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 replacement level soon. This is encouraging, because Indonesia is the world’s most populous Islamic nation. It is not a highly industrialized state, but the govem- ment keeps pushing the idea publicly that small fami- lies are happy families. I think that is worth considering in many parts of the world that are grow- ing rapidly. General Discussion DR. WIXMAN: In light of a comment made by Pro- fessor Mikesell, I agree that, in terms of conflict reso- lution, the example of Finland is superb. Why did the Finns give such rights to the Swedes? Because they had been under Russian rule. A little earlier in history, when Ru_ssia took Finland from Sweden, it was anti- Swedishism that became the symbolism in pro-Russi- anism. What we need to look at in terms of conflict resolution is how reconciliation can take place. The reason Armenians still hate Turks is that there has never been reconciliation. Similarly there will be no ability for Bosnian Croats, Serbs, and Muslims to live together until reconciliation occurs. DR. MIKESELL: Another example of a government maintaining a keen awareness of minority-group needs would be that ofrthe Netherlands. About 10 per- cent of the country’s population is Frisian, but only 10 percent of the Frisians vote for the Frisian National Party. There is a Frisian academy; there are chairs in the language in Dutch universities. It is almost as though the government has said to the Frisians, “You are recognized. We would be pleased if you would engage in activities to promote your identity. We’ ll even subsidize it.” Also, Switzerland recognized its Romansche-speakers before they clamored for recognition. This is partly because Mussolini considered Romansche to be an Italian dialect, and that frightened the Swiss. But we have so few other examples of that happening. I would say that treating a 10-percent minority as though it were a 49-percent minority works, but it requires extraordinary sophistication on behalf of the majority side. There are four core-applied questions that come to mind: ' Under what circumstances do ethnic groups become politicized in the first place‘? ' Under what circumstances do politicized groups come into conflict? ' What circumstances aggravate or ameliorate con- flict? ' What are the implications of conflict for national! intemational order? Those are, it seems to me, the strongest set of applied questions we should deal with. If there is a message related to those questions, each one of which could be addressed at some length, it seems to me, it is that we are not living in a simple world. I will avoid the ugly term complexification, but it seems to me that what continues to come across is that context matters, and context is a complicated array of things that come together. If there is a value to geography, it is not that it studies a particular thing but that it tries to look at how things come together and interact with core concepts like ter- ritory, location, and environment. The key advantage of a geographical perspective is its ability to try to think about the relationships among and between phe- nomena in places. This is where political science and geography really come together. Politics and power are expressed territorially, and looking at the relation- ships among and between the territorial units and the expression of powers is critical to understanding the circumstances that lead to each of those four applied questions that I noted. DR. DE BLIJ: The examples that Dr. Mikesell men- tioned of countries that were gracious to their minori- ties were also countries that were relatively well off at the time they made those concessions. When Germany was thriving, the Turkish minority was welcome. When Germany had an economic recession, the Turkish minority became disliked. 176 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.