To the Secretary

by Mary Thompson-Jones

  But the most unsettling custom was revealed when the travelers checked into their hotel. “Prostitution did not seem to be a discreet trade in Xilin. In the first hotel where we stayed, for example, a condom was thoughtfully provided in each hotel room, discreetly stashed in the cylinder of a toilet paper roll, with no mention of extra charges for use.” 2

  HALF A WORLD AWAY, officers from Embassy Paramaribo spent four days in a dugout canoe, determined to make contact with the Njuka Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves), who had not been visited by any embassy personnel for seven years. In pursuit of their goal, the officers happened upon a burgeoning illegal gold mining industry run by Brazilian and Chinese immigrants who had been exploiting a no-man’s-land with no Surinamese law enforcement or government presence.

  Their itinerary into the interior reads like a geography quiz: they went to Dritabiki, Manlobi, Stoelmanseiland, and Loka Loka—all villages along the Tapanahoni and Marowijne rivers. The dugout canoe was one of many challenges.

  As no suitable housing could be found in Manlobi, the second night’s destination and a village of about 1,000 individuals along the Tapanahoni river, Emboffs spent one night in a gold mining camp across the river from the village. The camp consisted of a bar, a restaurant, and a store which sold overpriced supplies. Some 20 Brazilians, 5-10 of whom likely were commercial sex workers, and a few Maroons lived on the site.3

  The informal gold mining and the environmental degradation it caused were the major discoveries of their trip. The officers saw hundreds of tracts of land mined for gold deposits washed down by rainwater from the slopes above, along with fifteen floating suction dredges excavating for gold in the riverbeds. The machines were operated twenty-four hours a day by Brazilians who paid royalty fees to the closest Maroon village. The officers carefully documented the widespread selling and use of mercury in the mining areas (a dangerous but cheap means of extracting the gold). Their concerns about mercury damage to drinking water sources made their trip useful for environmental as well as sociological reasons.

  South of Suriname, the Amazon and Andean regions offered equally enticing frontiers for embassy officers posted to Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. They evaluated economic development, prospects for ecotourism, environmental problems, and the status of indigenous people.

  Bolivia is undeniably beautiful, with fossils in Sucre, salt flats in Potosí, and rain forest in Pando, but government support to develop tourism in these areas is very limited. “The people in the government now aren’t from Pando—they don’t know the rain forest and it’s hard to get them to care,” lamented one ecotourism expert to embassy visitors.

  Despite the underdevelopment, the region attracts hordes of backpackers, and environmentalists shudder as more so-called eco-lodges spring up. The border town of Guayaramerín hosts a wildlife park that an officer described as “a glorified backyard zoo. Amazon birds, monkeys, capybaras and jaguars huddled in cramped cages while visitors snapped photos. . . . When asked where he obtained the animals, the owner responded, ‘you can buy anything in Bolivia if the price is right.’” 4

  In a perverse example of how lack of infrastructure creates a kind of dark tourism, thousands of thrill-seeking mountain bikers flocked to “The Road of Death” to ride down the steep ten-foot-wide unpaved path that offers no guardrail between the biker and the two-thousand-foot drop below. “Not everyone gets the ‘I Survived Bolivia’s Death Road’ t-shirt handed out by tour companies at the end of the trip,” the officer wryly noted. “At least 13 bikers have died on the road in the past decade.” 5

  Embassy reporters from Bogotá noted that Colombia was also struggling to build viable ecotourism, despite substantial help from a USAID-sponsored initiative, which provided small grants to indigenous communities. A chronicle of an ambassadorial visit to Amacayacu National Park noted that it was home not only to protected flora and fauna but to indigenous communities that lived in the park and helped care for vulnerable species. The cable spelled out the challenge in stark terms: the Amazonas department, one of thirty-two statelike political divisions, is Colombia’s largest but has only forty-eight thousand inhabitants, 53 percent of whom lived in a sixteen-kilometer strip along the Amazon. The area was woefully short of infrastructure, with only twenty-five miles of paved roads and few hotel rooms. The economy contributed less than .05 percent to Colombia’s GDP, and there was no comprehensive plan to attract high-income “boutique” tourists.6

