Image Credit: The Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign 2005-05-10.
Prime Minister Maliki stops the building of barrier that will inflame sectarian tension
BBSNews Commentary 2007-04-23 -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Sunday that he was opposed to a "wall" to provide security in Baghdad neighborhoods saying that the building of it would stop. According to Gulf News Maliki said:
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Filephoto: While Palestinian residents of Bethlehem remain ghettoized behind the Apartheid Wall, tourist buses continue to flood into Bethlehem. The Occupation continues to exploit the tourist attraction of Bethlehem, robbing Palestinians of vital income, by organizing day visits to the city. Tourists stay in occupied areas of Jerusalem to be shipped in and out of the ghetto through the checkpoints and Apartheid Wall.
Image Credit: The Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign 2005-05-10. |
"'I oppose the building of the wall and its construction will stop. There are other methods to protect neighbourhoods,' Al Maliki said on Sunday. 'I asked yesterday that it be stopped and that alternatives be found to protect the area.'"
Initially these "gated communities" - a term suitably sanitized to make walls dividing people from people seem almost like a pleasant retirement village somewhere in Florida, were not described as being a policy. On April 11th during a news briefing Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for the Multi-National Force in Iraq answered a question about the security walls being put up:
"As far as the gated communities, you know, what you may be talking about is like out in Fallujah, where they took and somewhat made that a gated community where anyplace you sort of enter or exit through over there, it's through a checkpoint manned by Iraqi police, Iraqi army and some coalition force presence there, which has been proving very successful in holding down the level of violence out there and the number of outlaws and terrorism insurgents that can get into that city and do damage in the city against the civilians there."Within Baghdad itself, though, I think General Fil would tell you that the ongoing plan that General Abboud has laid out is to continue the operations in each of the districts and to continue to establish a permanent presence with the Iraqi security forces that will allow for that close contact with the people, which will, hopefully, develop into the confidence between them so that they in fact start working more closely together, as we observed in this tip that occurred two days ago here in Baghdad when an Iraqi citizen came forward and told us about another weapons cache out there.
"There's no per se plan -- I mean, local commanders may be talking or something like that, but there's no overall big plan."
Inevitable Comparisons to the Israeli Apartheid Wall
The chief difficulty with the occupation of Iraq by US forces until now has been a failure of policy makers to make any political solution look viable enough for Iraqis to be able to rid themselves of unwanted insurgents like Al Qaeda. Building walls along sectarian lines in an already volatile civil war between Iraqi factions seems as doomed to failure as the Israeli apartheid wall.
A chorus of editorials in a number of Arab news publications strongly linked the walls being built around sectarian enclaves in Iraq as being Israeli inspired. And they said that the apartheid wall in Israel had not made Israeli's safer, it simply caused a change of tactics where Palestinian militants now use crude homemade missiles bypassing the wall altogether.
It should be amazing that American policy planners did not see this coming, but it's not. The apartheid wall in Israel is but the latest in degradations to ordinary Palestinians after decades of occupation that is contrary to long-standing UN Resolutions. This blunder should have been obvious except the fact that most American Republicans hold a hatred for Jimmy Carter that almost burns as bright as the one they have for all things former president Clinton.
So therefore, they simply ignore his very real description of what the Israeli apartheid wall is to the Arab world.
Sadly because of this blind partisan hatred it would not even occur to them that a security wall cannot be hidden away with a nice clean sounding euphemism like "gated community" -- instead for the Arab world it symbolizes decades of brutal occupation of Arab land by Israel -- now apparently being exported to Iraq.
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