Word: kirghiz
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...GILGIT, a small town at an altitude of 4000 feet or so in a remote, seldom visited part of northern Pakistan, a tribe of Kirghiz mountaineers ekes out a precarious existence. It is a strange land to them, and they are among strange people. This tribe of about 280 families--over 1000 people--left their homes in the towering Pamir mountains, to the north in Afghanistan's Wakhan corridor, after Soviet troops invaded in December, 1979. Fighting hit-and-run battles against the better-equipped Russians, they soon had to sell their livestock and slip over the border into Pakistan...
...Kirghiz--long accustomed to tending their herds at altitudes over 10,000 feet--have found the climate in Pakistan particularly inhospitable, confronting diseases they never suffered in their homeland. Already, 160 people--mostly women and children--have died as a result of conditions to which they are unaccustomed, according to a Boston Globe reporter who has written about the Kirghiz. The remote land where the Kirghiz now live offers them no means to support themselves Forced to leave behind their animals when they made the trek into Pakistan, the tribesmen have no other skills beyond herding. And even if they...
Despite some reports that the Kirghiz had not been declared refugees by the UNHCR--the state department uses the commissioner's decision to fit groups under its own refugee heading--officials with the UNHCR in Geneva and with the Pakistani Embassy in Washington say the Kirghiz are indeed refugees, part of the whole body of people fleeing to Pakistan to escape the fighting in Afghanistan...
...greater part of the Kirghiz live in and around the Kirghiz Soviet Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Thousands of Kirghiz fled across the mountains to China after the Soviets began their program of forced collectivization and settling of nomads in the 1930s. More fled from China to Afghanistan in the 1940s when the Communists came to power in China. The mid 1970s finds 25,000 Kirghiz in Afghanistan and more than three times as many in China. An Islamic group speaking a language related to Turkish, the Kirghiz are by tradition herders...
With this out of the way, the Kirghiz would have to meet any one of four conditions the State Department uses to decide who has priority in coming to the United States under the Refugee...