  A WORLD AWAY FROM the rivers and mountains of South America, but with the same spirit of exploration, embassy officers took to the backwaters of the post-Soviet world—contested villages in Georgia and forgotten rural spots in Central Asia. While Moscow and Saint Petersburg are as cosmopolitan as any part of Western Europe, the remote parts of the former Soviet Union provide landscapes littered with the rusting automotive hulks of Zhigulis, Trabants, and Wartburgs, all of which served as apt metaphors for the hasty abandonment of Soviet-era decay and the isolation of those left behind.

  The troubles of ethnic Georgians in the breakaway region of Abkhazia are emblematic of the problems of people whose national identity may not change as fast as their borders. A year after the 2008 Russian invasion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, embassy officers ventured into Gali, a border town within the UN security zone.

  Emboffs observed decrepit housing, execrable roads, collapsing schools, insufficient health care facilities, horse drawn carts and insect-threatened hazelnut trees . . . The nuts are the primary source of income, with profits from the fall harvest needed to last the whole year.

  The aspect of life in Gali most immediately and glaringly apparent to a visitor is the appalling state of the roads. The longest stretch the main road extends without massive road damage is perhaps a couple hundred yards . . . The roads in the villages, off the main road to Sukhumi, are even worse, with gaping holes every few yards. Although the UNHCR’s [UN High Commissioner for Refugees’s] four wheel drive SUV handled the rough spots well enough, the horse drawn carts and old Zhiguli sedans the locals use likely encounter major difficulties.7

  Ethnic Georgians hinted at shakedowns when they crossed back and forth across the border and described the many ways their language, history, and culture were being erased. The officers described a dying village with depressing prospects, still occupied by Russian troops and Abkhaz forces, and one from which young people flee for better futures elsewhere.8

  On the other side of the Urals, the Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, with their borders like interlocking jigsaw pieces, offer a physical landscape as challenging as the political one. It is easy to understand why embassy officers might want to take to the roads and explore something less contentious than the halls of government.

  Tajikistan offered an irresistible temptation to diplomats stuck in Dushanbe one January: a visit to the Rasht Valley to see rural life in winter. The locals begged them to wait until summer, warning of perilous road conditions in the mountains. Undaunted, the officers loaded their vehicle with meals ready-to-eat, sleeping bags, and bottled water, and headed off to Garm, six hours northeast from Dushanbe on the road to Kyrgyzstan.

  EmbOffs enjoyed blazing snow-covered scenery as drivers slowly maneuvered through icy mountain roads at 25–30 kilometers per hour. Occasionally men from villages dressed in furry hats and beards came up to shovel dirt on the mountain paths to provide traction for passers-by. Vehicles small and large maneuvered between rockslides on the icy roads, carrying people and goods, such as new Chinese minivans, into the country.9

  They also saw firsthand how harsh winters affect daily life. With only two to four hours of electricity a day from mid-October to mid-April, they made a very quick visit to School Number 1, where “shivering pupils bundled in coats dutifully wrote in their notebooks.”

  Evidently the group survived to make another excursion eight months later—this time covering two thirds the length of the 1,344-kilometer Tajik-Afghan border, where they found mo
re poverty-stricken villages and a rapidly developing western route for Chinese goods.

  In the Tajik mountain village of Zing just downstream from the Darvaz border crossing, 165 families survive on remittance income from family members working in Russia, pensions, and family gardens. A shiny mausoleum marks the entrance to the pomegranate and apple tree–lined road. Residents often live over 90 years in this mountain town known for its honey sold in two-liter bottles. Across the river from Zing, Afghans transport goods via donkey along the mountain path to their houses the same shade of brown as the dirt. The Afghan side is within throwing distance of Tajikistan and EmbOffs watched as an agile Afghan boy clambered off the thin mountain path to retrieve sticks for firewood from further down the mountain.10

  ANTHROPOLOGY 101: ANCIENT PEOPLES

  Embassy officers were clearly fascinated by encounters with indigenous people, most of whom live in some of the globe’s remotest corners. Tribal peoples were challenged by creeping modernity, intergenerational divides, and contentious relations with national government officials, who were often of different ethnicities. Officers were alert to human rights abuses and evidence of political and economic marginalization, but their stories suggest a far more complex picture.

