Market Focus : Aga Khan Aims to Reform Pamir : The Ismaili Muslim leader plans to privatize land and update farming.

In a remote mountain land in the heart of Asia, all but lost to the outside world, a crowd of tens of thousands kneel reverently as a lone figure robed in brown passes among them.

He is the Aga Khan, one of the world’s richest men and spiritual leader of the 12 million to 15 million Ismaili Muslims, paying his first visit to his followers in the isolated Pamir mountains of Central Asia.

Tajikistan has been tormented by a civil war that broke out in 1992 afte the collapse of Soviet power. For the 215,000 people--mostly Ismailis--of this region known simply as the Pamir, the Aga Khan remains a saint and a prince combined. He is also a one-man development enterprise.

During the Soviet period, the Pamir was dependent on food and fuel sent by Moscow, and the collapse of the Soviet economy brought the region to the brink of starvation.

The Aga Khan runs a network of small-scale, locally based development agencies and is now setting up similar programs in the Pamir. The plan is to make the region self-sufficient in food production by privatizing land and introducing new agricultural methods to this ancient culture.

During the last century, the Pamir mountains were the setting for what historians dub the “Great Game,” a land of spies and adventurers in high Asia where Russia, China and British India met and where their expanding interests bumped elbows. Now this is a poor, forgotten land.

Its people, the Ismaili Muslims, are a minority branch of the Shiite Muslims that broke away from the Shia mainstream 1,200 years ago, in the early period of Islam. Most Ismailis live in the Indian subcontinent and East Africa, though many have also settled in the United States, Canada, Britain and elsewhere in the West.

His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV is the 49th imam of the Ismailis.

In Europe, the image of the 58-year-old leader is a gossip columnist’s fantasy of legendary wealth, fine racehorses and beautiful women, an image burnished by memories of his late father, Prince Aly Khan, a playboy and onetime husband of American actress Rita Hayworth. Few people in the West, however, know of the Aga Khan’s work with development agencies in Asia and Africa that are widely admired for their small-scale, self-help approach.

When the Aga Khan flew in last month for a four-day visit to the Pamir, landing in Khorog, the sleepy capital of Gorno-Badakhshan in eastern Tajikistan, the town of 30,000 emptied as residents set off to walk to the spot where the imam would meet his people. Most spent the night in the open, huddled under blankets.

He arrived punctually the next morning, dressed in a gleaming white suit, and was whisked to the site in a silver Mercedes specially imported for the occasion. Donning his robe and a tall astrakhan hat, the imam walked through the expectant crowd on a pathway of elegant carpets.

Addressing the throng, he urged them as Muslims to solve their political disputes peacefully. Tajikistan remains divided between the groups that fought each other in the post-Soviet civil war. Most Pamiris continue to oppose the Russian-backed government in the capital, Dushanbe, and clashes between opposition fighters and Russian-led border forces still occur in Gorno-Badakhshan.

The political tensions were emphasized by two Russian helicopter gunships that buzzed overhead during the Aga Khan’s appearance. “Weapons should never be used again in our society,” said the Ismaili leader. “They should be replaced by constitutional rights.”

The present Aga Khan’s grandfather moved from Bombay, India, to Europe, where he served as president of the League of Nations, hobnobbed with royalty and gained a reputation as a breeder of racehorses. Prince Karim, who succeeded his grandfather in 1957, runs his business and philanthropic empire from his home in Paris.

Raised in Kenya and Switzerland, he studied Islamic history at Harvard, but his passport is British, as are those of his mother and his recently divorced wife. He speaks English, French, Italian, Hindi-Urdu and some Arabic. He usually travels by private jet, and his entourage bristles with satellite fax machines and walkie-talkies.

The prince takes all this in his stride. In an interview, he said he feels no cultural clash in crossing from Paris to the Pamir.

“Not in the least,” he says quietly. “I have read Nasir Khusrau,” the Ismailis’ medieval poet-philosopher, who lived in Badakhshan. “I was educated in the West, but I was educated as a Muslim.”

He talks passionately about his work for the Pamiris. In remoter areas, he says, he found “people without enough food to eat, people without sufficient clothes for the winter--and winters here are dramatically cold.”

This poverty, he emphasizes, is due to the collapse of the economic system. Asked the key to improving life in the Pamir, he replies, “First, peace. Second, peace. Third, peace. And after that, food self-sufficiency.”

In the Soviet period, this sensitive border area was well provided with education and health care. The agricultural economy was neglected, however, and 80% of Gorno-Badakhshan’s food and all its fuel came from outside the province.

Since 1993, the Aga Khan’s international development network has brought in more than 50,000 metric tons of wheat, rice, tea, fuel and other emergency relief.

His locally-based Pamir Relief and Development Programs (PRDP) is encouraging the inefficient Soviet-era collective farms to turn over plots of land to private farmers. Using the same seed varieties, this step has already attained a wheat yield 12% higher than those attained under the Soviet system; potato yields jumped 86%.

The PRDP has also introduced new high-yield wheat varieties and encouraged the building of small irrigation channels.

“My feeling is that in eight years, these people will be self-sufficient [in food production],” says Patrick Peterson, coordinator of rural development programs for the Aga Khan.

“It would be much better if we had private land,” says Doyor Faizov, looking at the green shoots of wheat in fields he and a relative have leased from a collective farm near Khorog under a PRDP project. “When people work for themselves, they’ll work night and day.”

The Aga Khan’s development network spends about $125 million a year on development projects worldwide, his aides say.

Prince Karim seems only mildly perturbed that his philanthropy may be overshadowed in the West by fascination with his lifestyle.

“I answer to my constituency. That’s my priority,” he says patiently. “Let the mad dogs bark. I have too much work to do.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Aga Khans: A Geneaology

Aga Khan I (Hasan Ali Shah, 1800-1881): The imam, or spiritual leader, of the Nizari Ismaili sect of Shiite Muslims. He was governor of the Persian province of Kerman when the Persian shah gave him the title, which means “chief commander.” He helped the British in the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1839 and in 1848 established the headquarters of the sect in Bombay, India.

Aga Khan III (Sultan Sir Mohammed Shah): Grandson of the first imam, he was born in 1877 in Karachi. Succeeding his father as imam when he was only 8, he became a player in Indian constitutional reform and was named president of the League of Nations’ General Assembly in 1937. In his religious capacity, he established schools, hospitals and welfare agencies in India. Aga Khan III raced and bred thoroughbred horses before he died in Versoix, Switzerland, in 1957. His son, Prince Aly Khan, was briefly married to American actress Rita Hayworth and died in an auto accident in 1960.

Prince Karim Hussain Shah: The present Aga Khan was born in Geneva in 1937 and, after graduating from Harvard, became the Ismaili imam upon the death of Aga Khan III, his grandfather. Now 58, divorced with two sons, the imam, Aga Khan IV, lives in Paris, where he runs the family horse-breeding empire and oversees charitable activities.

Compiled by Times researcher by JOHN MALNIC

SOURCES: Columbia Encyclopaedia, 5th Ed.; Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Ed.; Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 1; International Who’s Who, 58th Ed.