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
When the proportion of the Sinhalese population who Let me switch the venue to the case of India. My grad- ‘ were young adults reached 20 percent of the total pop- uate student, Joan Butler-Qazi, meticulously went ulation—what we term a youth bulge—the Sinhalese through numerous Indian newspapers and other publi- insurgency of 1970 occurred. Although other factors, cations and came up with measures of violence for I which I do not mean to diminish, were behind the each of the country’s districts. Then she correlated uprising, it is more than coincidental that the peak in these measures of violence with the size of'the l5-to- that age group took place as conflict broke out. 24 age cohort in 1981. The correlation for India as a Indeed, a former US Ambassador to Sri Lanka told me whole was an R squared of 0.77.2 Here, the overall that all the insurgents in the rebellion were under 24 demographic variable is driving ethnic conflict gener- years old. Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 ally. ' The Tamil population shows a similar story. At the time of the Sinhalese insurgency, the percent of the Conclusion Tamil population that was age 15 to 24 was low and, thereby, caused no problem. In response to the Sinha- We have also examined the youth bulge situation lese insurgency, the govemment made changes in the more broadly, not only as it relates to ethnic conflict. allocation of resources, jobs, land, and higher educa- For South Korea, for example, we predicted flatly that tional opportunities. So by the time the Tamil youth youth riots would taper off and eventually disappear bulge occurred, numerous institutions and laws were as a result of the shrinking of-a youth bulge.’ Finally, in place that favored the Sinhalese rather than the one tremendous advantage in using demographic vari- Tamils. As such, the outbreak of a much more serious ables for analyzing conflicts, including ethnic ones, is episode of violence took place coincident with the rise that often the data are quite easy to come by. of the Tamil youth bulge. This bulge, incidentally, has lasted such a long time that it has become entrenched Z The publication of this research is foflhcoming "1 the 59c1ety- Even when H goes awa§'_'Pr°bably bY 3 See Political Geography, January 1990, pp. 9-21. l995—its effects are going to linger because of its longevity. 154 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.