesy of ICG.org

Despite Verne’s concern, nobody has ever paid much attention to ecology in this part of the world. Sumgayit, Baku’s neighbouring town 40kms north of the Apsheron peninsula bears brutal witness to this. Sophisticated Bakunians occasionally laugh at Sumgayit locals; “they dry wool in the middle of the street!” some say. But textile handicraft is doubtless the least to worry about in the city once designed to be one of the biggest petrochemical complexes in the whole Soviet Union. Housing was easy to get here, so this village of 4000 souls in 1940 turned into today’s concrete-tower city of 270.000 people.

The main goal of “Azerbaijan’s pride” was to maximize low-cost production, so the nomenklatura cared very little about the wastes being dumped into the air, into the sea and onto garbage heaps. Despite the region’s “generous” government providing milk, cheese and meat to those workers in factories where toxicity was extreme, the environmental disaster had direct consequences in cancer mortality rates and premature-born babies, many of them with genetic defects as well. It’s not by chance that the city that once held the world record for infant mortality has got a separate section of its cemetery for children, many of them with severe malformations, according to the portraits engraved on their tombstones.

Travellers still eager to pay the visit will find marsrutkas aplenty leaving for Sumgayit outside Baku´s 20th January metro station. It’s just an hour’s drive northwards across the Apsheron peninsula during which the collective taxi stops whenever and wherever the passengers wish.

The greens provided by Baku city centre’s trees are substituted by the greyish thicket once in the outskirts. Verne had already pointed out that only the wormwood, the plant from which absinthe is made, survived in this barren land beaten by the winds, so Bakunians had to wait until the Nobel brothers started pumping oil here to get to enjoy the trees and the parks that cool down the city still nowadays. The story tells how the first Swedish oil tankers were filled with tons of fertile soil on their way back to Baku after cruising the Volga; a remarkable example of sustainable development, which unfortunately Exxon, BP and the rest of their heirs are not willing to follow in any way.

The feeling of movement comes from the continuous interchange of people in and out the mini-bus, as Baku´s outskirts couldn’t be more monotonous under the grey concrete towers called “Stalinska”, “Kruschevska” or “Breznevska”, named after the man ruling the Empire at the time. Actually, post-Soviet cities’ outskirts look exactly the same, from the Caspian shores to those of the Pacific coast.

The view from the hill before Sumgayit couldn’t be more appalling: The familiar mass of concrete, but this time surrounded by rusty pipes, rusty chimneys and rusty oil derricks here and there, many of them standing alone in the middle of a black puddle. Anyhow, Sumgayitans probably get used to it from an early age as rust also covers the swings for the children downtown.

But the city has some pleasant areas too, like the open air-market at the city centre, whose colourful display of fruits and vegetables helps to break the monochromy of the place. From there, the waterfront can easily be reached through the Sulh (peace) Avenue, which leads to Sumgayit’s two sole pieces of art just before the beach: the “Dove” sculpture, and the Nagorno Karabagh martyrs´ monument. Both made of concrete, the first still has a certain modernist charm, but the latter looks more like a rocket launched by resentful Armenians from the very heart of Nagorno Karabagh, willing to avenge the pogroms the local Armenians suffered here back in 1988. Armenians would also stick to the ethnic cleansing of Azeris and Kurds during the Karabagh conflict, hence the thousands of refugees from the war-torn region spread out all over the country, including Sumgayit.

Two rows of stairs help us leave the war memorials behind and make our way to the beach, beaten by the Jazri, the onshore wind. Looking towards the sea, one cannot help think of the strategic place this country has on the world map: Turkmenistan and Central Asia to the east, Russia to the north and Iran to the south. Some may say it is part of Europe; some others consider it the gate to Central Asia. President Ilham Aliyev, the last of the Aliyev dynasty, in power since time immemorial, goes even further and promises his people a “New Kuwait” for the near future. But plain Azeris hardly get to see any benefits of their “black gold”, most of which runs across British Petroleum’s Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipe – almost 2000 Kms long, running across the Caucasus and Eastern Turkey to reach the Mediterranean.

The long beach also gets its dose of rust, present on football goals and kiddies’ swings; on a big wheel that could be a replica of that one in the ghost town of Pripiat, near Chernobyl; and also in a wrecked ship that marks the end of the stroll.

