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 A society whose fertility begins to fall rapidly is area have led me to some hypotheses about demo- undergoing a profound transformation. Most basically, graphic processes that correlate strongly with societal it has begun to trust the permanence of lowered infant troubles. It is important at the onset to understand that and childhood mortality, something that is hard to per- such correlation is modest at best with general popula- ceive at the family level, and something that may tion growth. That, of course, is why so many extreme require denial .offirmly'embedded beliefs. The society neo-Malthusians insist very loudly that you believe has otherwise begun to change its traditional way of them; the ideology is strong, but the evidence is weak. life by moving away from rural, agrarian values and to I will limit my remarks here to a single case of ethnic embrace the smaller family norms associated with strife, that of Sri Lanka's two postwar insurgencies.' urbanization and economic development. Rostow's term "takeoff," which used to describe a The Youth Bulge in Sri Lanka stage in economic development, has been largely dis- credited by other economists (although it is not clear As Professor Stoddard implied, if you look at the his- whether this is because Rostow was overall simplistic torical or cultural context of the ongoing conflict in Sri or because he went to work for US President Lanka, a complex situation emerges. Indeed, political Johnson). "Takeoff," however, seems appropriate to scientists and analysts in the State Department and describe certain changes in fertility and growth that elsewhere have accounted for this in many ways. change the "momentum of growth" from positive to Many cite ancient animosities between Tamils and negative. Brazil and Mexico are both at that point Sinhalese. now, and, while any number of observers of different stripe continue to focus attention on the problems of The demographic data suggest another reason behind severe poverty that haunt sectors or regions of both the conflict, however. Figure 14 shows the age struc- countries, the demographic picture is reasonably opti- ture of the two ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. Using Dal- mistic. Rely on the pessimistic reports if you will, but las Fernando's method of looking at the Sri Lankan the economic transformation of both societies is inher- population by revenue district, we are able to break ent in their current demographic profiles. down ethnic group data to determine age structure of the populations. This graph reflects two distinct demo- Infant mortality data offer a measure of societal well- graphic transitions-a leading transition for the Sinha- being that is highly sensitive to change. Public health lese, who predominantly live in the country's wet authorities argue that the infant mortality rate is the zone, and a lagging one for the Tamils, who live in the best measure of-the health of-a society, and, even if dry zone. It reveals a correlation between the incidents this is hyperbole, surely there is a high correlation of conflict between the two ethnic groups and the pro- between such mortality and the prosperity of a society. portion of each population that is youthful (ages 15 to Overall mortality is also a valuable indicator. Mortal- 24)-those who are in demand of land, jobs, higher ity remained constant in Eastern Europe from the mid- education, opportunity, and other kinds of resources in 1960s until the late 1980s-and actually increased in the society. the USSR during the same period-while mortality was falling in virtually all other countries. There is, When the British left Sri Lanka, they left these indeed, good reason to suspect that these mortality resources largely under Tamil control. After all, the trends have real meaning, just as Moynihan pointed Sinhalese had resisted British penetration, while the out. Tamils had worked in the civil service not only in Sri Lanka but elsewhere in the empire as well. Within the context of this discussion, demographic data should be considered as analogous to an air photo See Population Geography, June 1984, pp. 1-11. in which "signatures" of various kinds indicate a dan- gerous ground truth. My initial investigations into this 152
Not linked to a story yet.
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.