Word: karmal
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...stepped off the Aeroflot jetliner onto the tarmac of Moscow's Vnukovo Airport, Afghanistan's President Babrak Karmal was given effusive greetings by a phalanx of Soviet officials led by Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. The Afghan leader was on his first venture outside the Soviet-occupied country since he was installed as Moscow's puppet last December. The sheer number of senior Soviet Politburo members participating in the Moscow welcome demonstrated the Kremlin's obvious desire to shore up Karmal's legitimacy and make a show of his supposed influence with the Kremlin. Mused...
...amount of bear hugging, however, could hide frustrations over the inability of the Soviets' 85,000 occupation troops to vanquish the rebel insurgents' continued resistance in Afghanistan. In a propagandistic way, Karmal admitted as much when he complained to his Soviet hosts that bandits and terrorists armed by the U.S. and China "intimidate and loot the population and kill party members and employees of state organizations...
...gladhanding, Karmal's sojourn in Moscow was expected to turn up little in the way of hard Soviet aid, at least not enough to pump some life into Afghanistan's hemorrhaging economy. Instead, Karmal and Brezhnev signed a wide-ranging treaty of military cooperation. Said Karmal, with utter slavishness: "Were it not for the Soviet Union, there would be no Afghanistan on the political map of our planet, and all mankind would have been suppressed by the brutal barbarity of fascism and imperialism...
Kabul is waiting for something to happen-riots, guerrilla action, a tightening of curfew, the replacement of Moscow's puppet party boss Babrak Karmal, army or police mutiny, perhaps an even more overt Soviet takeover. However ill founded, however paranoid, the constant rumors have a reality of their own in shaping the war psychosis of the occupied city. The men seen in the streets with guns, the façade of power, are Afghans. The real occupiers, the Soviets, are invisible, except for their helicopters, the jet contrails, the daily barrage of Pravda-phrased media propaganda, the Cyrillic script...
...more than a symbol, since there is no sign of the emergence of a Vietnamese-style liberation front among Afghanistan's disparate and so far uncoordinated rebels. But the letters have far more credibility than the government and its enormous press, radio and TV propaganda machine. Indeed, Karmal is seen as a puppet and a traitor. He is commonly referred to as a saq (dog)-an unclean animal to Muslims...