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 The Demographic Backdrop to Ethnic Conflict: A Geographic Overview Gary Fpller Professor of Geography and Population‘ Studies University of Hawaii Introduction Following the breakup of the fonner Soviet Union, Senator Daniel Patrick Moyriihan strongly criticized US intelligence estimates that, he alleged, had ignored Soviet demographic and health statistics. Moynihan argued that any society that exhibited the symptoms of the USSR-—which included rising overall mortality and a high incidence of alcoh:olism—-could not be a legitimate economic or military threat to the United States. The criticism is unfair in one sense, since it does not require national health or sobriety to launch missiles. Nevertheless, Moynihan’s observation about the role of demographic statistics in intelligence anal- ysis is insightful. i States sometimes go to great _lengths to disguise data about their economies and societies, usually with the motive of misleading their enemies (and perhaps their own citizens as well). More commonly, however, accurate data are elusive because they are difficult and expensive to collect, analyze, and interpret. I once spent several months visitinggand collecting data from remote family planning clinics in Chile, and I was struck with how different thesituation at the clinics was compared with the official reports in Santiago. My experience is highly typical, I think, and is shared by most who have done field research. 5 Demographic data are almostfalways the best data that are available for a society. This is not to say that they are good; indeed, they are often very poor. I am only here advancing a comparative judgment. Govern- ments collecting demographic data (whether censuses, vital registers, or surveys) can call upon an impressive body of international experience and knowledge con- cerning the planning, execution, inteipretation, and 151 adjustment of demographic data. Most such data, moreover, are not seen as threatening by govemments. Certainly there are cases where certain population information is viewed as terribly dangerous (Lebanon or Iraq’s religious compositions, for example), but, even when this is the case, other demographic data unrelated to policymakers’ phobias may be unaf- fected. Finally, censuses have to be conducted openly. Information about their quality and the nature of their biases is widely circulated in the demographic com- munity, and sometimes “corrections” are advanced by demographers outside the country. The only effective way to keep demographic data secret is not to collect them. Demographic Indicators of Instability Consider also that certain demographic trends corre- late highly with socioeconomic variables; were it not for this fact, demographic transition would be an arcane model of little interest to any but abstract theo- rists. Thus, it requires only a small logical step to see that socioeconomic data and trends (perhaps closely guarded or disguised) are imbedded in demographic data that are open and aboveboard. Hungary offers an interesting example. As a former Warsaw Pact mem- ber, Hungary was quite guarded in releasing social and economic data, but its population data are among the best in the world. I do not mean to imply either that censuses ought to replace electronic surveillance in the intelligence kit bag or that demographic data can entirely compensate for a lack of socioeconomic data. My point is that population data are a rich vein that is not mined suffi- ciently and that academic researchers and intelligence analysts have the opportunity to use census data in creative ways that give new insight into societal trends. Perhaps because the data are easy to come by, their value is not fully appreciated. A comprehensive case for the value of the demo- graphic perspective in assessing intelligence issues would require more space than I have available. I hope a few aspects of the “correlation” I mentioned earlier will suffice. 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.