Yak polo loses out to CIA outpost

Isambard Wilkinson, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: May 01. 2008 6:18AM UAE / May 1. 2008 2:18AM GMT

CHITRAL, PAKISTAN // There are new casualties in the hunt for Osama bin Laden: yak-mounted, polo-playing herdsmen who have been told to shift their annual competition from a remote corner of Pakistan for “security reasons”.

Pakistan’s intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence, has ordered polo players to move their contest to a neighbouring district because the current site is too near a secret CIA surveillance post.

The hugely popular festival takes place in the Hindu Kush mountains – on what is probably the highest polo ground in the world – in Chagril, on the ancient Silk Road bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor.

Pakistan, a key ally in the US-led war on terrorism, was contracted to build a facility to allow monitoring of possible infiltration of militants in an area deemed by the CIA to be a possible refuge for bin Laden.

The intelligence agency informed the tourism department of North West Frontier Province – where Chagril is located – that the annual tournament on the 3,962-metre Boroghil Pass, must be shifted.

Security officials want to deter foreigners visiting the area that was once a backdrop to the 19th-century Great Game – the battle between imperial Russia and Britain for power in central Asia.

The change of venue would mean transporting the festival, which is held in July and attracts thousands every year, from the North West Frontier Province to Gilgit in the Northern Areas. “We will have all the same activities but in a more secure place,” said Syed Aqil Shah, NWFP’s minister for tourism.

Locals, who come from Pakistan’s poor, semi-nomadic Wakhi tribe, have complained that the move will be inconvenient as it involves herding dozens of corpulent, hairy yak from Boroghil over a glacier and the 4,572-metre Darkhot Pass to a land that is alien to them.

A local dignitary, who asked not to be named, said the move had “caused local anger and threatened the Wakhis’ only source of monetary income and their livelihood”.

“They have built this so-called listening post next to the road in the valley where they play polo. Why could they not have built it higher up away from the Wakhi? Was it to save expense?” he said.

Among the Wakhis are ethnic Kyrgyz who have been forced on dramatic migrations in the past. Muslim Kyrgyz left their central Asian homeland after suffering periodic bouts of Russian repression from 1916 through to Stalin’s regime.

They arrived in Chitral in 1940 but many left in the 1980s when they took up an offer from the Turkish government to settle in Turkey.

They are once again temporarily on the move for the sake of their livelihoods. The festival also includes a regular polo match played on wild horses but with few rules and no referee. President Pervez Musharraf attended the event last year.

“Yak polo is a unique sport,” said a spokesman for the Sarhad Tourism Corp, a local body that organises the festival. “The government should re-think the plan to move it.”

“Because of the installation, sentiments against the government and its ally in the war on terror can escalate in a sensitive area between Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he added.


iwilkinson@thenational.ae