Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...Kirghiz, regardless of their suffering at the hands of the Russians, maintain no ties with the United States other than their involvement with Dupree, Jones, and Nassif Shahrani--an anthropologist at UCLA who has done field work with the Kirghiz in Afghanistan. As a result, Lynch says, Qul and his tribe do not stand a chance on earth of qualifying for the U.S. refugee program...
With their romantic appeal, the Kirghiz--fierce mountaineers left suddenly destitute--have drawn more attention than other Afghan refugee groups. They are also one of the few not wanting to return to Afghanistan. During the past 50 years, the Kirghiz have fled from the Communists twice: first from Soviet Kirghizistan to Xinjiang--Chinese Turkestan, whence they fled to Afghanistan at the time of the Communist take-over in China. The Soviets, according to Dupree, have annexed the entire Wakhan Corridor, the sprit of land jutting off to the northeast of Afghanistan, where they are busy building roads to consolidate their...