Even if ecology has dramatically improved after the breakdown of the most poisonous factories during the economical discord of the early nineties, the majority of sewage here is still dumped into the sea unprocessed, turning the Caspian shoreline into a biological “dead zone”. Oblivious of this fact (or maybe not) Azeri tourists, longing for the sea, flock to the Caspian beach resorts during the summer season; something that the famous visionary French writer would never have been able to predict.

Author – Karlos Zurutuza

Vince Gainey recently returned from a two-week mission to Pakistan-administered Kashmir to conduct an assessment for a humanitarian aid agency on provision of health services to earthquake survivors.

For any of you living in a cave since last year, on October 8th 2005 at 08:50 a category 7.5 earthquake with an epicentre in Pakistan-administered Kashmir struck the region. In Pakistan, India and Afghanistan over 73,000 people lost their lives and up to 3.3 million lost their homes, and now live in tent cities around what is left of major towns, such as Muzaffarabad and Balakot and Srinagar in India.

I spent two weeks around Muzaffarabad, the regional capital of Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, the region referred to locally as Azad (free) Jammu and Kashmir, or AJK. I was also taken by helicopter up to the Neelum valley, north west of Muzaffarabad and close to the disputed line-of-control with Indian-ruled Kashmir – one of most heavily militarised regions in the world, and the site of a major military standoff between these two nuclear powers.

This area, close to the line-of-control (LOC), is normally off limits for foreign visitors, but the pressing need to get assistance to earthquake survivors has meant that military forces on both sides of the LOC have relaxed access regulations sufficiently to allow the aid operation to proceed unhindered. In fact one of the remarkable things about this situation is the role and co-operation of the military on both sides and the vital function their capacity to heavy lift has been in providing emergency relief to the earthquake victims.

I have to admit to a great sense of shock on seeing the extent of the devastation caused by the quake. Huge swathes of the city of Muzaffarabad are in ruins. In particular the Government buildings failed to withstand the shock and most were left derelict, taking with them students, doctors, police officers, prisoners and prison warders alike, clerks and administrators. In fact anyone caught sitting at their desk on the morning of 8th October in Muzaffarabad, was doomed to become a victim. Most poignantly, over 17,000 children were killed in the quake in Muzaffarabad. The city is a children’s graveyard and you can tell it in the silence of the empty spaces; the lost voices, the lack of play, the sadness in parents’ eyes.

Boarding an Mi8 helicopter for the trip into the mountains was an exciting, albeit slightly unnerving, experience. There have been several aid choppers lost in this region since October and with fickle weather, overworked machines and rugged mountain terrain, I could see why. All went well though and as we flew over the city, the multicoloured splashes of the tented camps told their own story of lost homes, lost lives and destruction. A huge raw gash in a mountain overlooking the city was also startling evidence of a whole mountainside that sheared off at the earthquake epicentre, sweeping away homes and blocking and diverting the Neelum River, down below.

I spent a few days at a field hospital that had been set up at 5,500 feet on a mountainside above the valley. While extraordinarily picturesque, with snow capped peaks all round, the landscape was also treacherous and at night we could hear the rumble of landslides, and by day watch the clouds of dust, another section of mountain fell away into the valley.

Earthquake survivors were still coming in for treatment, but four months since the quake, most of the critical trauma injuries have been treated and the medical teams are back to dealing with more routine medical conditions such as illnesses, pregnancy, childbirth and the occasional accident. There are a lot of traumatised people out there though who have lost all that they had put together in their life, and it was heartbreaking to see these tough, mountain people breaking down with the despair of their losses.

I just missed the ‘cartoon’s protest on the way through Islamabad and was careful not to broach politics when in polite conversation with Pakistanis or Kashmiris. This is still too much of a raw and sensitive subject at the moment and I felt my own opinions would not be understood or accepted too readily by a people with an entirely different cultural mindset. I also thankfully just missed the visit of Dubya, although by the time I left, Islamabad was already crawling with crewcut marines and suspicious looking men in dark suits and shades, talking into their lapels.

I Expect I will be back in a couple of months to get the ball rolling there on our own project work. Watch this space.

