Word: begmatova
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sakin Begmatova, Foreign Minister of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic,* began by stating, "We wanted to make sure that no one strangles the Afghans' people's revolution." As the conversation went on, she recalled an incident-before the April 1978 revolution that brought the Marxists to power in Kabul-when the Soviets helped the Afghans fight a plague of locusts near the border. "That could have spread to us," noted Begmatova, "the locusts threatened crops on both sides of the border...
Might one reason why the Soviet Union moved into Afghanistan be to prevent the spread of a political locust plague into the U.S.S.R.? Begmatova denied heatedly that she had intended any such analogy: It is the official Soviet position that the Central Asian republics are utterly loyal to Moscow and that their Muslim populations are immune to contamination from the south, where Islamic fundamentalism and militancy are rampant...
Over and over again, especially toward the end of any discussion of Afghanistan, the issue of proximity kept coming up. Warned Begmatova: "I say to you as a human being, as a woman, as a mother and as a grandmother, that country [Afghanistan] is right on our border." Gairat Sapargaliyev, a law professor in Alma-Ata, said: "Afghanistan is, after all, a country on our own border!" Sapar Baizhanov, the editor in chief of Socialist Kazakhstan, put it this way: "We're not talking about Canada, after all, we're talking about a country on our own borders...
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