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 Russia anyway-is a question of decentralization ver- people who were sent there after 1917. This is the sus centralization, more than of ethnicity. group-of people in the Russian empire who, more than anyone else, has had an antagonistic attitude toward QUESTION: To what extent will patterns of trade and Moscow for decades. They are located on the Pacific, commerce shift the regional identification of the Rus- so a strong movement exists toward stronger ties to sians who live in the Far East from considering them- Korea, Japan, the United States, and Canada. selves to be Russians to considering themselves a part of the Pacific Rim or the Northeast Asian community? QUESTION: Would you comment on the relation Will such patterns accelerate the trends that you are between ethnicity and environment? speaking of in terms of localization? DR. KAISER: At the beginning of the independence DR. KAISER: Dr. Wixman seems to see more of a movements, a lot of national fronts-particularly in potential for separatism in the Far East among the the Baltic states and in Belarus-began as environ- Russians themselves than I do. On the ethnic map of mental movements. Environmentalism and national- Russia, the Far East is overwhelmingly Russian and ism-especially national independence-were very has been since about 1700. Even so, the region is closely tied, not only in the Baltic states but also in sparsely populated; only about 25 million people live many of the European republics. east of the Urals.. I suppose a redirection or reorienta- tion of the population could occur, because there is a This should not be surprising because people consid- great deal of localism there. Two different regional ered their soil to be sacred-as the only place where restructuring processes have been at work, however. their nation could survive and prosper-and they First, the Russians themselves are reorganizing and became angry when it was polluted by forces outside directing their attention to the Pacific Rim and think- their control. Indeed, a lot of the region's polluting ing more in local and economic terms; second, the industries were moved in at the behest of Moscow. non-Russian population is banding together in groups_ Along with them came Russians, so the ethnic feature and organizing to try to gain political clout. Neither of was added on top of the environmental one. these restructuring processes is on the same level as an independence movement and certainly not on that of a Since independence, environmentalism has often movement based on ethnonationalism. Instead, local taken a back seat to nationalism and independence. Russian areas are demanding more autonomy within a For example, nationalists in Estonia who had more decentralized Russia and particularly seek lamented the fact that Russians had set up an oil shale greater control oyer the economic wealth that flows mining operation there now say they need to keep that through their region. Because these Russians are not operation going so as not to rely on Russia for oil. The sacrificing for the good of Mother Russia and all Rus- same thing occurred in Lithuania with the Ignalina sians, one could probably question the level of their nuclear plant. The Lithuanians have talked about add- Russian national consciousness and their common ing a third unit to that nuclear facility-even though sense of homeland, but this localism/regionalism is before independence it was a symbol of Soviet not on the same order of magnitude as separatist oppression and a symbol of the environmental degra- nationalism. dation of the homeland. In Ukraine, there is even talk about keeping Chornobyl' (Chernobyl') in operation DR. WIXMAN: I think the movement for autonomy and maybe expanding it as well. In Armenia, a nuclear in the Russian Far East is greater than in even the eth- plant had been shut down by grassroots opposition nic regions. There is a strong anticentralist feeling. because it was on a geologic faultline and has been There is no question that the population is Russian; damaged by earthquakes. Now the Armenians are they are just as Russian as anyone else. But who considering reopening it because they need local resides in the Russian Far East? The descendants of the people who fled to the Far East to escape central authority before the Soviets took over and of those 72
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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.