Peering into the Past

It’s 6 a.m. and I’m standing on the banks of the mighty Panj river in eastern Tajikistan. I’m looking across the water at people starting their day in a small village in Afghanistan. There’s a woman taking a cow along the bank followed by a few children larking about. She’s quietly trying to keep her different charges on the beaten track, literally.

It’s an idyllic, charming scene and one that could be from any time of the last thousand years or more. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Joseph leading a donkey with Mary on it coming round the mud brick houses (though they might be bit surprised to be 2,000 miles from Nazareth!).

Salima's village

But it’s not really that idyllic for our mother – let’s call her Salima - going about her business. She lives a hard life. The houses are crudely built, with no windows, in a place that gets deep snow every winter and temperatures down to -20°C. There is no modern plumbing and sanitation and no electricity. Salima has no access to medical attention for her children and very little access to education. There are no metalled roads where she is and no shops. If she is the mother of an average family she will have five children and a 1 in 50 chance of dying in every pregnancy. It’s much as life has been lived forever.

Tajikistan is a developing country, the poorest of the ex Soviet republics. But I am standing outside a pleasant guest house with running water, electricity and nice bedrooms and sanitation. The people around me don’t generally enjoy the luxuries of hotels but they have health care and schools and shops and restaurants and public transport. They need more and better - standards have declined badly since the Russian withdrawal - but this is a country of at least the 20^th century if not quite the 21st. yet.

Afghanistan across the Panj

Why such a difference? The people on both banks of the river are essentially the same. In central Asia, as in Africa and most of the world, communities settle along both banks of rivers; rivers are not the natural frontiers between communities we suppose in Europe, they are the central thoroughfares.

It’s not physical factors of climate or geography that make the difference. It’s not race, religion, ancestral roots or traditional culture that mean Salima will have a shorter and much less comfortable life than her kith and kin on the east bank of the river. It’s just an accident of history. We have essentially the same people in the same place leading very different lives.

We are very critical of ex Soviet Union in the west but at least in Tajikistan the people have known some form of the rule of law, of health services and education. They have electricity and water supplies – albeit subject to interruptions – and cars and consumer goods. Theirs has been a different history for the last 150 years and they have enjoyed institutions and organisation aimed at developing the country.

It’s a stark example of the fact that people are not naturally confined to poverty and backwardness by the nature of where they live or their ethnic background. The way we organise society makes the big difference. This is true of comparing  Afghanistan to Tajikistan and then Tajikistan to so many more prosperous  countries. The barriers to human progress are mostly man-made.

But back to why I am setting off from the glorious Pamir mountains at 6 a.m. in the morning. I am racing back to Dushanbe, 10 to 12 hours away, and the nearest Sky Sports receiver to watch Andy Murray in the Men’s Singles final at Wimbledon. Empires may rise and fall; civilizations ebb and flow, but it’s not often we see a British champion at Wimbledon. I wonder what Salima would have thought of this if she was looking across at me. Probably pity…..