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 Geographic Factors in Ethnic Conflict in Africa Harm J. de Blij Landegger Distinguished Professor of Geography Georgetown University Introduction Over the past decade, no geographic realm has suf- fered as severely from ethnic conflict as Africa. Entire countries have been devastated by years of ethnic strife. Millions of Africans have become displaced persons in their own countries or refugees in others. Hundreds of thousands are imperiled by hunger and starvation, and ruling regimes are in some instances preventing food and medicine from reaching the dislo- cated. This paper will focus on the geographic realm of Africa, not the entire African continent. Geographi- cally defined, this realm extends from the zone of Islamic contact along the southern margins of the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope. It includes nearly 50 countries, an area of more than 8 million square miles, and—as of midyear 1994—a population of 572 million. ' Factors Aggravating Ethnic Divisiveness The prevalence of etlmic conflict and dislocation in Africa must be seen against a background of: (1) rapid population growth, (2) a problem-ridden intemational and internal boundary framework, (3) rising religious fundamentalism, (4) persistent neocolonialism, (5) historic animosities, and (6) stagnant or deteriorat- ing economies—f_actors that serve to aggravate exist- ing divisions. . In rural as well as in urban areas, Africa’s high growth rates contribute to the ethnic tensions and conflicts that affiict the realm. As a world geographic realm, Africa presently exhibits the highest rates of natural population growth. This continues despite the AIDS I pandemic in tropical Africa and the realm’s pernicious and debilitating plagues and diseases. Such population growth, attended by doubling times as low as 18 years, fills natural ethnic buffer zones, places further stress on already overexploited environments, and cre- ates a growing urbanward flow. Sub-Saharan Africa’s existing boundaries have con- tributed to, rather than mitigated, ethnic conflict in Africa. The framework of the continent’s intemational political boundaries, as has been said ad infinitum, is a troublesome legacy of the colonial period. This is more true in some areas (such as the Hom) than in others (the South), but overall, such boundaries still divide people of common origins; elsewhere they throw a girdle around peoples with adversarial histo- ries. Many African states have sought to accommo- date the latter by manipulating their intemal borders. Rising religious fundamentalism in Africa mirrors what is happening all over the world today, from Algeria to India to America. A number of African countries lie astxide religious transition zones, includ- ing Nigetia and Sudan, and religious fervor is contrib- uting to ethnic strife in these countries. Neocolonialism remains a factor in Sub-Saharan Africa in various forms, ranging from outright inter- ference in national affairs to economic intervention. French forces have acted in support of governments in countries plagued by ethnic strife; in effect, the French involved themselves in ethnic conflicts—recently in Burundi, earlier in Chad. US support for Zaire’s Mobutu has contributed to the continued comparative stability of that vast country; it undoubtedly has staved off-ethnic strife there, and it has played a useful role—from the US viewpoint—in the war in neigh- boring Angola. Accusations ofcollaboration with “neocolonial” interests often stoke the fires of ethnic conflict. Sub-Saharan Africa’s economies, in aggregate, are alone in showing an overall decline over the past decade. Declining living standards tend to exacerbate ethnic rivalries; in comparatively wealthy Europe, the ' 74 - - t ' 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.