Author: Vince Gainey.

Horsing around with the French, Americans and Swiss in a little-known corner of the world.

From Here to There and Back Again: Horses and Cultural Ruminations in Kyrgyzstan

Below the snow-covered slopes of eastern Kyrgyzstan, the horses ran in the At Chabysh races that afternoon in early November with all of the power and the grace and the beauty of all of their forebears. So much in the foreground of human cultures has changed. But the horses and their willingness to do the bidding of their riders remain a constant. A constant, that is, in the development of empire and trade along the Silk Road. A constant, that is, in the fledgling new businesses of ecotourism that have been launched in the post-Soviet period. A constant, that is, in transportation in a country where only 10 percent of households own cars. And a constant, that is, in the tending of livestock and in people’s diets.

Who, though, were the many hundreds of people who patiently watched the races and then the awards ceremonies that ran for hours and hours through the late afternoon? What motivated a group of musicians and horse people from the northern Rockies to come halfway around the world to showcase the cultures of the American West? Why had an ad hoc group of about 25 French people volunteered and paid their way to Kyrgyzstan to help organize these races? Why is Switzerland so far in the lead among NGOs working in Kyrgyzstan?

Several days before the races began some of us had broken away from the preparations to ride on the slopes above the racecourse. During the morning of that day I had been involved in the set up of a photo exhibit that tenderly portrayed cowboys and rodeo riders at work. Others in our delegation did a sound check of the equipment to be used in a program of western folk songs that would be performed that evening. Another member of our group, Teresa Jordan, the greatly admired author of a memoir on ranching life, Riding the White Horse Home, had already done a slide show that morning depicting 30,000 years of horses in art.

The village that day, in which these events took place, was Tamga, a destitute small town above the treacherous and lightly used road that runs along the south side of Lake Issyk-Kul, a huge alpine lake in eastern Kyrgyzstan, into which the waters of the Tien Shan mountains flow. This particular spot had once been a resort for vacationing Soviet soldiers who stayed in bleak, multi-storied apartments in the town’s center about two miles above a dreary fenced-in picnic and beach area on the lakeshore. Nothing about the town or resort layout seemed inviting. And now that all of these facilities are closed and have rapidly fallen into disrepair, it was not at all clear how people make their living here, or why they would stay at all. Of course, people the world over tend to stay where they are, until circumstances like war or famine force them to make a change. The risk of losing what one has outweighs by far, for most people, the difficult-to-picture benefits of moving somewhere else and doing things that one can’t quite picture.

In Kyrgyzstan, the generalized but secure poverty of life in the former Soviet Union has been replaced by a market-based economy that is far more precarious, so it’s all but impossible to picture alternatives that open on to a better material future. Commonly, when a person goes trail riding in the western United States, they leave their day-to-day affairs behind and cross over into unpopulated areas, like the national forest or a wilderness area, where recreation and nature merge to give one the feeling of living sensually in a mythic present tense. But here where 60 percent of the people (versus less than 2 percent in the United States) derive their livelihoods from grazing animals and farming, the line between town life and nature is completely blurred.

In Barsko’on, a town of several thousand people, on a plateau between the mountains and the lake where the races were run, shepherds on horseback or on foot drive their small groups of cattle, sheep and goats out along the roads each morning onto the open ground at the edge of town that stretches away in all directions. There on the unfenced commons, shepherds spend their days moving their animals around in search of forage, returning to town after 5 pm and once again clogging the roads as the sun drops behind a distant ridgeline.

In November, there is still a slight feeling of repose, and this is when some of the great Kyrgyz distance races (since banned by the Soviets) were held historically. The harvest work is completed. The snows, which would soon make daily life so difficult and uncomfortable, wait patiently on the slopes above.

We rode our horses that afternoon for several hours, from the delightful, relaxing setting of middle fall to the sharply defined snow line 500 meters upslope. Over and over again I thought that we had come to the settlement edges beyond which no one else lived, but over and over again we’d turn the crest of a small knoll and find yet another dwelling nestled in a draw. The Kyrgyz that we saw that afternoon seemed both patient and attentive, their lives conspicuously influenced by the rhythms of their animals’ lives and the forceful progression of the seasons. As we rode by we nodded shyly at the people who stood outside their dwellings and watched us. But the gesture of contact, as far as it went, was miniscule. For surely we must have been as irrelevant to the day-to-day reality of their lives as a shepherd moving a flock of sheep along a distant ridgeline would be to passing motorists in the Rockies.

