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.
“Nevers”25 pages
C00123268 When the proportion of the Sinhalese population who Let me switch the venue to the case of India. My grad- were young adults reached 20 percent of the total pop- uate student, Joan Butler-Qazi, meticulously went ulation-what we term a youth bulge-the Sinhalese through numerous Indian newspapers and other publi- insurgency of 1970 occurred. Although other factors, cations and came up with measures of violence for which I do not mean to diminish, were behind the each of the country's districts. Then she correlated uprising, it is more than coincidental that the peak in these measures of violence with the size of-the 15-to- that age group took place as conflict broke out. 24 age cohort in 1981. The correlation for India as a Indeed, a former US Ambassador to Sri Lanka told me whole was an R squared of 0.77.2 Here, the overall that all the insurgents in the rebellion were under 24 demographic variable is driving ethnic conflict gener- years old. ally. The Tamil population shows a similar story. At the time of the Sinhalese insurgency, the percent of the Conclusion Tamil population that was age 15 to 24 was low and, thereby, caused no problem. In response to the Sinha- We have also examined the youth bulge situation lese insurgency, the government made changes in the more broadly, not only as it relates to ethnic conflict. allocation of resources, jobs, land, and higher educa- For South Korea, for example, we predicted flatly that tional opportunities. So by the time the Tamil youth youth riots would taper off and eventually disappear bulge occurred, numerous institutions and laws were as a result of the shrinking of-a youth bulge.? Finally, in place that favored the Sinhalese rather than the one tremendous advantage in using demographic vari- Tamils. As such, the outbreak of a much more serious ables for analyzing conflicts, including ethnic ones, is episode of violence took place coincident with the rise that often the data are quite easy to come by. of the Tamil youth bulge. This bulge, incidentally, has lasted such a long time that it has become entrenched 2 The publication of this research is forthcoming. in the society. Even when it goes away-probably by 1 See PoliticalGeography,January 1990, pp. 9-21. 1995-its effects are going to linger because of its longevity. 154
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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.