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 The Environment as a Factor It is drought that has been, and continues to be, Africa ’s greatest and most consequential environmen- tal problem. The pulsations of the Sahara are now bet- ter understood than they were during the 1970s, when the word “sahel” became synonymous with environ- mental disaster: Not only did that desertification phase claim as many as a half million human (and countless animal) lives but it also caused ethnic strife in coun- tries to the south. The geographer Thomas Bassett documented the results when cattle herders from the desiccated savannas took their livestock into farm- lands in the Cote d ’Ivoire, where crops were trampled and fighting broke out. Soon, the northerners‘were blaming the (then) Abidjan-based government for not supporting them effective!y during the crisis, and North-South relations-—always diflicult in coastal West African countries-——worsened. In Ethiopia, several successive years of drought tumed out to be a more formidable adversary to the Marxist regime in Addis Ababa than any insurrection was-— when the crops failed and people streamed ofi" the land, the insurgency became unstoppable. Now, with Eritrea an independent state, Ethiopia is landlocked—~its politi- cal fiiture far from certain. In addition, Eritrean ethnic unity is a myth; for example, the Afar (who extend into Djibouti and whose domain centers on the port of Assab) have a claim to nationhood that may well reemerge in the future. Environmental conditions also contributed to the downfall of the Barre regime in Somalia Crop failures and famines in the south led to the movement ofpeople and livestock acmss traditional clan-territorial boundaries, and in the ensuing clashes lay the origins of the weak govemmentis collapse. The current conflict in Somalia, it should be noted, however; is not an “ethnic” conflict in the terms of this discus- sion; it is not religious, tribal, strategic, or reformist. The Somali nationis ethnic and religious uniformity does not extend to territorial unity: six major clans and hundreds of subclans occupy bounded and inviolable spaces not only in Somalia but also in eastem Ethiopia, eastem Kenya, and southern Djibouti. Significantly the north, which suffered least from drought and resultant dislocation, has been virtually untouched by the prob- lems of the south. Although news media have paid comparatively little attention to it, searing, decadelong drought, the worst in living memory, has prevailed over interior southern Africa, affecting lives and economies from Malawi and Zambia to South Africa (Tanzania and southern Zaire also were affected). This drought, which came at a time when nearly l million refugees _from Mozambique crossed into Malawi and when Angola was consumed by a civil war; contributed to food shortages and politi- cal unrest in Zambia; one is tempted to speculate that, without it, Kenneth Kaunda still would be President. Perhaps more important, the drought has done much damage in Zimbabwe, where smallfamters on the Afri- can-owned lands suflered visibly while white owners of large estates fared better: As economic conditions wors- ened and the Mugabe governments popularity plum- meted, the dormant land issue was revived—in the form of the 1992 Land Acquisition Bill. Zimbabweis commer- cial farmers, who number almost 4,500 (nearly all white) still own 30 percent of all of Zimbabwe. They have sustained the agricultural economy, producing about 80 percent of the country ‘s cash crops. The Zim- babwean Government wants to force the sale of half the whites’ land for the purpose of resettling black farmer families. Although the program is opposed by Zimba- bwe is donors and lenders, including Britain and the IMF} it is likely. to proceed All this is happening at a time when multiparty democracy is being forced on a government that controls 147 of the 150 seats in the parliament. The drought forces the land issue; the land issue will cause ethnic discord in a country long known for its successfid transition. In a realm where most of the population continues to live on and depend directly on the land, environmental swings soon lead to human dislocation, and dislocation translates into conflict—often ethnic conflict. As the growing rifts in the European Union remind us, intercul- tural harmony is easiest to generate when economic times are good. When livelihoods are threatened, the human reaction is to blame outsiders-that is, noneth- nics, whether they be North African or Turkish immi- grants or local minorities. In Europe, the problem is recession; in Africa, it is unpredictable, fluctuating envi- ronments. 76 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.