It was these qualities of patience and fortitude that we also intuitively observed in the people who came to watch the horse games and races that were held over the course of three days. People clearly enjoyed themselves. There was lots of laughter and conversation. But there wasn’t the restlessness in a crowd one would see in the West. And when an afternoon’s events concluded, people moved away much more slowly than their western counterparts would have done, racing to beat the traffic snarls.

But why were we, as people of the West, from France and Switzerland and the United States, there at all? If what I thought I saw in eastern Kyrgyzstan is linked to factors in the natural world that deeply influence how people there live their lives, where were we coming from environmentally and culturally? What are the deeply embedded aspects of our lives that draw us halfway around the world?

Self-referential inquiries like these shouldn’t be allowed to absorb too much of one’s attention. But the fact is that, like factions in a political party, we’d talk a lot among ourselves about the Europeans we got to know tangentially over the course of two weeks. And hopefully by describing the other outsiders, I’ll come around to some conclusions as to why we, the Americans, were there.

As for the French, they were the least ambiguous, the most dedicated. The leader of their group of racecourse volunteers was Jacqueline Ripart, a wiry woman in her 50s (I’d say) who has documented and collected DNA samples from horse breeds all over the world. It was she who decided several years ago to revive the traditional At Chabysh celebrations after the long interval during which they were banned by the Soviets. And it is she who’s leading a sustained effort to preserve the Kyrgyz horse breed before its characteristics are completely lost to crossbreeding.

Thrifty and powerful, the relatively small Kyrgyz horse is superbly adapted to life in the high mountains. Renowned for its energy and for its capacity to travel for days without food, it is undoubtedly one of the world’s first or original breeds from which all other modern horses descend.

Alongside their efforts to make a new society, the Soviets also wanted to develop an improved version of the Kyrgyz horse by mixing its bloodlines with thoroughbreds. They also slaughtered thousands of Kyrgyz horses after World War II, a documentary film by a Kyrgyz producer asserts. At this point in time it’s not clear what the Kyrgyz horse really is or isn’t in terms of its DNA profile. And the only criteria for entering the At Chabysh races were that the horses be smaller than thoroughbreds.

While the Americans played a lead role in bringing entertainment and cultural offerings to several villages in the vicinity of the races, the French focused completely on the horses, the races and the media work of documenting, in idealized romantic terms, everything that was going on. They didn’t appear to be more than politely interested in the cultural programming that the Americans brought in (… historically shallow, already familiar?) but they were obviously very respectful and very fascinated, as we were, by everything Kyrgyz.

As I looked through some French magazine takeouts on Kyrgyzstan and Jacqueline Ripart’s work that had been photocopied, several things stood out. One was that in France there are at least several very well done magazines, like Animan, Les Routes du Monde, that are dedicated to the subject matter of faraway foreign cultures. On the cover of an issue in which Jacqueline describes her work in Kyrgyzstan, a photograph shows two solitary camel drivers walking with their steeds in different directions across a sand dune in the Sahara. The ideas imparted by this photograph are that the human being stands alone in the world; that vitality comes from a natural world that is inhabited by those who are strong; by those who have not been corrupted by modernity and politics.

The beautiful photographs that appear in Jacqueline’s article portray the nomadic life styles and distant mountain residences of the Kyrgyz people. Nothing modern, like cars or radios, can be seen. These images could have been set 200 years ago.

The American version of this story would more likely have been built around photographs of pure, “unpeopled” nature. But more to the point – there wouldn’t be anything like an American version of this story. Beyond National Geographic and the publications that serve tightly defined recreational subcultures, like rock climbers for example, there are no magazines that would publish photo texts on remote foreign locales (… thank you, Polo’s Bastards).

One cannot help but admire the energy and curiosity that the French bring to cultures in remote settings. And even though this inquiry might be romanticized and self-referential at times and always, always, media attentive, it’s a life choice that produces much less of a drain on world resources than the choice to stay at home and immerse oneself, as Americans commonly do, in a bottomless materialism that passes for a way of life.

