Altitude Sickness.

• Author: Starr, S. Frederick

Poverty and Violence in the Mountains

AT THE checkout counter of my grocer is an attractive magazine for New Age shoppers entitled Shambhala Sun. This evocative name refers to the mythical mountain realm of the Tibetan Buddhists, a hidden place symbolizing purity, truth and wisdom. It is also what James Hilton had in mind when he created the land of Shangri-La in his 1933 novel, Lost Horizons. As it happens, just last summer I was camping on the Kazakstan--Russian border in the shadow of Beluka, a 16,600-foot peak that local people have long associated with Shambhala. It is

indeed an awesome sight, altogether worthy of the symbolic role assigned to it by Buddhists and assorted mystics such as Henry Wallace's friend, the Russian visionary painter Nikolai Roerich. But the deep valleys of the Altai Mountain range that surround Beluka are more notable for another characteristic: the peoples who inhabit them are desperately poor and increasingly frustrated over their circumstances.

For modern urbanites, the world's high mountain zones are symbols of unspoiled nature and timeless truths that, we often presume, somehow escape the lowland denizens of the global marketplace. They are places depicted on gorgeous calendars, locales for "trekking" (formerly known as hiking) and other forms of eco-tourism. But for the people who actually live in them they are all too often places of neglect or persecution, economic and cultural breakdown, and spiraling violence. Indeed, a disproportionate number of the world's bloodiest zones of conflict today are in mountain regions.

The majestic Andes highlands of Peru, for example, were for years the scene of a relentless battle between local campesinos and the intellectuals who led them, on the one hand, and the Peruvian army and security forces on the other. The fighting pitted ethnic Indians against the Spanish culture of Lima, and coca planting against the economic uncertainties of legal market crops. It turned entire areas of the Incas' enchanting mountain home into a killing zone. The Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru are less in evidence today, but few if any of the problems that gave rise to them have been solved.

A world away, the Caucasus region presents an equally romantic picture of towering peaks and brooding ruins, a region celebrated by Russian poets, Lermontov and Pushkin among them, and by the young novelist Tolstoy. But beginning in 1989, fighting in the small territory of Karabakh ("The Black Garden") cost thousands of Muslim Azeris and Christian Armenians their lives and led eventually to a million displaced Azeris, one of the largest groups of refugees anywhere in the world today.

Chechnya, one of several Muslim provinces in Russia's North Caucasus range, presents another struggle in the mountains, but this time between central and local rule. Several hundred thousand Russian troops, tribal guerrilla fighters and civilians have perished there in two vicious phases of warfare, with no end to the fighting in sight. The Russians' best hope is that the violence can be kept from spilling over into the neighboring mountains of Dagestan and Ingushetia. Meanwhile, in the South Caucasus, independent Georgia faces armed independence movements in Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In Mexico's inaccessible and mountainous Chiapas state yet another struggle against central rule proceeds. The fact that no religious differences divide the parties, and that the Indian-Spanish ethnic split is only partial, may make this conflict less bloody. But it poses as serious a challenge to Mexico as any that country has seen in decades. The struggles in Chechnya and Chiapas are in some respects similar to the generation-long conflict over Turkey's remote and still undeveloped southeastern provinces, where ethnic Kurds, peripheral to Turkish culture and political geography, have waged armed struggle for greater control over their own affairs. Episodic Kurdish struggles against Iran, Iraq and Syria fit a roughly similar pattern.

An undeclared civil war in Nepal pits Maoist insurgents against an ineffective and discredited central authority in half of the country's 75 districts, with the rebels now in full control of five districts. Like Afghanistan's Taliban, the rebels forcefully impose a puritanical order wherever they go, and are often welcomed in mountain huts for doing so. For the insurgents promise stability and a government attuned to the needs of impoverished mountain peoples, rather than to the urban middle class of Kathmandu.

Not all mountain conflicts pit indigenous locals against the armies of remote central governments. For four years in the early 1990s a civil war raged across the newly independent Central Asian state of Tajikistan. Ninety-five percent covered with mountains, Tajikistan produced a many-sided conflict in which regional interests, rival Muslim religious factions, clan and ethnic groupings, and a weak central government all played a part.

Other mountain-based conflicts combine ethnic, religious, central-local and cultural issues in ways so complex as to make the factors inextricable from one another. The Balkans (Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia) are prime examples of how such diverse threads can be woven into a web of strife, and are the more notable because during the previous two generations the peoples involved had lived together quite amicably.

No mountain zone has witnessed more bloodshed over the past two decades than the Hindu Kush, Pamir and KohiBaba ranges that make up Afghanistan. This crisis, like the struggle in Karabakh, began when one state invaded another, in this case the Soviet Union's 1979 assault on Kabul. As in Communist Yugoslavia and Tajikistan, the old state collapsed, leaving the field open to a range of local warlords and their competing foreign supporters.

The one respect in which the struggle in Afghanistan surpasses all other mountain conflicts is the impact of locally grown drugs on the country and on its neighbors. Yet even though Afghanistan has been producing 85 percent of the world's heroin--until this year--the combination of drugs and mountain-based conflicts is not unique to that country. It is a root cause of the ongoing fighting in the mountains of Colombia's interior, and the reason President Clinton committed $1.2 billion to stop it. The Balkans, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Chiapas and Kurdistan are all important transit points for drugs, as are Kashmir and the north of Myanmar, two more mountain regions where strife prevails.

THIS CURSORY survey of three continents suggests an intriguing correlation: While only about one-sixth of the world's population lives in mountainous zones or areas immediately adjacent to them, such regions account for a solid majority of the bloodiest and most intractable contemporary conflicts. To be sure, other geographical zones claim their share of strife, whether the arid lands of the Levant and Arabia, the islands of Indonesia, or the coastal plains of West Africa. Further, there is always the possibility that the "mountain-ness" of Chechnya, Colombia, Afghanistan, Chiapas, Karabakh, Kashmir, Peru and the Balkans is just a coincidence, or that it is...