Around
Globe, Walls Spring Up
To Divide Neighbors
By Bernd Debusmann
03 May, 2007
Reuters
TIJUANA, Mexico
- What do Tijuana, Baghdad and Jerusalem have in common?
They all have walls that
divide neighbors, cause controversy and form part of an array of physical
barriers around the world that dwarf the late, unlamented Iron Curtain.
There are walls, fences,
trenches and berms. Some are reinforced by motion detectors, heat-sensing
cameras, X-ray systems, night-vision equipment, helicopters, drones
and blimps. Some are still under construction, some in the planning
stage.
When completed, the barriers
will run thousands of miles, in places as far apart as Mexico and India,
Afghanistan and Spain, Morocco and Thailand, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia,
and Iraq.
They are meant to keep job-hungry
immigrants, terrorists and smugglers out, thwart invaders, and keep
antagonists apart.
Their proponents cite the
proverb “Good fences make good neighbors” but critics say
they are a paradoxical result of globalization in so far as goods and
capital can move freely but migrants cannot.
By an irony of history, the
United States — the country that hastened the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989 — has emerged as a champion wall builder.
The latest wall to divide
city neighborhoods went up in Baghdad in April, built by American soldiers
using 12-foot (3.7-metre) high grey concrete slabs weighing more than
six metric tons each. The 3-mile-long construction separates a Sunni
Muslim district from a Shi’ite area.
It provoked protests from
both communities and Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr termed it
“racist.”
The wall that snakes through
Jerusalem to seal off the eastern (Arab) part of the ancient city from
the West Bank is of similar construction and inspires similar charges.
In contrast, the people of
the Mexican border city of Tijuana have become resigned to the wall
of thick, rusty corrugated metal that runs from the surf of the Pacific
beach up and down the California hills, separating them from the U.S.
city of San Diego. (The official border crossing is the world’s
busiest — around 17 million cars and 50 million people a year.)
Further inland, the wall
turns into a 17-foot (5-meter) fence, with metal mesh so fine prospective
climbers cannot get their fingers through, and an overhanging portion
to make scaling even more difficult. It stretches east for 14 miles.
ARE WALLS EFFECTIVE?
The United States is planning
to build a 700-mile double-layered fence along part of its 2,000-mile
border with Mexico under the 2006 Secure Fence Act. Proponents point
to Tijuana and argue that physical barriers are effective in keeping
unwanted foreigners out.
Since the attacks on New
York and Washington of September 11, 2001, anti-immigrant groups in
the United Sates have linked illegal immigration with security concerns,
and political pressure for tighter border controls grew exponentially.
The Tijuana wall stopped
the “banzai runs” of groups of up to 50 illegal crossers
who swarmed past border guards in the knowledge that at least some would
get past. Before the wall was built, arrests totaled around half a million
a year, and have steadily dropped to around 130,000 last year.
But opponents of walling
off the United States point to the unintended consequences: a booming
industry in building tunnels under the wall (the longest to date, almost
half a mile, was discovered in San Diego last year) and in forging identity
documents.
And as would-be crossers
detoured around the fence and trekked across the Arizona desert instead,
the death toll rose steadily, to an average of nine a week.
Latin American politicians
in general and Mexicans in particular see the border wall as an affront,
and a departure from the philosophy that prompted then President Ronald
Reagan, standing before Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, to challenge
his Soviet counterpart to “open this gate … tear down this
wall.”
Two years later, the wall
fell, and, not much later, so did what remained of the Iron Curtain,
the lethal system of walls, fences and minefields that sliced 2,500
miles through Europe and divided countries under communist rule from
capitalist democracies.
Many of the ruses used when
the Iron Curtain was still up — hollowed out hiding spaces in
cars, tunnels, hook ladders — are still used now. Then, successful
crossers were hailed as heroes of freedom. Now they are seen as a threat
or a burden.
