Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sending reporters into a distant war-torn land prevents adequate media coverage, but this is clearly not the case. The reports filed by journalists working at the refugee camps in the relative safety of northern Pakistan are quite numerous, and, combined with the smaller number of reports from inside Afghanistan, provide such graphic and horrifying evidence of Soviet atrocities that it's hard to imagine a more gripping and newsworthy event in the world today...
Earlier this year, for instance, freelance journalist Rob Schultheis recorded numerous refugee accounts of the mass execution of 800 people, in the elderly, in the Laghman Valley in eastern Afghanistan. The well-documented level of brutality in this incident place it in the ranks of other well-known civilian massacres, like Guernica or My Lai. National Public Radio was the only U.S. media organization to carry the Laghman story...
...content to rely solely on eyewitness accounts, droves of journalists have gone through the Khyber Pass to report on the conflict. "There is no shortage of Western journalists working in Afghanistan," says Karen McKay, Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-based Committee for a Free Afghanistan. "The problem is that Afghanistan just doesn't have a high editorial priority in our news media...
Perhaps even more dangerous than complacent media leaders are the numerous liberal apologists who attempt to deceive the American people with excuses for Soviet atrocities. The many voices, especially since the Geneva summit, which swear that the Soviets have a sincere desire to settle the Afghanistan issue through peaceful means are engaging in wishful thinking, or conscious deception, or both. These same voices probably hailed Moscow's promised peaceful solutions for Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Soviet outrages in these countries look like Cub Scout outings compared to their current actions in Afghanistan. It would be hopelessly naive to believe that...
...Russian people cannot be expected to put real pressure on their government in this matter. They, unlike American citizens during the Vietnam era, are kept in almost total darkness concerning the war in Afghanistan. In several instances, the Soviets have been known to secretly bury their dead in mass graves rather than send them home to grieving families. Last year a popular Radio Moscow announcer who publicly criticized Soviet policy in Afghanistan disappeared from public view overnight. If world public opinion is going to influence Moscow's foreign policy, as it did ours in Vietnam, it will have...