Understandably, the French people we met were not particularly interested in us. They weren’t bellicose or dismissive, but like many of France’s cultural heroes, the French who’d come out to Kyrgyzstan were straight ahead, unapologetic, completely specific in their own agendas for being there. Coming as they do from a culture that is renowned internationally for its sublime and aristocratic contributions to world culture, many modern day French people seem to look beyond France for a sense of renewal and self-affirmation. But perhaps surprisingly, the French are much less directly involved in helping the Kyrgyz via non-governmental organizations (NGOs), it appears, than the Swiss and Germans and even the Americans are. The Swiss in particular are very visible because Helvitas, the country’s largest NGO, directs its formidable resources to specific places and projects that it selects autonomously.

Kyrgyzstan, partly because it is mountainous, receives lots of aid in the form of the applied expertise that engineers, hydrologists, foresters, ecotourism consultants and others who work in alpine settings can offer. In all of the conversations that I had with Swiss people there, an emphasis on what’s really needed was apparent. In the same way that Switzerland follows its own path in Europe, the Swiss projects in Kyrgyzstan are independently chosen and funded with the awareness that resources, along with what can be actually be accomplished, must be tightly defined.

For example, Bernard Repond, the long time Director of a summer school near Gstaad, travels to Kyrgyzstan several times each year to monitor the construction of bridges that will open the high country to herders, an operation paid for by an NGO that he launched six years ago. In 1999, while trekking in the Terskey-Alateu Mountains, south of Lake Issyk-Kul, Repond encountered whole drainages that were inaccessible by people living nearby, because bridges allowing access had fallen into disrepair.

“For many years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody even knew where the villages were,” Repond said. “The villagers themselves were waiting for the government to repair the roads and bridges. And in the meantime they [were overgrazing] the areas near their summer encampments that could be reached.”

Using powerful winches that villagers would not have access to, Repond realized that bridges all over the country could be repaired or built from scratch for as little as $5,000 apiece. Local people could be paid to do the work under the supervision of a technically trained person.

When Repond went to international aid organizations like the Central Asian Mountain Project, he found that expensive studies on the grazing potential and ecology of high mountain pastures were being done. But when he pointed to the far simpler work of repairing bridges, an official admitted to him that the issue of access had never been identified.

“This pattern among large NGOs of studying problems and discussing them in the setting of international conferences absorbs much of the money that’s available for project work in Kyrgyzstan”, Repond said. In Karakol, a small city on the eastern end of Lake Issyk-Kul, below the 7,000 meter peaks of the Tien Shan range, he had counted, at one point, no fewer than seven NGOs simultaneously studying the ecotourism potential of the region. “They are all very busy. They’re all doing reports,” he said, “and yet in Bishkek (the capital city 300 miles away) in this, the 15th year of independence, there is still no single office in the center of the city where a visitor to Kyrgyzstan can go for maps or basic information.”

This can-do quality of the Swiss, their realism and careful deployment of resources runs through much of the work that they support in Kyrgyzstan. As for the Americans – what is the personality of their involvement? Beyond the heavy-handed geopolitical aspirations of the US government to maintain a military presence in this strategically significant part of the world, there is a growing and very active community of missionaries who are funneling resources into impoverished villages. The work of modern day missionaries is much less based on counting converts than it is on the activist tradition of working with the poor. But in spite of this, the work of missionaries is very controversial. It also demonstrates how Americans tend to subordinate their efforts and labor to larger causes. And it follows, surely, that our ad hoc group of musicians and horse people could be seen dispassionately by an outsider as the embodiment of something specifically American.

But what really was distinctly American about our participation in the At Chabysh festival? For me, it’s hard to separate our purposes in being there from the ideas of Candra Day, a remarkable charismatic woman in her 50s who

several years ago developed an arts center in Jackson Hole that cost $12 million and now somehow had cobbled together the funding that was needed to send our delegation of 13 Americans half way around the world.

