Chitral-Shandoor /Baroghal Pass: Karakoram Highway and Central Asian Republics Human / Physical Connectivity

Abstract

The Baroghil pass connects the Northwestern District, Upper Chitral of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with Afghan Wakhan, a narrow strip, that separates Pakistan from Tajikistan and connects Afghanistan with China. Almost a thousand years ago the nomadic pastoral Turkic tribes from the Central Asian steppes began migrating westwards to Anatolia and towards Wakhan in the southeast. Around ten million pastoral nomadic people, mostly Turkic-speaking Muslims including Kirghiz, Kazakh, Turkmen, Uzbek, Karakalpak, Bashkir, Nogai, Karachai, and others, inhabited large expanses of the arid and semi-arid steppes of Turan/Central Asia. Migration, in modern times, culminated in the arrival of a small number of Turkic Central Asians to Anatolia marking the end of a significant historical process. Turkey, because of her historic, ethnolinguistic, and cultural ties to the peoples of Central Asia, has traditionally offered refuge to the Turkic peoples displaced by the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions. Haji Rahman Qul, the Kirghiz request for immigration to Turkeyia, received an especially favorable review when their plight was brought to the attention of General Kenan Evren, the president of Turkey, during his 1981 official visit to Pakistan. The Kirghiz community, along with nearly 3,000 other Afghan refugees of Turkic origin, was accepted for resettlement in Turkey. The arrangements for their transfer were made remarkably quickly and the Kirghiz were airlifted on August 3, 1982, to Adana. Political situations/borders at times created hurdles and on other occasions accelerated human migration/connectivity. The paper assesses the correlation between human/physical migration/ connectivity.