  Where does India end and China begin? The answer to that riddle encompasses practices dating back to the British Raj: a long-unresolved border war and a fiercely xenophobic collection of tribes for whom modern nation states such as India and China are abstract concepts. A glance at a map of Arunachal Pradesh, India’s most isolated and least developed state, shows why the question might be relevant. Bhutan, Nepal, and Bangladesh nearly converge to leave Arunachal Pradesh’s connection to the Indian “mainland” hanging by a thread. With one million inhabitants, it is the least populated of all Indian states, home to twenty-six tribal groups, each with its own language and customs, and hundreds of subgroups.

  “Arunachal is something of an anthropologist’s dream but a political and developmental nightmare,” wrote a U.S. consulate officer. Its northern border with China is a dotted line, symbolizing the uncertain feelings of the people (many of whom identify more with China than with India), as well as the cartographers. The border has been in dispute since India’s defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Deemed “sensitive” territory, even Indian citizens need special permission to visit. More than 80 percent of the land is covered in heavy forests, and parts of the state are still largely unexplored. With few highways, helicopters and footpaths are the main ways in and out.

  The officer explained that indigenous communities are protected through a system of Inner Line Permits dating back to the days of British rule. No outsider can enter Arunachal Pradesh without an Inner Line or a Protected Area Permit. Neither can they buy land, start a business, or take up employment. Visiting consular staff were prohibited from taking photos with their Inner Line Permit. Yet, the officer noted, the people of Arunachal are unanimous about retaining the permit system. Without it they fear they would lose their lands to people from mainland India.

  Villages are administered in consultation with headmen and the elected panchayat (local self-government leader). “Several tribes practice Donyi Polo, a religion worshipping the sun and the moon, whereas others practice animism. Missionaries have made few inroads here. Polygamy is permitted and practiced by some tribal elites. Two of the tribes exist in a master-slave relationship.”11

  This is a place few Westerners ever reach.

  In a smoky Mishmi longhouse, middle-aged tribal women with enormous plugs in their earlobes stared at the PO [principal officer] as he squatted by the fire and sipped rice beer under racks of charred wild cattle skulls. Asked through an interpreter what they found so interesting, they replied that they had seen “white” people on the cable television in their longhouse but that they had not believed, until just then, that such people existed in real life.12

  The United States has an interest in the peaceful resolution to the long running Sino-India border dispute, and there may be prospects for U.S. investment in hydropower projects, forest-based industries, or adventure tourism. But with the xenophobic nature of the native Arunachalese and the government of India’s reluctance to upgrade infrastructure—especially if some or all of the land will eventually go to China—foreign investment remains a distant hope.

  SOMETIMES THINGS AREN’T what they seem. In northernmost Thailand’s Mae Hong Son province there is a population of stateless people known as Padaung, a subgroup of the Karenni who fled their native lands in Burma in the 1990s; however, they lack refugee status, in part because they live in villages they created instead of official refugee camps. How they came to live in those villages is a story of crass commercial tourism. The Padaung are famous for their “long-necked” women. A custom of placing dozens of brass rings around the neck—which actually force the clavicle bone into a lower position to give the illusion of a longer neck—dates back centuries but had nearly disappeared in modern times.

  Ambitious businessmen encouraged the refugee women to revive the tradition, live in Padaung villages, and pose for tourists who were bused in. Hundreds of Padaung saw it as a better alternative than refugee camps. They soon found themselves marketed as a “Thai Hill tribe” and mired in uncertain status. The Thai government refused to classify them as refugees and refused them the right to resettle in third countries, a problem the Chiang Mai consulate said was “endemic for refugees, migrant workers and ethnic minorities near the Thai-Burma border.”