For Candra, and for all of us who are swayed by her vision, the arts can be a doorway to honest, long-term relationships. “The ‘delight factor’ embedded in the arts is a powerful force for the good and is freed from the interferences that economic and political pressures sometimes produce,” she said. “And mountain cultures have lots to teach one another.” There’s a natural curiosity and a kindred spirit that ties mountain peoples together on a planet where only 10 percent of the human population lives above 1,000 meters. And in places like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is the wealthiest single county in the United States, there’s an opportunity to raise money and use it to get things done in parts of the world that desperately need infusions of capital.

So this was why we were there. As Americans, we tend to be drawn to agendas that are larger than ourselves. We’re embarrassed by many of the policies that our government pursues in our names. We want to go further into foreign cultures than pleasure-based tourism allows. And perhaps in a subtle way we feel guilty (or at least awkward) about the very large amounts of wealth that flow into our lives from places unseen. It’s marvelous, on the one hand, that we can do the simplest things for one another in the United States and be so amply rewarded for the exercise of such ordinary talents. But it’s also vaguely apparent that there are lots of people living in other places who probably work just as hard as we do and who are just as capable, who earn pennies compared to our dollars.

The opportunity to go out into the world and to share some of our cultural traditions would have been the idea that drew our polyglot group of “cultural ambassadors” together. On the ground, none of this was particularly clear. All of us appreciated the assignments that gave structure to our meanderings, and many of us probably doubted that we were more than marginally qualified to do the tasks that we had been assigned.

In other words, it was life as usual, albeit in a very unusual and distant place.

A Kazakh Nomads’ expression of equine affinity states, “Kazakhs are born in horses”.

Perhaps that’s going a little too far, if taken literally, but there’s undeniably a very close alliance between man and beast in this vast tract of Central Asia.

The present Republic of Kazakhstan was created in 1991 on the dissolution of the USSR and is about the size of Western Europe, with a population of some 15 million people. In the southwest of the country laps the shores of the northeast end of the Caspian Sea; to the east is the Tarim Basin, and the Altai Mountains are to the north. It’s a region traditionally inhabited by nomad herders, but it is now rare to see the traditional gher (felt round-tent) settlements, as most of the nomads were settled under Soviet rule. There is still reputedly some transhumance between summer and winter pastures for some herders, however.

If we take a long stride from nomad life into the present day, we see the survival of horsemeat as a luxurious food in the Republic of Kazakhstan. In September 2004 I found myself there as an OSCE election observer when, as my official work excluded celebratory drinking, I grasped the opportunity to pursue a sober study of this neglected subject. I visited two yamarka (outdoor markets) – one in Almaty, the former capital and largest conurbation; the other 500km north in Stepnogorsk (Russian for ‘town on the Steppes’), a former closed Soviet town with notable levels of uranium, rare metals and gold.

Kumis (fermented mare’s milk) is perhaps the best-known horse product from the Steppes of Central Asia. In a restaurant in Astana I drank repeatedly from a palm-sized bowl of kumis. Once the sickly smell was put aside by application of my mystic sensory controls it tasted better and better, with a tang vaguely reminiscent of some highland malts.

The author with two Horse-Rearers.

Not satisfied without sight of meat on the hoof, I diverted our driver 10 km into the Steppe at Karabulak early on our return route from Stepnogorsk to Astana, the new capital that boasts unique Stalinist Post-Modernist architecture. The vast and endless Steppe has some forestation of small birch trees near the road and then opens out to rolling pasture and scrub. In the small area that I observed it was not the virgin desolate place of my imagination, but criss-crossed with a bewildering number of tracks and spattered with lakes of unknown radioactivity, linking the odd railway wagon shelter and a variety of bits of concrete, spun off from the ruins of kolkhoz State farms. Soviet civilization had left its mark and passed by.

We befriended Bukpeshev Sahintay Olzhabayuli, the horse-rearer in the village of Karabulak, where he looked after the co-operative’s 700 head of horse. The bad news was that a rustler had stolen 50 the previous night, which doubtless accounted for not a horse to be seen when we drove half an hour into the Steppe. His son-in-law uttered that timeless apology in broken Russian as we gazed sharp-eyed about the distant horizons, making horse noises; ‘The horses were here two days ago’.

