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.
“Terry”12 pages
C00123268 percentage drop below 50 percent. However, the loca- ethnoregionalism more than on the nonspatial inter- tion-and here we come into the geographic aspects class struggles for power. However, interclass strate- that were emphasized by Dr. Murphy-of these three gies have real implications for the Hindu nationalist districts complicates the task of regionalization. Two movement. of the plurality districts-Trincomalee and Amparai- are in Eastern Province and present the same defini- It is critical to note thatwe are dealing with two major tional problem as produced by the larger provincial perspectives on Indian nationalism, the secular and the units. The third district, Nuwara Eliya, is located in Hindu. Indian secular nationalism is well illustrated the center of the country, where it is surrounded by by the leadership of Nehru, who expounded, prac- Sinhalese majority districts. Furthermore, the ethnic ticed, and institutionalized the pluralistic society. population that holds the plurality is the Indian Tamil From this perspective, the Indian nation-state is based community. Therefore, if a definition of "Tamil popu- upon a syncretic view of Indian culture and a federal lation" were to be expanded to combine both the Sri system of government. All religions, all jatis, all lan- Lankan and Indian Tamils, the resulting different eth- guages, and all people within the territory of this nic map would produce a Tariil region having a non- country have equal opportunity under the law, accord- contiguous exclave, ing to the Constitution. The laws of the land accom- modate both the wishes of the majority, as expressed Minor civil divisions below the district level are too by free and democratic elections, and the rights of the small for political autonomy. Tmat does not mean, minorities. however, that these units cannot be used as a basis for a regionalization scheme. However, the spatial frag- In contrast, Hindu nationalists believe that the nation mentation of the Sri Lankan Tamils in the peripheral should be based not only on common culture but also zone persists at this scale. In the Trincomalee District, upon the religion of Hinduism. The more extreme the population residing along a narrow coastal sliver forms want to rule India as a Hindu state and rid the forms a plurality consisting of a third ethnic group- country of all non-Hindu persons and influences. The the Moors. The geometric complexity of ethnic con- more benign forms of Hindu nationalism seek unity centrations is partially solved if the Sri Lankan Tamils among the various castes and languages in India and Indian Tamils are considered as members of the through the common heritage of living within a "Hin- same ethnic category because the plurality population duized" land. of this coastal strip shifts to being Tamil. Although such a redefinition of the Tamil population tends to From the perspective of the Hindu nationalists, Bud- solve some of the problems of contiguity along the dhists, Jains, and Sikhs already share a more or less east coast, as noted above, it complicates the regional- simliar sacred geography. Because of their origins, ization task in the central part of the country. their holy lands are within the same Hinduized land. The Jews and the Parsis came from foreign areas, but, Thus, it is evident that a major contributor to ethnic because these communities are small, they have-not conflicts is the distributional pattern of contending been a particular problem. On the other hand, Hindus populations. Also, this Sri Lankan situation reinforces view Christians and Muslims-with their doctrinaire the generalization made yesterday: the areas where ideas-as a problem. The nonacceptance of Muslims atrocities are most likely to occur, and from which is especially strong because: most refugees would originate, are the zones of ethnic transition between the regional core areas of the dif- e Muslims are associated with the invasions from fering ethnic groups. circa 1000 to later than 1500. Now, let me shift to the second topic which concerns India, where I would like to deal with a nonterritorial conflict. My own interests have usually focused upon 147 I '
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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.