For many Cordillerans, they still vividly remember old movies or read pocketbooks of the former Wild West of America where the cowboys rode supreme on magnificent horses all over the wide open country, these frontiersmen and their families having helped shape the history of their country, the United States.
In fact, the cowboy culture of America has very much rubbed on many Cordillerans for countless years back that even today during festivals held in parts of Cordillera or in Baguio City, one can witness highlander males and females garbed in cowboy outfits dancing to music’s tempo at Malcolm Square or for any important public occasion.
In rural outskirts Benguet towns for example, you can easily find men astride horses with easy grace, sitting on free-spirited horses that makes anyone feel jealous at how dexterous they can do it while you could hardly clamber on a tame horse that is standing still.
Cordillera takes pride in its cowboy culture. In Baguio, for instance, this fact embedded in its allowing public horseback riding for visitors and tourists at Wright Park Riding Circle where there, at any time, one can learn to hitch on a horse while the four-footed steed would wait patiently and yawn at first-time rider or beginner trying to climb on its back.
Cordillera cowboys and cowgirls are far different for they don’t pack guns, unlike the gun-toting cowboys and cowgirls of the America Wild West then. And by the way, while Cordillera cowboys and cowgirls may not have Wild West hick towns scenarios, they sure do have their country music.
Daily Laborer, who loves watching Cordillera cowboys and cowgirls do their dance struts at Malcolm Square, was nonetheless unprepared for a Wild West hick town scenario on his recent working assignment in Pakistan, Southeast Asia, when he dropped by Darra Adam Khel.
Darra Adam Khel is a hick town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan in the northwest region, not far from Peshawar, capital of the province bordering Afghanistan.
Far from being a sleepy, drab patchwork of huts, it is a jumble of low buildings nestled in Safed Koh mountains in northwestern Pakistan with an estimated population of 119,588 persons.
Darra will jolt any first-time visitor, like Daily Laborer, into wide-awake alertness. Why so? Because anytime of the day, the air smells of fired gunpowder. At any given hour or even stretching into the night, sounds of gunfire are heard with monotonous and nerve-wracking regularity.
While machines whine to bore metals in making local or fake copies of different guns manufactured abroad.
It has gained fame and notoriety for its shops teeming with weapons merchants selling illegal guns and Pakistan authorities cannot do anything about it.
Darra Adam Khel is famed for a strange industry. Its economy is driven only by one business: the manufacture and sale of illegal arms. The lone street that runs across the hick town stretches to more than two kilometers that enjoys a complete monopoly over the trade.
It displays all sorts of weapons from revolvers, shotguns, Kalashnikov and Armalite rifles, not to mention million rounds of ammunition.
Darra Adam Khel, is known as the “Wild West” waypoint between Pakistan and Afghanistan is also known as the “Valley of the guns,” and is suspected to have more guns than its population.
Daily Laborer was able to visit Darra Adam Khel who luckily was invited by a local politician of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Darra, Daily Laborer soon learned enough, is the nearest thing Pakistan has to a Wild West thick town and the only place in the whole country producing one commodity: guns.
What Thailanders and Singaporeans can do in fake designer watches and what Filipinos can do in fake designer clothes, Darra does so with weapons.
American Smith and Wesson, Israeli Gallils, Russian and Chinese Kalashnikov, English mortars, French anti-aircraft guns – in fact, name any kind of weaponry and Darra has it, genuine or “Made in Darra.”
Excellent copies of almost all types of guns and other firearms are forged by hand in the hundreds of tiny workshops found in almost all corners of the town.
One Darra Adam Khel resident who said his name was Noor, works on Russian and Chinese Kalashnikov automatic rifles, turning out a copy in about 17 – 21 days.
On the shelves of his shop, Daily Laborer saw all sorts of guns including US .45 caliber pistols that can pass as “genuine” that only an expert can claim otherwise.
Mr. Noor’s shop is only one of the many, many similar gun stores on the street which Daily Laborer visited in the company of the local politician. He also talked to one shop owner who believed making guns are child’s toys, was deep in study copying an anti-aircraft gun which he said was captured from Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
In another gun shop store, a young man was trying to offer visitors a fountain pen which can fire lethal .25 caliber bullets.
Customers who do not want copied weapons, however, can buy the real thing also. These genuine ones are apparently smuggled into the town. Do not ask Daily Laborer how, because Pakistan has porous borders with its neighboring countries.
One shop owner intimated to Daily Laborer: “You name it and we have the weapon of your choice. If at the moment we do not have it, we will have it made for you or brought in even before you can finish a good night sleep.”
The shop owner never stopped talking to Daily Laborer even as a young feller, no more than 12 or 13 years old (probably the son of the gun owner) kept firing a pistol a short distance away and showing a would-be customer how to operate the gun.
The would-be customer took the gun himself and fired. Satisfied, he asked the boy how much for the pistol. Father and son exchanged hand signals, the would-be customer – somehow Daily Laborer thought he was an Afghan from Afghanistan – haggled for a price and son and customer settled for a price suitable to all.
Darra is Pashtun. The locals, also known as Pathans, were the most romanticized of all the people of British India. And of all the tribes, they were the only ones allowed to keep guns or permitted to manufacture them.
Pakistan inherited the system and still allows Pashtuns to make or carry guns freely whereas other Pakistanis need gun licenses.
Since the Afghan invasion, the area has become even more notorious for its gun industry. Business is still booming in what is called the “gun bazaar” of Pakistan.
“We deliver anywhere in Pakistan,” one shop owner intimated. “We even get orders from India and Iran.”
Daily Laborer can only imagine how dangerous it must be to live in Darra, when one takes into account the hundreds of copies being churned out daily.
“No, sir, not at all,” a gun-toting Pashtun told Daily Laborer when he expressed his apprehension. “Most people here, like our bakers who never gorge on their products, look at weapons as an item to earn an income with, not to kill other people.”
Shopkeepers in Darra share the Pashtun’s optimism. “We are craftsmen and make a good living, “a latheman said. “We try to please everybody and do not impose on anyone.”
Not even those who express misgivings over the trade do not worry the gun makers. One foreign news reporter came over one time and later wrote an article entitled, “Merchants of death.”
“Of course, we did not like his article, “one-gun store owner sniffed. “If he comes back, we will just tell him we did not like what he wrote. That’s all.”
Then the gunsmiths squinted at Daily Laborer and asked, “And what title will you put in your article after having visited us?” Daily Laborer, looked at the expectant faces, thought for a moment then answered, “I might caption it as the Wild West of Pakistan.” The gunsmiths smiled and nodded in approval.
Having ascertained that gun-making has indeed given the Darra folks a source of income, Daily Laborer believed the gunsmiths, even as they kept urging Daily Laborer to try firing one of the fake Kalashnikovs.
Daily Laborer declined. For he remembered the true story a long time ago of one of his Ilocano friends who once tried firing a “paltik” (fake revolver made in the Ilocos Region) and the barrel of the paltik exploded.
Luckily, that friend escaped unhurt and swore that no more will he ever tinker with a pistol, genuine or “Made in Ilocos,” or made even elsewhere.