Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...threads its way over a mountain pass in northern Ethiopia. In the vehicles are members of a European medical team on their way to staff a hospital in territory captured by guerrillas. Thousands of miles away another medical corps travels with a caravan of packhorses through rugged terrain into Afghanistan. There its members will treat victims of the war between the Afghan resistance and the Soviet-backed government. At a headquarters building in Paris, shortwave-radio antennas turn toward Africa. A faraway voice reports that a cholera epidemic has struck refugees fleeing Mozambique's civil war. Within 48 hours, prepackaged...
More than adventure, Afghanistan offered sheer terror -- "the most extreme of all situations I've ever known," says Maria Muller, a West German nurse and veteran of five missions to Viet Nam. Five medical facilities in rebel territory were destroyed by Soviet bombs, and medical care was administered under the most primitive conditions. Amputations, says Muller, were "unimaginable. We had only a small amount of a narcotic, Trapanal. The saw came from the nearest work shed, and the amputation knife was a dagger from one of the rebels...
...vision, both compelling and audacious, was suffused with the romantic dream of a swords-into-plowshares "transition from the economy of armaments to an economy of disarmament." Included were enticing initiatives on a variety of concerns, such as Afghanistan, emigration, human rights and arms | control. Topping it off was a unilateral decision to cut within two years total Soviet armed forces 10%, withdraw 50,000 troops from Eastern Europe and reduce by half the number of Soviet tanks in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. If George Bush can build on it, this surprise announcement could reinvigorate conventional arms-control talks...
...Soviet leader also announced wide-ranging plans to continue the Soviet withdrawl from Afghanistan, ease tensions along the Russian-Chinese border, make improvements in human rights in the Soviet Union and clean up the world environment...
...Bhutto faces the hard part: governing a volatile country burdened by poverty, landlessness, ethnic rivalry and foreign debt. Three out of four Pakistanis are illiterate; unemployment is endemic. The economy is headed toward bankruptcy. Finally, Islamabad is the reluctant host to some 3 million refugees from the fighting in Afghanistan...