Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, numbered RTT 95-10039 and dated October 1995, presents the proceedings of a conference held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored the conference. In it, academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials examined ethnic conflict by region, covering Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. The report also discusses what these conflicts mean for US policy. It does not deal with UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.
“The Advance”17 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 Finally, the major concern the Lebanese currently have is the 300,000 Palestinian refugees who are in the southern part of their country. They would like to see them moved out. This is another of the destabiliz- ing aspects of the human geography of the Middle East. ’ General Discussion QUESTION: I’d like to focus the Kurdish question on Turkey. What do you think the prospects are for Turks-—who seem adamantly opposed to any kind of acknowledgment of the Kurds, at al1—to ever try to solve the Kurdish problem politically or socially rather than just militarily? Is this insurgency ever going to end? ' DR. MIKESELL: The recent statements from Prime Minister Ciller simply reinforce what has been said before. When asked about this, she said, “Why is there a problem? The Kurds have the same rights as all other Turkish citizens.” In other words, the Turks are quite emphatic in the idea that, although they recog- nize they have minorities, they cannot have minority citizenship. There is a Kurdish party represented in the parliament in Ankara. When the delegates arrived and wanted to use the Kurdish language, however, they were accused of treason and violation of law, The Turks see themselves as living in a unitary state, a nation-state. They know a lot of diversity exists in the country, but they have not allowed allow citizenship to be defined in reference to anything other than Turkish identity. QUESTION: Do you think that there will be an alien- ation of those Kurds who have been integrated into Turkish society, particularly within the military and the intelligence services? DR. MIKESELL: Turkey has used military conscrip- tion as a way of promoting national identity, and, when a Kurd is drafted into the army, he gets shipped away from Kurdistan. The Turks have used military service and crash programs in literacy to try to Turkify the non-Turkish population. It would be very difficult to find out how much assimilation has taken place, however, because Turks are so sensitive to this issue. Regardless, I can’t imagine an assimilated Kurd who has changed his name and who knows Turkish going back to being a Kurdish nationalist. 107 Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.