IN GILGIT, a small town at an altitude of 4000 feet or so in a remote, seldom visited part of northern Pakistan, a tribe of Kirghiz mountaineers ekes out a precarious existence. It is a strange land to them, and they are among strange people. This tribe of about 280 families--over 1000 people--left their homes in the towering Pamir mountains, to the north in Afghanistan's Wakhan corridor, after Soviet troops invaded in December, 1979. Fighting hit-and-run battles against the better-equipped Russians, they soon had to sell their livestock and slip over the border into Pakistan. Now they want to come to America--possibly Alaska--and settle permanently.

The Kirghiz--long accustomed to tending their herds at altitudes over 10,000 feet--have found the climate in Pakistan particularly inhospitable, confronting diseases they never suffered in their homeland. Already, 160 people--mostly women and children--have died as a result of conditions to which they are unaccustomed, according to a Boston Globe reporter who has written about the Kirghiz. The remote land where the Kirghiz now live offers them no means to support themselves Forced to leave behind their animals when they made the trek into Pakistan, the tribesmen have no other skills beyond herding. And even if they did, there is no work to be found in the region around Gilgit. The tribe must live on a meager subsidy paid by the Pakistani government, itself burdened with the responsibility of playing host to an estimated 2-1/2 million other refugees. Without their livestock--yaks, goats, and sheep bred especially for high altitudes--the Kirghiz have little to do but wait.

The greater part of the Kirghiz live in and around the Kirghiz Soviet Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Thousands of Kirghiz fled across the mountains to China after the Soviets began their program of forced collectivization and settling of nomads in the 1930s. More fled from China to Afghanistan in the 1940s when the Communists came to power in China. The mid 1970s finds 25,000 Kirghiz in Afghanistan and more than three times as many in China. An Islamic group speaking a language related to Turkish, the Kirghiz are by tradition herders or farmers, depending on the land the individual tribe occupies.

In Gilgit, members of khan Haji Rahman Qul's tribe see their culture disappearing even as they themselves are dying. For their very culture is wrapped up with their animals. Providing food, shelter, clothing, and goods for barter, livestock sustains the tribe's all-too-precarious existence. The women of the tribe--who must still cook, sew, and care for their families--have become the barers of the tribe's culture. But to survive, the tribe must have enough land at the right altitude to raise their animals in peace and carry on their nomadic existence.

Qul first applied to bring his tribe to the United States in April, 1980. Accompanied by Alan Jones, an American relief worker, Qul went to the American embassy in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. The two ran into a brick-wall of bureaucracy. In fact, all they managed to achieve was confusion--whether Qul was actually applying to immigrate to the United States, or not just informing the embassy of his intention to apply.

Qul submitted a list of the people in his tribe who wanted to come to the U.S. Nothing was heard until Jones, then running a medical assistance program for Afghan refugees under the New York-based International Rescue Commission, inquired about the matter, and found out that Qul's petition could not serve as formal application for immigration. And so Qul went back to the embassy in April 1981, and filled out what he thought was the proper form. Told by the vice counsel that she would send the application on to Washington, Jones returned to Washington and inquired at the State Department about the application. He says he was then told it had not been received.

It was a tenet of U.S. immigration policy, not bureacratic incompetence, that blocked the path of Qul and his people to Alaska. U.S. immigration law considers only individuals, whereas Qul had intended to apply for the entire tribe. And no provision existis to justify treating a group of people as a single entity. This--an official from the State Department's Bureau of Refugees, who wishes not to be identified, says--is the only fair way to run immigration.

He would find, however, those who disagree with his contention. The entire system of immigration is at odds with the tribal idea of self, according to Louis Dupree '49, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University who has done field work in Afrghanistan. A friend of Qul, Dupree has set out to see that he and his tribe do get to Alaska. The immigration authorities look at individuals as individuals and deals with them as such, Dupree says. The individual in a tribal society considers himself part of this group; this, Dupree says, has led to mistakes on the part of immigration officials when dealing with tribal societies.

But such is the law, according to Paula Lynch (another official in the Bureau of Refugees Affairs); and under it each individual in Qul's tribe wanting to come to the United States must show up in Islamabad and file a formal application.

Even if everyone in the tribe were to apply, there would be no guarantee that everyone would receive permission to immigrate, Dennis Murphy, an official on the State Department's Pakistan desk, says. Murphy hastens to add that the member's of Qul's tribe would be considered along with several thousand other people applying for refugee status from Afghanistan and Iraq. From October 1980, to September 1981, more than 3000 refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq--the majority from Afghanistan--were admitted to the United States. The Bureau of Refugee Affairs, Lynch says, has been using the definition of refugee set by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which was incorporated into the Refugee Act approved by Congress in 1980.

A REFUGEE, according to both the UNHCR and the Refugee Act, is someone who lives outside his own country and unwilling to return home either because he was persecuted there or because he has a well-founded fear of persecution upon return. Every year the president and the Congress agree on ceilings for the number of refugees that can be admitted from any one part of the world. In 1982, for example, the ceilings limit entries from the entire region termed the Near East to 5000 people. Most of them, Lynch says, will be Afghan refugees.

Despite some reports that the Kirghiz had not been declared refugees by the UNHCR--the state department uses the commissioner's decision to fit groups under its own refugee heading--officials with the UNHCR in Geneva and with the Pakistani Embassy in Washington say the Kirghiz are indeed refugees, part of the whole body of people fleeing to Pakistan to escape the fighting in Afghanistan.

With this out of the way, the Kirghiz would have to meet any one of four conditions the State Department uses to decide who has priority in coming to the United States under the Refugee Act:

*people who have family in the U.S. with whom they want to be reunited;

*people who have been political prisoners;