WALLS TO CEMENT TERRITORIAL
CLAIMS
While security and immigration
control are the most frequently cited reasons for building border walls,
politics play a key role in some countries. In others, fortifications
serve to translate territorial claims into concrete facts on the ground.
That applies to one of the
least known but longest border barriers of modern times, built by Morocco
in the 1980s to curb attacks by the Western Sahara independent movement,
Polisario, on territory it claims for itself.
It lies behind a set of walls
some 1,700 miles long and 10 feet high made of earth, rock and sand
built in the 1980s.
The wall is defended by thousands
of Moroccan troops and fortified by bunkers and fences, barbed wire
and landmines — between 200,000 and several million of them, depending
on who does the estimating.
To hear Palestinians and
United Nations officials tell it, the grey concrete wall that splits
Jerusalem from the West Bank and the fences and trenches that run through
the West Bank have as much to do with Israeli expansionism as with the
stated, and largely successful, purpose of keeping suicide bombers out
of Israel.
The West Bank berms, barriers
and fences are almost twice as long as Israel’s internationally
recognized borders and run in a way that make major Jewish settlements
in the West Bank a part of Israel.
Israelis who oppose the occupation
of the West Bank, as well as foreign critics such as former U.S. President
Jimmy Carter, talk of “apartheid walls”.
Israel’s wall has been
a persistent target of Arab criticism but Arab countries have built
or are building walls themselves.
Saudi Arabia has quietly
invited bids for a 550-mile high-tech fence — complete with sensors,
night vision cameras, face-recognition software, barbed wire —
to seal off its border with Iraq.
CONTAINING IRAQ CHAOS
According to U.S. defense
contractor sources, the project will cost several billion dollars and
was prompted by fears that growing anarchy and unrest in Iraq will spill
into Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis stopped work on
a barrier along their border with Yemen — made up largely of huge
pipelines filled with concrete — after Yemeni complaints three
years ago.
Another neighbor of Iraq,
Kuwait, has already sealed its border with electrified fences, berms
and a two-meter deep trench running along the 135-mile (217-kilometer)
dividing line, according to a senior Kuwaiti diplomat in Washington.
There is constant aerial
surveillance of the line, across which Iraqi tanks rolled in the 1991
invasion of Kuwait.
East of the Arabian Peninsula,
ambitious projects are underway to control movement between India and
Pakistan; India and Bangladesh; and Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Almost invariably, governments
that decide on physical separation from a neighbor predict that it would
reduce tension but, at times, that remains wishful thinking.
In April, for example, a
firefight broke out between Afghan and Pakistani troops after the Afghans
tried to tear down parts of a fence running through a tribal area.
Pakistan started building
a fence along part of the 1,500-mile (2,500-kilometer) border under
U.S. pressure to close the routes of Taliban fighters heading to Afghanistan
to join the war against U.S. and multinational forces.
In Europe, two of the most
infamous walls — the remnants of the Berlin wall and the “Peace
Wall” in Belfast — have become tourist attractions. But
Spain has built double fences 10 to 20 feet high and topped with razor
wire around its wealthy enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco to
keep immigrants out.
The fences have had an effect
similar to the walls on the border between the United States and Mexico:
would-be immigrants from poor countries looked for other ways to reach
a rich country.
Stepped-up Spanish coastal
patrols and better radar systems prompted African migrants to make riskier
voyages to the Spanish-owned Canary Islands. Hundreds have drowned.
If history is a guide, no
border fortification can seal off a country entirely. Even the mother
of all walls, the Great Wall of China, at around 4,000 miles the longest
border wall ever built, failed to keep out the northern barbarians against
whom it was meant to protect.
Additional reporting by Robert
Birsel and Simon Cameron-Moore in Islamabad, Kamil Zaheer in New Delhi,
Tom Pfeiffer in Rabat, Sheikh Mushtaq in Srinagar, Daniela Deasantis
in Paraguay and Tim Gaynor in Phoenix
© Reuters 2007
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