Conservation and Controversy in the Karakoram: Khunjerab National Park, Pakistan Are Knudsen Introduction “The involvement of local people in planning and management of natural resources is now widely recognized as critical to conservation and development.” Guidelines for Mountain Protected Areas (D.Poore 1992:19) High up in the Hunza valley a couple of thousand Wakhi people reside amidst some of Pakistan’s most spectacular and rugged mountain scenery. They carve out a living from combining pastoral animal husbandry with some work migration and more recently, trekking tourism. Animals are moved across a vast mountain terrain, utilizing sub-alpine and alpine pastures in a complex pastoral herding system. During the summer, women take care of yaks, sheep and goats on the alpine pastures above 4,000 m. In late autumn, male herders move yaks to lower elevations where they look after them through the winter. Whereas the resident Wakhi population has not been the source of great interest, conservation agencies have been alerted by the biodiversity importance of this area and its exceptional range of wild animals, some of them critically endangered. The area is home to the Himalayan brown bear (Ursos arctos), the world’s largest snow-leopard (Panthera uncia) population, wild ungulates such as blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur), and Siberian ibex (Capra ibex siberica) and is the last refuge for the endangered Marco Polo sheep (Ovis ammon polii). In 1974 the American wildlife biologist George Schaller proposed establishing a national park in the area (G.Schaller 1980:98ff.). The main objective of the park was to protect the Marco Polo sheep and, possibly, a remnant population of the rare Tibetan wild ass (Equus hemonius kiang). In order to comply with the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) guidelines for national parks, 1 Schaller deliberately drew the borders so as to exclude permanent villages. The proposed park covering about 2,300 square km included all the major rangelands of the local Wakhi villagers, but this Schaller considered “details [which] could be resolved later” (ibid.:98). The then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Conservation and Controversy in the Karakoram 2 Vol.6 1999 Journal of Political Ecology Ali Bhutto, enthusiastically embraced Schaller’s proposal and on April 29 1975 the Kunjerab National Park (KNP) was formally declared (“gazetted”) by the government (Figure 1). My own involvement with the KNP controversy is based on two short periods of fieldwork in Shimshal, the Wakhi village which most adamantly rejected the national park plans (A.Knudsen 1992). Unannounced visits by foreign researchers, such as myself, aroused local suspicion and were associated with the park plans. Prior to my first visit in 1990 the Norwegian wildlife biologist Per Wegge had done a field survey in Shimshal (P.Wegge 1988). Since I was a Norwegian, villagers believed I was a wildlife specialist too. My research topic -- herd ownership, range management and agro-pastoralism -- added weight to this interpretation. None of these topics were neutral. To the contrary, they were the type of information people in Shimshal jealously guarded and did not want to fall in the hands of national park “spies”, of which many suspected, I was one. Did the Shimshalis and the other Wakhi villagers have reason to be concerned? It is my contention that they did. Although details are lacking and the narrative is difficult to piece together, the following represents -- as far as I am able to ascertain -- the chain of events that hurled the Wakhi villages in the Khunjerab from relative obscurity in the 1970s to the center of controversy in the 1990s. My argument is that national parks, despite imposing heavy burdens on local people, are implemented primarily for the high conservationist profile this alternative offers. In particular, this paper is critical of the IUCN’s preservationist approach to the Khunjerab National Park which studiously ignored the organization’s own guidelines for mountain protected areas.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 07:37:27 +0000
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