There was also no glimpse of the two teams of horse-ranchers, each with three men, who alternated three days and nights on and off. I gave up and returned. Of course, no sooner had we returned to the asphalt when we saw another herd of horses, about 200 strong, by the road. Recalling the Horse Whisperer movie, I leapt out, making horse small talk. I was allowed near but they were reluctant to stay for a close-up photograph.

At the two markets, I met, questioned in Russian, and photographed my informants; all female horse butchers, sausage makers and vendors, and their array of products. In Stepnogorsk I was assisted by Kanat Ibrayev, a local post-graduate who had been our official OSCE interpreter. He was one of 12 Kazakhs who had spent a year in an American University, and now works in planning in the Department of Transport in Astana.

So, what does it taste like?
The extremely lean cuts are rich dark and deep-red meat, slightly sweet, redolent of venison but much more tender. Because the horses are Steppe reared, in what must be an original source of the term ‘free range’, there is little fat. In the great intestinal sausage (below), where two thin strips of meat and fat, cut from the edge of the length of the rib cage, are stuffed with crushed garlic salt and pepper – there the fat tastes like the richest butter. My Caucasian Russian friend, who had survived his Soviet Military service there, thanks to the horsemeat, dared me to ask “Is the large intestine preferable to the small intestine for sausage making”; “Of course (stupid question)” was the Almaty woman sausage-maker’s tart reply.

I was hoping that the Kazakh language had a hundred words for horse as the Inuit, Sami and Nenets all reputedly have for snow, but there are far fewer. Breeding, eating, racing, riding and working horses are all distinct animals. For example a breeding horse is not for eating, and, conversely, a horse destined for the dining table, will not be used for breeding.

Stepnogorsk market words for both breeding and eating horses are:
Meren: A gelding.
Zhabakhý (PRON: zhuh-BA-khuh): Up to one-year-old of both sexes
Tay: One- and two-year-olds of both sexes.
Kuman: A three-year-old male.
Bital: A three-year-old female.
Biye: A three- to four-year-old male and female.

At the rear of the hectare-size market, arranged in rows of wooden stalls, was the covered, refrigerated meat section. Through plastic cold doors there were about 40 stalls in a clean and chilly room. Only one sold horsemeat (and beef). The others sold beef, chicken, and mutton. In Astana market we were told that there are two separate rooms for storing meat; one for horse, beef, mutton and chicken, the other for pork and pork products.

We were helped by a partner of the horse stall, Ainagul Sadvakasova, whose daughter Aigul was studying foreign languages. In English she recommended The Aelita Café, round the corner, for the best horse dishes in Stepnogorsk. Unfortunately it was closed.

On their display table, amongst other meats, were four raw cuts arranged in a square – çürek (heart), baür (liver), kharim (stomach), and öpke (lungs). They also had Khazi (the main rib) and the mane, a beehive-shaped cross-section of meat and fat, both special delicacies. For the most respected guests there is an oval fillet from the chops, called omirtkIa. The oblong rump is called kesekyet, which means ‘meat to be divided’, and is used in bestirmek, the delicious preserved meat which is served sliced cold.

There was various sausages, ready for cooking, called shruzikI and kIarta (the small intestine, stuffed with chopped offal). And, of course, the great intestinal sausage (5-6cm diameter), where two thin strips of meat and fat are cut from the edge of the length of the rib cage and stuffed with crushed garlic salt and pepper. A 60cm length is then tied off, cooked, and eaten cold. When I commented that not all parts of horse were on display, they looked me in the eye and told me “we eat all of the horse!”

Yesil (Green) Bazaar, Almaty. The horsemeat was sold under a sign saying “Konili”, a separate part of the meat section of the market, which was as clean and spotless as Stepnogorsk. Each meat section displayed a small, tin flag, featuring a silhouette of the appropriate animal. I was reminded that Mareshchal Kutusov, after the battle of Borodino, repeatedly intoned that Napoleon’s army would be eating horseflesh in Russia before the winter of 1812 was out. He used the words “loshadinoye miase”, meaning beast-of-burden, as opposed to konili, meaning noble steed.

