New Silk Road: Boom or dust for Pakistan

Pakistani tourists and local residents go about their business at the bazar in Sost, the border town of the Hunza valley, in northern Pakistan. — AFP

A glossy highway and hundreds of lorries transporting Chinese workers by the thousands: the new Silk Road is under construction in northern Pakistan, but locals living on the border are yet to be convinced they will receive more from it than dust.

The town of Sost is gateway to millions in customs duties, with its rickety stalls of corrugated iron engraved in Mandarin and Urdu, its cross-border secret agents and its dusty petrol station’s abrupt service.

It is the first stop along a new $46 billion “economic corridor” designed by China in Pakistan.

Drivers from China arrive through the Khunjerab Pass, the world’s highest paved border crossing at 4,600 metres above sea level, and unload their goods encircled by the magnificent Karakoram mountains, swirled with snow.

From there, Pakistani colleagues pick up the goods and transport them the length of the country — currently to Karachi, some 2,000 kilometres away on the Arabian Sea, but in the future to Gwadar, where Beijing has been given management of the port in a grand project allowing China greater access to West Asia, Africa and Europe.

But, until recently, the highway was cut off just south of Sost, blocked for five years by a landslide that dammed the Hunza river and birthed the 10 kilometre long lake of Attabad, with its ice-blue glacier water.

Unable to drive around the mountain, China simply tunnelled through it, sending thousands of workers in a titanic effort that took more than three years and cost at least $275 million.

“We have suffered because of the lake,” joked Amjad Ali, a round-faced trader who sells clothing in the Sost bazaar, where the new Chinese highway has replaced the old Silk Road — a tortuous dirt track travelled for centuries by trade caravans.

Before the tunnel, residents of Sost had to cross the lake by boat in a journey that took at least an hour. Traffic in winter was meagre.

“With the tunnel, we hope business will take off and tourists flock here,” said Ali.

“We are once again connected by road to the rest of Pakistan,” rejoiced another resident, Mohammed Israr.

But their optimism is tempered by fear that the trucks will simply drive on by, leaving Sost to receive, as Ali put it, “nothing but dust”.

“The Chinese care only for their own economic interest,” said Noor-e-din, another trader with a russet moustache. “We risk spending our days counting trucks as they drive past.”

Islamabad, he predicted, is set to collect millions in customs duty from Sost while doing little or nothing for the town.

Israr, for his part, evoked a land grab by wealthy Chinese and Pakistanis “from below” (the south). The latter have already approached farmers in the region in a bid to snap up their fields.

Sitting on the border of his potato field under the shade of an apple tree, Ali Qurban fears losing his beloved region in Islamabad’s grand dance with Beijing.

“This is my land of Gilgit-Baltistan — not that of Pakistan or China,” the local activist and occasional poet cries.