- Title: PAKISTAN: US DELEGATION VISITS REFUGEE CAMPS ON ASIA FACT-FINDING MISSION.
- Date: 18th August 1979
- Summary: 1. GV: Refugees at refugee camp (3 shots) 0.18 2. GV: Aircraft on tarmac delegates out of plane. 0.22 3. GV: Refugee camp 0.32 4. SV: Refugees with delegates. 0.35 5. SV: Refugees speaking to camera. 0.58 6. SV: President Zia-ul Haq, greeting delegates at banquet. 1.20 The New York Time reported on the 11 August that White
- Embargoed: 2nd September 1979 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: CHITRAL, PAKISTAN
- Country: Pakistan
- Reuters ID: LVABXBJSZ40VXWX2U1A826O1T5ZR
- Story Text: Almost 200,00 Afghan refugees have fled across the border into pakistan since President Noor Mohammad Tarakki seized power in a bloody coup last year (27 April 1979). They come claiming kabul;'s Moscow-backed government is introducing left-wing reforms which threaten Afghanistan's Islamic traditions. The huge influx of refugees has brought relations between Afghanistan and pakistan to a boiling point-not least because Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of training the refugees to fight a guerrilla war against the Kabul government. Now an American Congressional delegation--on an Asian fact-finding mission has visited one of the refugee camps set up by Pakistan.
SYNOPSIS: Chitral has become a sanctuary for some fifty-five thousand refugees. But no one knows the exact number of forbidding Kafiristan mountains which are the only manifestation of an otherwise undefined border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A United States government aircraft brought the fourteen member delegation to Chitral where they saw one of the camps set up by the Pakistan Government to house the refugees.
Pakistan says it has spent forty million rupees (4 million US dollar) to feed and house the refugees, but denies training them as guerrillas. In the meantime the guerrilla war continues and hostilities between Afghanistan and Pakistan escalate into a conflict which threatens the stability of the region.
Pakistan's President Zia-ul Haq met the American delegation at a state banquet. There the politicians discussed the wider implications of the Afghan-Pakistani conflict and reports that Pakistan is planning to explode an atomic bomb.
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