Bias crimes, those having an racial, ethnic or religious component, continue to be the focus of law-enforcement agencies, educational decision makers and other community forces.

Much of the city's problem, like that of the country itself, is the unwillingness of its ethnic components to assume a larger loyalty.

The negative attitudes, however, rarely had any ethnic or racial components.

"The people in the so-called ethnic component tend to think of the converts as very elitist, that they're taking over Buddhism and changing it."

Baluchis and Persian empires have a long dispute between their ethnic, culture, political and religious components.

So estimates of the community's ethnic components are anecdotal.

The reason, experts say, is that they have a strong ethnic component.

In addition to the economic division, an ethnic component exists in the ranking of the various levels of the middle class.

While the main component was probably the Turkic-speaking tribes, the confederacy included other ethnic components as well.

The racial and ethnic component of this change inhibited open discussion in the 1960's and 70's.