1995-10-01a- CIA Conference Report: THE CHALLENGE OF ETHNIC CONFLICT TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER IN THE 1990S GEOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES 01-Oct-95

C00123268
Summary of Discussion defining territorial belongingness to the group hav-
ing only a plurality. In most administrative subdivi-
sions of Sri Lanka, one or another of the ethnic
Discussant: Robert Stoddard groups has a very large majority, so the potential for
this kind of controversy is limited to only a few
I am going to try to achieve two things: first, integrate areas. But these few areas are the critical places of
content with what Alex Murphy said yesterday about conflict and are where "ethnic cleansing" is most
general principles through an illustration in South likely to occur. Even though intense fighting has
Asia, using Sri Lanka as an example and, second, taken place in the Tamil heartland of Jaffna, some of
build upon what Dr. Schwartzberg has said about the the severest suffering by noncombatants has
background of ethnic diversity in South Asia, but giv- occurred in the peripheral or frontier areas, where no
ing a slightly different prediction about India's politi- ethnic group possesses a majority.
cal future.
- The size of the arealunits. The real crux of the terri-
The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka is primarily between torial problem is one of scale because the homoge-
the Sri Lankan Tamils and the,mostly Sinhalese gov- neity of a region depends upon the size of the areal
ernment. The Tamils want greater political control unit that is being clustered to form a regional whole.
over their lives; therefore, they seek greater autonomy
or even sovereignty over a specific territory. My com- - The decision about the necessityfor regional conti-
ments pertain to the controversy over the delineation guity. There is a strong argument for avoiding ethnic
of such an area, a territory I will call "the Tamil enclaves in any administrative unit. In the Sri Lan-
region." kan situation, it is difficult to achieve complete con-
tiguity because of the spatial distributions of the
At first glance, it would seem that a map showing the ethnic populations.
spatial distribution of people according to their ethnic-
ity would provide a fairly objective method for draw- Let us examine this regionalization task-that is, the
ing boundaries. However, even so-called objective objective delineation of a Tamil region-by looking at
regionalization depends upon agreement about, at the distributions of ethnic populations at three areal
least, four conditions which involve fundamental geo- scales.
graphic issues. These are:
On the provincial level, eight of the nine Sri Lankan
" The definition of the pertinentpopulation. What provinces have large majorities consisting of only a
constitutes membership in the ethnic group being single ethnic group. Furthermore, their geographic
regionalized is illustrated in Sri Lanka by the uncer- arrangement does not violate the goal of contiguity
tain status of those classified as Indian Tamils. (figure 13). In the Eastern Province, however, the larg-
Because the Indian Tamils have an uncertain citizen- est group has only a plurality. Sri Lankan Tamils, who
ship status, have been less politically active, and have the plurality in this province, insist that it should
generally belong to a lower caste than the Sri Lan- be part of their region of control, even though it differs
kan Tamils, they are usually omitted from the popu- a little bit from the traditional historical lands. The
lation that defines the Tamil region. But such an government disagrees.
omission is not universally accepted and, as I will
presently show, the inclusion of Indian Tamils can If we look at the district level, the complexity of the
make a difference. territorial issue is even more evident. In over half the
24 districts, the majority ethnic group exceeds 80 per-
- The definition of ethnic territory.Territorial belong- cent of the population. In only three districts does the
ingness is normally based upon the existence of a
demographic majority. But in a census unit where no
group exceeds 50 percent, a case can be made for
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