Word: central
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While en route to India last November, Mikhail Gorbachev made his first visit as Communist Party leader to Soviet Central Asia. At Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, Gorbachev gave a speech to local party officials on such familiar problems as economic inefficiency and official corruption. But at one point his address took a distinctly unfamiliar turn. According to the Uzbek daily Pravda Vostoka, Gorbachev called for a "firm and uncompromising struggle against religious phenomena." Then he said, "We must be strict above all with Communists and senior officials, particularly those who say they defend our morality and ideals...
...against religion has not been going well. Finally, the fact that Gorbachev chose Tashkent as the place to attack religion indicated that the Soviet leadership is specifically fearful about the currents of fundamentalist zealotry sweeping the Islamic world, which might eventually infect the fast-growing Muslim nationalities of Soviet Central Asia...
...special concern. Soviet Muslims are concentrated in the U.S.S.R.'s strategic southern border regions and maintain ties with Islamic peoples in neighboring countries. Official worries have intensified since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan; many Soviet Muslims sympathize with Afghan co-religionists battling Soviet troops, as do many of the Central Asian conscripts in Soviet uniform...
...foreign policy, the most dramatic ideas the President is hearing are dubious ones advanced by hard-liners. One group is urging that Reagan both announce he is moving toward early deployment of his Strategic Defense Initiative and greatly increase pressure on the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The Central American initiative would mean asking for a huge increase in U.S. aid to the contra rebels and assigning American ground troops to support the guerrillas. "That would focus public debate on something useful to the country," says one adviser...
...event, Central America is not the place to look for a foreign policy success that would repair the damage of Iranscam. That could come only from an arms-control agreement. Says a White House official: "There is a feeling around here, heightened by the Iran business, that Soviet-American relations and arms control are the only game in town...