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.
“Anderson”6 pages
C00123268 US Policy Perspectives: rights, not group entitlements. Second, it calls for a A Conceptual Approach Europe that is both more united and more autono- mous. More autonomous in the sense that decisions are made-on a practical, not ideological basis-at Jon Gundersen the lowest possible administrative level. At the same US Department of State time, autonomy can lead to anarchy and increased eth- nic strife unless guided by universal, shared values. Americans are uncomfortable with ethnic politics. Therefore, the paper suggests ways to create civil Why shy away from distinction based on race, reli- societies in the East and to integrate these societies gion, or nationality-at least in our public rhetoric. into a democratic family of nations. During the Cold War, ethnic conflicts were under- standably ignored by Western policymakers. Forty plus years of finely crafted and cleared NATO talking Ethnic Issues in Bipolar World points provided all the answers we seemed to need in a bipolar world. In a brave new Europe, without an Since the end of World War II, we viewed our policy identifiable enemy, we now have to think for a living. in Europe through the optics of the Cold War. The pol- icy of containment-with NATO as its operative man- The ethnic killing fields of Bosnia confronted the ifestation-aimed at providing collective defense West with a number of options-all of them unattrac- against a real Soviet threat. In this regard, the policy tive. Compassion fatigue set in when our initial was extraordinarily successful. We deployed our attempts to draw up convoluted ethnic maps were forces and accomplished our mission without a shot rejected and scenes of starving babies became all to being fired. In the process, we helped build viable commonplace on CNN. Was this fratricide not a democracies and, ultimately, witnessed the systematic uniquely Balkan curse, Europeans silently wondered? and systemic defeat of our main adversary. Could we not quarantine the carriers? This approach, of course, provided a convenient rationale for Western In a bipolar world, however, other issues, such as eth- noninvolvement. It is also proved to be wishful and nic conflicts, were largely ignored by Western policy- dangerous thinking, makers. In the West, the emphasis was on centrally organized solutions to security and economic prob- Setting aside the humanitarian rationale, there is a lems; for example, NATO and the EC. While these compelling strategic argument for Western engage- organizations have fulfilled their primary Cold War ment. The nations of the East already perceive them- missions of uniting Western Europe, they have tended selves in a political, economic, and security vacuum. to avoid, perhaps understandably, issues such as Without a sense of being part of a larger community- national identity, regional autonomy, and ethnic con- governed by accepted rules of behavior-neo-Com- flict. Few commentators were prepared, for example, munist and ethnic nationalists may once again set the for the anti-Brussels backlash following Maastrict. In rules. Already the unprecedented flows of refugees the East, more ominously, long-simmering ethnic dis- from the East have spilled over even to prosperous putes remained submerged or suppressed by totalitar- avenues of Paris and Frankfurt. Xenophobia and eth- ian regimes controlled by Moscow. There was no nic politics have become forces to be reckoned with chance to resolve differences in an open and evolu- throughout the West. tionary manner. Moreover, generations of Western diplomats, scholars, and journalists working out of Ethnic conflict will be on the international agenda for Moscow-and Belgrade-rarely journeyed to the the foreseeable future. This paper traces the historic provinces. If they did, they were greeted by party loy- and philosophical reasons why Americans have been alists who owed their positions to the central authori- so ill prepared to confront the issue and then suggests ties. In a sense, we tacitly accepted the Leninist a conceptual framework to deal with ethnic conflict in imposed view of the new man shorn of ethnic identity. Europe. First, it argues that we should look at the eth- nic issue through the prism of individual and human 178
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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.