  The UNHCR representative charged that the women were being kept in a “human zoo,” and a human rights group said Thai authorities colluded with Burmese groups to traffic additional long-necked women into these Potemkin-style tourist villages. The Padaung languished in legal limbo, facing the hard choice of either refugee camps or tourist villages without a right to schooling, jobs, or a clear path to legal residency or citizenship.

  In a few cases, Padaung women removed their rings as a means of rejecting the exploitation. But the reporting officers inserted a cautionary note, warning that the case of the Padaung is rife with ambiguities. “Despite signs of cultural exploitation, it is not clear what outcome the Padaung themselves want to see. Some have chosen a taste of freedom and economic opportunity in the tourist villages over an uncertain life inside a refugee camp.” The consulate report reflected on the frequent hostility between host countries and refugees. Thailand hosts one of the world’s largest stateless populations, who must contend with unfriendly and bureaucratic citizenship laws. “This dilemma has left thousands stranded in border camps while many more slip farther into Thailand to work illegally and risk exploitation.” 13

  IN COUNTRIES WITH which the U.S. has no diplomatic relations, embassies from surrounding countries deploy border area watchers who chat with border crossers hoping to glean insight into a country from afar. Borders drawn on paper maps mean little to rural people for whom seasonal migration is a way of life. Embassy officers in Azerbaijan, a country that sits atop the northern border of Iran, interviewed two ethnic Kashgai people, a semi-nomadic Turkic minority of about 1.5 million with a history of antigovernment violence. About a third maintain a traditional migratory lifestyle that revolves around sheep and goat herding over a three-hundred-kilometer stretch of summer and winter grazing grounds between Isfahan and Shiraz, in central Iran. The seasonal trek takes three months each way with the help of camels and horses, although nowadays some herders use trucks to move livestock. The wool they produce is prized for its high quality and is woven by the Kashgai into carpets. They have no written language and no historical national ideology.

  One Kashgai interviewee had a PhD in social anthropology; the other was a Tehran-based Kashgai carpet merchant. Both had been raised in traditional households, and they offered a fascinating picture of how a tribal minority is faring in Iran’s postrevolutionary era.

  Known as the fiercely independent “Lords of the Mountains” (referring to the Zagros range), the Turkic-speaking Kashgai raided village
s and were regarded with hostility and fear. Once one of the most violent minority groups in Iran, they engaged in armed resistance against central government efforts to force them into permanent settlements. After the fall of the shah, many returned to their migratory lifestyle. Although the anti-shah Kashgai leaders were initially embraced by Ayatollah Khomeini, they fell prey to the extremism of the revolution when they rejected Islamic rule and enforced settlement. As a result, many of their leaders were hanged by the Revolutionary Guard in 1982.

  After the severe repression of the 1980s, Iran’s more relaxed policies have encouraged a peaceful political coexistence. Although not Persian, the Kashgai share the Shia faith—up to a point. The Kashgai men told officers that the mostly Persian mullahs are tolerated but not followed. Kashgai women work outside and do not wear the chador (full covering) except when visiting towns. The PhD left the officers with an indelible image of how this ancient people are coming to terms with modernity while, at least for now, maintaining a separate identity. He said that young herders use the Internet and social media, follow the NBA, and listen to rap music. “Economics is achieving what force could not achieve,” observed the PhD.14

  In a media environment in which almost all the news on Iran concerned its nuclear program, this kind of reporting should have been invaluable to Washington. It puts individual faces to the collective label “Iranian,” reminds policymakers that Iranian society is diverse, and highlights a domestic narrative that has little to do with Western perceptions.

  Turkmenistan abounds with something that would seldom catch a diplomat’s attention—truck stops. More than forty thousand Iranian truckers travel to or through Turkmenistan each year, the majority passing through the Farap crossing on the Uzbek border. The embassy officer painted a vivid picture: “As night falls, dozens of drivers congregate at cafes and parking lots, or on the side of the road on either side of the wobbly pontoon that connects the banks of the Amu Darya River and closes to truck traffic at 7 p.m.”