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.
“Nevers”25 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 Summary of Discussion v Discussant: Robert Stoddard I am going to try to achieve two things: first, integrate content with what Alex Murphy said yesterday about general principles through an illustration in South Asia, using Sri Lanka as an example and, second, build upon what Dr. Schwartzberg has said about the background of ethnic diversity in South Asia, but giv- ing a slightly different prediction about India’s politi- cal future. ' The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka is primarily between the Sri Lankan Tamils and the, mostly Sinhalese gov- ernment. The Tamils want greater political control over their lives; therefore, they seek greater autonomy or even sovereignty over a specific territory. My com- ments pertain to the controversy over the delineation of such an area, a territory I will call “the Tamil region.” . At first glance, it would seem that a map showing the spatial distribution of people according to their ethnic- ity would provide a fairly objective method for draw- ing boundaries. However, even so-called objective regionalization depends upon agreement about, at least, four conditions which involve fundamental geo- graphic issues. These are: ~ The definition of the pertinent population. What constitutes membership in the ethnic group being regionalized is illustrated in §ri Lanka by the uncer- tain status of those classified as Indian Tamils. Because the Indian Tamils have an uncertain citizen- ship status, have been less politically active, and generally belong to a lower caste than the Sri Lan- kan Tamils, they are usually omitted from the popu- lation that defines the Tamil region. But such an omission is not universally accepted and, as I will presently show, the inclusion of Indian Tamils can make a difference. i ~ The definition of ethnic territory. Territorial belong- ingness is normally based upon the existence of a demographic majority. But a census unit where no group exceeds 50 percent, a case can be made for defining territorial belongingness to the group hav- ing only a plurality. In most administrative subdivi- sions of Sri Lanka, one or another of the ethnic groups has a very large majority, so the potential for this kind of controversy is limited to only a few areas. But these few areas are the critical places of conflict and are where “ethnic cleansing” is most likely to occur. Even though intense fighting has taken place in the Tamil heartland of Jaffna, some of the severest suffering by noncombatants has occurred in the peripheral or frontier areas, where no ethnic group possesses a majority. ' The size of the areal units. The real crux of the terri- torial problem is one of scale because the homoge- neity of a region depends upon the size of the areal unit that is being clustered to form a regional whole. ' The decision about the necessity for regional conti- guity. There is a strong argument for avoiding ethnic enclaves in any administrative unit. In the Sri Lan- kan situation, it is difficult to achieve complete con- tiguity because of the spatial distributions of the ethnic populations. Let us examine this regionalization task-—that is, the objective delineation of a Tamil region—by looking at the distributions of ethnic populations at three areal scales. On the provincial level, eight of the nine Sri Lankan provinces have large majorities consisting of only a single ethnic group. Furthermore, their geographic arrangement does not violate the goal of contiguity (figure 13). In the Eastern Province, however, the larg- est group has only a plurality. Sri Lankan Tamils, who have the plurality in this province, insist that it should be part of their region of control, even though it differs a little bit from the traditional historical lands. The government disagrees. If we look at the district level, the complexity of the territorial issue is even more evident. In over half the 24 districts, the majority ethnic group exceeds 80 per- cent of the population. In only three districts does the 145 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 under it. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.