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 What is not well understood is why people can at one moment share a higher level of identity that links two or more separate identities but then drop back into plac- ing their local level of identity first, thus leading to the exclusion of previously accepted neighbors and, per- haps, to conflict. For example, in Yugoslavia people for a time accepted a trans-subgroup “Yugoslavian” iden- tity but then, as the State apparatus rapidly crumbled, shucked that ephemeral level of identity and returned to giving priority to their age-old ethnic identities. Territoriality We are all territorial beings, exhibiting territoriality in varying manners, depending upon in which culture we are brought up. Although people vary from one cul- ture to another in terms of what they regard as their personal space, most will defend their home turf at a personal scale—be it the home from burglars, the team’s territory during a hockey game, or the claimed locations for our desks in the office. At a different scale, ethnic and national territory may also be defended if threatened. Groups, as with individuals, exhibit territoriality. Geographer Robert Sack (1981, 1986) notes that territoriality is a powerful and indis- pensable geographic strategy for controlling people and things by controlling area. Territoriality implies the need to possess, occupy, and defend a particular territory. Why should people sometimes link together and at other times not? It is not a given that some people can cooperate and share territory whereas others must be divided. The link between territory, identity, and terri- toriality becomes especially dynamic when discord exists between two or more group territorial identities that share a single space-—such as Walloons and Flemings in Belgium, Greek and Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus, contrasting peoples in Sudan—-or, indeed, lie across the shared bounds of two or more States, as do the Kurds in Southwest Asia. Self-Determination When the concern for identity, territory, territoriality, and self-determination are combined, a dynamic defini- tion is possible: “territory is . . . space to which identity is attached by a distinctive group who hold or covet that territory and who desire to have full control of it for the group’s benefit” (Knight, 1982, p. 526). Self- determination is at once a legal concept that finds expression in international law and a geographical con- cept because it links identity, territory, and the desire for control and has territorial processual consequences. In the West there is a tendency to discuss human rights from an individual basis, whereas in the former USSR and in many Third World States stress is given to group rights. Group rights form the basis for many claims, especially when the nation is involved, because most people today still put the needs of their nation above personal needs—-thus the call to arms is so often heeded in times of danger. Group rights also find expression in self-determination, for the term is used to refer to groups, not individuals. Maoris in New Zealand use the word turangawaewae to refer, literally, to “the standing place for the feet.” Implied in this is “the rights of a tribal group in land and the consequential rights of individual members of the group” (cited in Knight, 1988, p. 126). This phrase links identity, territory, and rights. Control is implied too, for without control the people’s rights and respon- sibilities cannot be fulfilled, and the identity within territory is threatened. Control over both identity and territory is self-determination. Many groups, varying defined, claim self-determination by maintaining they have valid links between their identity and their terri- tory and have the expectation of rights and control that would come from the granting of self-determination. Despite the clamoring for self-determination and its application following World War I in many places in Europe, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, in 1921 believed that national safety, historic rights, and economic interests should take precedence over self-determination. He felt the term self-determi- nation was “loaded with dynamite!" Thus Lansing and other politicians then and later, even to this day, have given priority to existing States (Knight 1985). Although the UN Charter states that “all people have the right to self-determination," the UN--which is made of representatives of States, after all—gives pri- ority to respecting the territorial integrity of existing 19 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.