Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, dated October 1995, contains the proceedings of a conference on ethnic conflict held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored it. Academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials presented papers on ethnic and territorial conflict in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. They also discussed what these conflicts mean for US policy. The document contains no UFO material.
“The Advance”17 pages
C00123268 land suitable for cereal farming and horticulture, a rich Easterners--the vast majority of them-who have petroleum field, several cities, and a population of never known democracy. Other hopes can be enter- 15-30 million. None of these observations distracts tained. By encouraging government reforms, discour- attention from a reality that precludes any prospect for aging excessive military expenditures, exposing the creation of an independent Kurdistan because a human rights abuses, seeking by diplomatic means to Kurdish state could come into being only if Iraq, Tur- promote peaceful settlement of border disputes, and key, and Iran were to display unprecedented coopera- organizing boycotts when such are required to prevent tion and generosity. or punish reckless national behavior, the United States could expect to play a constructive role in the Middle These speculative remarks reinfprce a comment made East. We also need to recognize that the United States at the beginning of this review: the Middle East is and has been, and will continue to be, viewed with suspi- will continue to be an area of contention and danger. cion and even contempt as a new colonial power, well As the only superpower and, indeed, the only external aware of the natural resources and strategic position of power capable of influencing events in the region, the the region but incapable of understanding the aspira- United States has an unavoidable responsibility. At the tions and frustrations of its "difficult people." least, we might hope that our experience since 1776 could be a source of illumination for those Middle 104
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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.