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.
“Terry”13 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 social hierarchy, has been abundantly documented. So too has been the! frequent creation of new groups through fission of older ones and the less common amalgamation or fusion ofgroups when that suited a particular purpose. While these processes have oper- ated since ancient times, the pace of change has accel- erated greatly over the past century. Many new forms of identity have been socially, and often deliberately, constructed in response to the evolving corporate agendas of would-be players on the political stage. The institutionalization of'democracy and the atten- dant politicization of more and more previously inert groups underlie these changes. Clever politicians have recognized that “pushing the right buttons" to elicit some son of ethnically rooted response—whether based on religion, language, caste, tribal affiliation, or regional sentiment—was the most efficacious way of=—' attracting a following and attaining power. Temporary alliances of convenience with others playing the same game were often established. This strategy was espe- cially common in regions where few persons held deep ideological convictions. Types of Ethnic Identity in the 20th Century Emergent Nationalism Two political parties acted as the vehicle for the expression of emergent Nationalism during the pre- independence period. The creation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 was an outcome of a newly nascent Indian nationalism. The Congress quickly became the principal Pan-Indian vehicle for the free- dom struggle. When the Muslim League came into being in 1906, however, it embarked on a more paro- chial course. It set its agenda as much by its percep- tions of the likely effects of Congress activities on the welfare of India’s Muslim community as on its views of the British raj. Not surprisingly, the League vacil- lated between periods of cooperation with the Con- gress and periods of fierce opposition to it. As powers were devolved toward the provinces, the importance of success in electoral contests gradually widened the rift between the_ two parties. Yet it was not until 1940 that the die was irrevocably cast in favor of establish- ing a separate state for India’s Muslim community. The requisite ethnic rationale invented for that state was Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s “two-nation” theory. It was the idea that India’s population consisted essen- tially of a Hindu nation and a Muslim nation whose core identities and goals were so fundamentally differ- ent that there was no hope that they could coexist within a single independent state without serious adverse consequences for the Muslim minority. In 1947, Jinnah’s dream of‘an independent Pakistan was fulfilled. At the same time, the Congress dream of a secular, all-embracing Indian nation was shattered. Partition and the massive population transfers that fol- lowed still left roughly a third of South Asia’s Mus- lims in India; this concentration continues to provide a basis for ethnic tensions. The more than 100 million Muslims in India today constitute by far the world’s largest ethnic minority. Few parts of the country are without a significant Muslim presence. Within the Indian-held portion of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, Muslims form a substantial majority. The dispute over Kashmir has been the cause of two wars between India and Pakistan, and the area also fig- ured prominently in the war that led to the indepen- dence of Bangladesh. Within Kashmir a bitter multisided insurrection is now in progress as some separatists seek an independent state and others union with Pakistan. Sustained Indo-Pakistani enmity peri- odically makes life precarious for India’s Muslims despite the country’s constitutional commitment to a secular state with religious liberty for all. Muslims, of course, are not the only significant reli- gious minority in India. Five of India’s 25 states have Sikh, Christian, or animistic majorities (figure 10), and, with the exception of the mainly tribal state of Arunachal Pradesh in the far northeast, all have been scenes of bitter ethnic struggles in the postindepen- dence period. The most intense of these struggles is that of Punjab’s Sikhs for an independent Khalistan, waged intermittently since 1981. The present period is one of relative quiescence, but the problem remains unresolved. I shall defer till later discussion of the eth- nic struggles of several tribal regions. 134 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.