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 movement and border vigilance have not been lost, merely shifted further east. Geographers, who have a long-established interest in migration, displacement, and territorial adjustment, are contributing to our understanding of the changing pattems. James Walsh (1992) has provided an overview that suggests that in France the threat of increasing migra- tion of Muslims animates racial passions. Fully 3.5 million foreigners make up 6.2 percent of the total population. The migrants are accused of such things as depressing average economic wage levels, refusing to integrate, clustering in Islamic neighborhoods, and undermining French culture and customs. Such charges serve the cause of the National Front under Le Pen, who won 38 percent of the November 1991 election vote and, in the regional elections of 1992, gave the National Front a larger percentage of the vote than the Socialist Party under Francois Mitterrand. Bruno Megret, a leading theoretician of the National Front, has announced a package of migration-curbing proposals: 1) posting of $180,000 bond by all non- European visitors, 2) mandatory AIDS testing, 3) review of the status of all aliens in France, 4) stricter border control, 5) no family unity doctrine, 6) repeal of the agreement on freedom of movement for EC-member migrants, 7) no social benefits to migrant children, 8) priority for French citizens in housing and social benefits, and 9) immediate deporta- tion for migrants with improper or no official docu- ments, (Walsh, 1992, p. 2l).'C1early such blatant state nationalism will not be adopted in policy terms by any responsible French Government, but more subtle vari- ants of these elements have entered the agenda of respectable political parties and interest groups and will be set in sharper focus as the key policy altema- tives each time urban racial violence occurs. The former German Federal Republic was a logical destination for many displaced Europeans and others because of its historically sympathetic reception of refugees that is enshrined in Article 16 of the German Basic Law. It is estimated that some 400,000 asylum seekers were processed into Germany in 1992. Walsh suggests that 80 percent came from the Third World and that the vast majority were Muslim; he argues that an additional 4 million Turks and their families and a further 310,000 de facto refugees should be taken into account as constituting the non-German sector of the population. Since unification and its attendant economic and fiscal difficulties, this liberal attitude has been openly chal- lenged. Anti-immigrant violence has made many Ger- man citizens wary of an extension of their open-door policy, especially when the media are quick to point out that 93 percent of asylum seekers do not have a valid case. Thus, one inescapable conclusion is that many places within Germany are going to witness sporadic and deep-seated violence. When this general trend is applied to the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria, it is evident that one major cause of future conflict will be the manner in which cross-border movement is handled. The German state’s response is to attempt to quench the migration fiow at the source through a massive investment in the emergent capitalist economies of the east and increased immigration control at external EU borders. To some extent this will be welcomed by dependent economies that will replace the ruble with the mark, but it is also likely to create deep-seated resentment and accusations of intemal colonialism, reminiscent of the first waves of German expansion in previous centuries. Such border controls will facilitate the removal of intemal EU border checks but only to the extent that each constituent country is as efficient and determined as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom in employing external controls, a doubtful assumption. The most recent migrants are incorrectly viewed as economically dependent and relatively unskilled-—a drain on EU resources. Miles (1992, p.41) is especially sensitive to this assumption. He argues that “this homogenization of migration flows is factually mis- taken and analytically problematic" and that “...large numbers of recent migrants originate from Eastern Europe, the migration of aussiedler into Germany being of special significance; that the most important category of intemal labor migration within the EU is that of skilled professional and managerial labour; and 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.