To crosscheck and add to what we saw and heard, I had the bible of Kazakhstan cooking – The National Cooking of Kazakhs, (Natsional’naya Kukhnya Kazakhov, a generous gift from Mary Springer who was then head of public affairs for Mobil (now Exxon) in Kazakhstan. Inside the book I found a contemporary photograph of a mountain summer encampment of two ghers with about eight horses. The photograph, I learned, had been slipped inside by the Kazakhs, who gave Mary the book in the first place. The first food section is devoted to horsemeat. There are captioned photos of cuts, recipes and serving dishes. Most favourite are cold dishes of horseflesh: kazy, shuzhuk, zhaya, zhal, karta and so on.

The kazy sausage recipe shows that the raw sausage is dried, boiled or smoked. If drying, it is better to dry kazy by warm weather, hanging them out for a week in a sunny, aired place. For smoking, it is best to place kazy in dense smoke at 50-60 degrees C, for 12-18 hours and then dry them for 4-6 hours at 12 degrees C. If boiling, Kazy should be boiled for 2 hours in a broad vessel on slow fire. The kazy should be pricked in several places to avoid bursting during boiling. Kazy are served cut into layers and arranged in a circle on a large plate with onion rings and green peas.

Shuzhuk is made of equal weights of horsemeat and suet. The meat is rubbed with salt and kept for 1-2 days in a cool place at 3-4 degrees C. Guts are washed and kept in salt water. The meat and fat are cut into small pieces and stuffed into the gut with salt, pepper and greens. The ends are then tied and the sausage is hung in a cool place for 3-4 hours. Shuzhuk is then smoked at 50-60 degrees C for 12-18 hours and then dried for 2-3 days at 12 degrees C. Dried or smoked shuzhuk is boiled on a low fire for 2-2 ½ hours and served in thin 1 cm slices on a plate, decorated with onion rings and greens.

Zhaya is made from the horse’s hip. The upper muscular layer with fat is cut off and salted. Then it is dried, smoked and boiled. Zhaya is served in slices decorated with greens.

Zhal is an oblong accumulation of fat in the undercrest part of the horse’s neck. It is cut off with a thin flesh layer, rubbed with dry salting mixture and put in a pan for salting. Then it is dried for 10 hours. Zhal can be smoked and boiled. Before boiling zhal is soaked in cold water; then it is boiled on a slow fire for 2 hours. Zhal is served both hot and cold, cut in slices and decorated with onion rings.

Karta – not for the faint-hearted. The thick part of the rectum is washed, without removing the fat, and then carefully turned inside out so that the fat is inside. It is washed once more and then tied up at both ends. Karta can be dried or smoked. To dry karta it is covered with fine salt and kept in a cool place for 1-2 days, then dried out. Karta needs to be smoked for 24 hours and then dried for 2-3 days. After washing it well karta is boiled for 2 hours on a slow fire. It is served cut into rings and decorated with green pepper or dill.

Sur-yet. Horseflesh is cut from bones, tendons, cartilages, and the fat removed. The meat is cut into rectangular pieces 0.5 to 1 kg each, salted and kept in a cool place for 5-7 days. Then it is dried for 10-12 hours. Sur-yet is smoked like zhaya and zhal and consumed only boiled. Before boiling it is soaked in water. Sur-yet is boiled for 2 hours on a slow fire and served cut into thin slices with onion rings and greens.

For those wishing to rush out to their nearest Kazakh market and stock up on horsemeat; In Stepnogorsk, hot smoked, cold smoked, wind-dried and salted horse all cost 1600 tengis per Kg (250 tengis = £1 sterling), while fresh meat costs 600 tengis per Kg for all meat, where lean and fat were considered as equal. In Almaty the raw Great Sausage costs 500 tengis per Kg; raw meat costs 500 tengis per Kg for lean rump, and it’s 800 tengis per Kg for rib – more expensive because it included fat. Cured meat was more expensive, with salami at 800 tengis per Kg, and bestirmek at 1500 tengis per Kg.

A one- to two-year-old horse of 150 – 160 kg (dead weight) is slightly less expensive than the five-year-old horse 280 kg (dead weight), which is considered the better meat. It Almaty they said that a nine-month colt tasted even better. Like spring lamb or sucking pig, I suppose.

Bon appetite!

By Robert Chenciner with Kanat Ibrayev