Word: kirghiz
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tribe have one recourse under the law. An act of Congress could circumvent the immigration laws and allow the Kirghiz to come to America. Their cause is not hopeless, for the Kirghiz have generated considerable publicity: WGBH recently aired a television program about them; the Boston Globe ran a front-page story about them in December; Reuters News Service has carried stories about them, as has the Associated Press. Indeed, it is because of the AP stories that Qul and his two sons have received an invitation from the Institute for Alaskan Affairs, a non-profit group in Fairbanks...
Marilyn Dudly-Rowley, who heads the institute, says she read the AP dispatches in he local newspaper a year ago and got in touch with Dupree. She has since won the promise from Alaska's two Senators and one Representative to consider sponsoring the bills that would allow the Kirghiz to come to America. Dudly-Rowley said the State Department recently issued visitors' visas to Qul and his two sons allowing them to come to Alaska at the end of March. Part of the two week visit will be spent talking to land experts about the best locations...
Dudly-Rowley says the shortage of private land in Alaska might make finding a home for the Kirghiz difficult. The bulk of it, she says, is owned by--or under the control of--the federal and state governments and the native corporations. But she adds that the state's new landage laws probably won't leave the state closed to the Kirghiz...
...publicity the Kirghiz have received has brought in money. Along with unsolicited donations from Americans who have heard of their plight, the Kirghiz benefit from the approximately $500,000 the International Rescue Commission earmarks each year for Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The committee has also helped out with the lobbying the Kirghiz desperately need to get to America. The Ford and Tolstoy Foundations and the Young Mens Christian Association have also expressed an interest in helping the Kirghiz. But all who are working on the project agree that it is difficult to find funds...
...State Department, which has come off as something of a cretin in this whole affair, is limited to what it can do by law. Murphy, with the State Department Pakistan desk, says the case of the Kirghiz has been "flopping around for about two years because of a lack of focus to it." He adds that he was "delighted" that the Institute for Alaskan Studies had taken up the Kirghiz cause. But the department, Murphy says, is a bureaucracy, and as such does not have the means to help beyond the processing the papers...