www.chitraltimes.com

Respected Editor,
what follows is a copy of the letter I have sent to Corriere della Sera of Milan, one of the two largest Italian newspapers, to rectify a highly disparaging article about Chitral. The letter has been forwarded also to the Embassy of Pakistan to Italy in Rome.
I trust you will consider it worthy of publication.
With my best regards,
Alberto Cacopardo, Italy

To the Director of "Corriere della Sera"
Milano, Italy

Dear Sir,

I am an anthropologist who for the last thirty years has been doing research on the peoples of the northernmost tract of the Pak-Afghan border, including the Kalasha. Having long been visiting the area, where I recently spent four months as Scientific Director of a mission from IsIAO of Rome, I have been direct witness of the progressive heating of its political climate and of the connected deterioration of the West�s image among the people. Since the Gulf War first and 9/11 later, the local public opinion, which, strange as it may seem, is much more critical and informed than the Western one at large, has developed a certain resentment towards the West which was once inexistent. I have remarked that among the main causes of this resentment is the distorted and inaccurate information that unfortunately often prevails in the Western media about the Muslim world in general and Pakistan and Afghanistan in particular. Since your paper has often made exception to this sad scenery by providing more careful analyses, I feel obliged to inform you that the article entitled "The Taleban put even the bees to flight" published on Monday 19 November, provides a quantity of unfounded information.

"Vallata di Kalash" is an improper designation for the three valleys inhabited by the Kalasha, an ethnografically quite famous people, since they are the only Indoeuropeans in the world who have preserved a "primitive" religion. This area is currently one of the less "impervious and remote" in Northern Pakistan, since it still is, in spite of the damages caused to tourism by the Western media, one of the most visited in the whole country.

This "vallata di Kalash" happens to belong to the District of Chitral, located along the northernmost tract of the border, which has nothing to do with "the regions controlled by the pre-Taleban Islamic militias", which lie much further to the south, not is it part of the "tribal areas", which are a very precise entity in Pakistani administrative law and political tradition.

The "authority of the central government" is very solid in the District of Chitral, which is penetratingly controlled by at lest four forces: the regular army, the police, the border guards, and the Chitral Scouts militia. Only in a few small valleys south of Nagar, not in the Kalasha areas, has the control of government always been somewhat weaker, for ethnic and historical reasons that have nothing to do with the Taleban.

Police forces in Chitral are far from "vanished" and are present even in some of the smallest and remotest villages. Whereas until the mid-Nineties the inhabitants, and especially the many refugees from the Afghan side, often walked with arms, since several years the weapons have been requisitioned by government or set aside, and people now walk unarmed. During my stay, at any rate, I have personally observed how certain irresponsible acts from the West can have the direct and immediate effect of reducing the unpopularity of such people.

"Black-market trade in prized timber", unfortunately, has been practiced for many decades throughout northern Pakistan, since long before the Taleban. Despite the presence of restrictive legislation and ecologically adequate regulations, this trade takes various forms, from small-scale unauthorized cutting to the corruption of officials in charge by the big contractors, who apparently manage at times by this means to illegally obtain a considerable increase in the quantities of timber they trade. That in Chitral District this business has anything to do with the Taliban is a claim new to me, which requires, to say the least, some scrap of demonstration.

Also on the Afghan side "north of Jalalabad", where in 1995 I documented the cutting of Himalayan cedar (cf. the volume Gates of Peristan, IsIAO, Rome, 2001), the exploitment of the Nuristan forests has been carried out by big Pathan contractors through much of the war period, and long before the Taleban existed. Though in this area, that I have again visited in December 2006, the Taleban have now much more influence than in Chitral, it is impossible that they alone should be able to control this traffic, since they do not control the highways, which are scattered with innumerable check-posts.

The idea that the reduction in Kalasha honey production is caused by deforestation is also to be proved. The Kalasha who spoke to us about it ascribed it rather to the fact that young people nowadays are less inclined to take the trouble of capturing the wild bees required to renovate the domestic populations. It is possible that a reduction in the wild populations is under way, but this may be connected to the considerable climate changes that are taking place in the region.

And finally, please allow me a scholarly note: it is surprising to find that the honey of the Kalasha was "known and appreciated since antiquity", when "it was known in mythology by the name of �ushniru�", because there are no sources from those times about these people. The word oshniru is an archaic Khowar word which does not mean "clean", but ritually pure in the preislamic sense, corresponding to onjeshta of the Kalasha, who indeed consider their own honey as a ritually pure substance.

This much I owed you, Dear Sir, out of pure respect for truth. Having a long record of direct acquaintance both with the Muslim world and with Europe and the US, I cannot help but suffer in perceiving the effects of the unjustifiable ignorance that we keep cultivating in the West about that world, and the consequent distortions with which we represent it. I can guarantee that Pakistanis in general know the West much better than Westerners know the Muslim world. It is inevitable, however, that what is often only sloppy journalism should seem pure propaganda to their eyes, since there is no lack of shameful examples of the latter as well. And yet, still today in that country those who admire the West for its knowledge and who respect it for its cult of freedom, are much more numerous than those fanatics who blindly despise it. It is up to us, however, to deserve such respect and admiration, rather than causing it to be eclipsed by resentment.


Alberto Cacopardo, Italy.