As a veteran war correspondent, Judith Matloff has been to most of the world's intractable conflicts from Colombia to Chechnya, Mexico to Kashmir. But as she writes in the introduction to her fascinating new book, “reporting from five continents and thirty-nine countries, whenever I was sent to cover violence, I invariably found myself in rugged mountains, writing about all manner of hostilities.”
The assignments often required hiking boots and tablets to fight altitude sickness. She encountered her first tank in the Bolivian capital, La Paz, nearly 12,000 ft above sea level, when the country was encountering its 147th coup. The inspiration for the book, surprisingly for her, came at home in ‘flatland’ Manhattan far away from the ‘zones of slaughter’, when she was playing a round of the board game Risk with her son and husband. As they battled over Afghanistan—where else?—her son asked her to spread out a map of the world and show him where people were currently fighting. As she marked two dozen conflicts, her son recited the names out loud—Kosovo, Georgia, Nepal, Chiapas—and asked her: “Most occur in mountains. Why?”
Over the last few years, in an effort to answer her son’s question, she revisited many of the world’s least hospitable environments up in the mountains. “In all these places, the obdurate terrain is matched only by the obstinacy of its inhabitants,” she writes. Matloff travels to the northern passes of Albania in the Dinaric Alps at 9,000 ft where blood feuds have been going on for centuries preventing teenagers from leaving their homes to attend school.
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“Marrash Kola had known for 30 years that one day he would be summoned to his own murder.” It finally happened one morning in April 2013, when he was 56. She goes to Mexico’s southern mountains into Zapatista rebel territory; to Nepal; to the Andes where Marxist FARC guerrillas lurk high in the mountains. But for us, her account of Kashmir is heart-breaking. “Kashmir showed me how prolonged violence and fear can destroy the soul,” she writes.
She visited Srinagar in 2008, and tells us about a psychiatric ward where a doctor and his helper are seeing one hundred thousand patients a year, treating them for depression, insomnia, “and fear, always fear.” We are in 2017, and Kashmir remains traumatised as ever.
Matloff, in the great tradition of political travel writing of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Robert Kaplan, ensures that we will never forget these conflict zones in the mountains.
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The War is in the Mountains ; Judith Matloff, Duckworth Overlook/ Bloomsbury, ₹1,199.