Baghdad wall has nothing to do with protecting Iraqis

In Focus:

More than a wall

Walling in Al-Adhamiyah has nothing to do with protecting Iraqis

---

When the Americans decided to build a wall around Al-Adhamiyah in Baghdad, they claimed that their main concern was to protect the inhabitants. Very noble of them, but was this the real reason? Are the Americans interested in protecting Al-Adhamiyah, or in protecting other areas from fighters based in Al-Adhamiyah? Before answering these questions, let's review a few developments that took place in Iraq of late.

The city of Kirkuk is being Kurdicised. Up until the occupation, ethnic Arabs mostly inhabited the city. Now the Kurds want to annex it to their province. Why is that? Because Kirkuk sits on a lake of oil, and the Kurds need to control the oil as part of their plan to secede from Iraq. The Kurdish scheme is so obvious that Turkey is already saying it cannot allow it to happen. The last thing the Erdogan government needs is a Kurdish state on its southern borders.

Meanwhile, plans are underway to declare a Basra Province in southern Iraq, although no attempts at secession have so far been made. The similarity between the situation in Kurdistan and Basra is worth examining. If things keep proceeding in this direction, Iraq would soon be partitioned into three mini-states. The "no fly" latitude lines the Clinton administration put in place several years ago would determine the borders of those mini-states. Kurdistan is already behaving as a semi-independent state. It is signing oil agreements with other countries, establishing political and economic ties with other nations, and generally ignoring the beleaguered government in Baghdad.

The Americans want to see Iraq divided; Kurdistan in the north, Basra in the south, and the Sunni triangle in the middle. But what does all this have to do with Al-Adhamiyah?

Well, let's not forget that the US administration is faced with a deepening crisis both at home and abroad. In Iraq, the US army is on the defensive. At home, the two houses of Congress, acting in defiance of President Bush, have made it clear that troops must be pulled out by September 2008 at the latest. Should the withdrawal take place -- and it most likely will -- then the whole Project for the New American Century would fall apart. All this planning, all these attempts to control oil resources, would come to nothing. It would be a disaster for the neo-cons. This is why the latter are determined to divide Iraq prior to withdrawal, the aim being to have two out of three mini-states under US control.

The Kurdish government would be pleased to forge a close alliance with the Americans. Such an alliance would offer the Kurds protection from the Turks, the Iranians and the pan-Arab government that may emerge in central Iraq. The southern province would also rush into US arms, for more or less the same reasons. Iraq would thus be reduced to the same status as any of the Gulf states, just another group of sheikhdoms reliant on oil and foreign backing.

This scenario wouldn't be easy to carry out so long as the resistance is going strong. So the fighters must be isolated in their strongholds: in Al-Anbar, Tel Afar, Al-Qaim and Al-Adhamiyah. Furthermore, some effort must be exerted for national unity, through the integration of former Baathists and army personnel into the system. The US administration is already moving in that direction. Also, the Americans claim to be succeeding in breaking the ranks of the Iraqi resistance. Still, why Al-Adhamiyah?

Let's go back to history. Founded at the time of Caliph Abu Jaafar Al-Mansour, Baghdad was built on the opposite banks of the Tigris. The west bank of the river was known as Al-Karkh, the east bank as Al-Rasafa. Until recently, the centre of the city was divided equally between the two banks. The mausoleum of Abu Hanifa was in Al-Rasafa, and that of Imam Al-Kazem was in Al-Karkh, with the Imamayn (two imams) Bridge connecting the two. Al-Adhamiyah took its name from the words "Al-Imam Al-Adham", or Abu Hanifa, a leading Sunni doctrinaire. During the Ottoman era, Al-Adhamiyah had a reputation for rebellion that continued even during the communist tide of the 1960s. Since the fall of Baghdad, Al-Adhamiyah has been active in resistance.

In the early days of the occupation, it was said that Iraq's political elite, Saddam's Hussein included, took refuge in Al-Adhamiyah. At one point, it was said that Saddam attended prayers at the mosque of Al-Imam Al-Adham. US forces reacted to the rumours by shelling the mosque. The main minaret of that mosque still bears the marks of shelling. For the past four years, Al-Adhamiyah has been a hotbed of resistance. The Americans repeatedly declared the area "liberated" from the resistance. But when the Americans tried to send the Iraqi army -- the new one they had created -- to its first real test in Al-Adhamiyah, dozens of Iraqi and US troops were killed. After this, the Americans tried to send troops in dinghies across the river, but suffered further losses.

Al-Adhamiyah is the link between the two banks of the Tigris and the gateway to Al-Waziriya, to the Ministry of Defence and the Green Zone. To isolate Al-Adhamiyah is to deprive the resistance of a vital asset. This is why the Americans built the wall. So there you have it. Al-Adhamiyah is part of the US drive to restrain, not protect, the Iraqis. This quest is likely to fail, as it did repeatedly in the past. The days of the occupation are numbered.

Galal Nassar

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

Al-Ahram Weekly Online

THE COLOR OF OLIVES

From Mexican director Carolina Rivas and cinematographer Daoud Sarhandi comes this elegant and visually breathtaking new film about the Palestinian experience. The Amer family lives surrounded by the infamous West Bank Wall, where their daily lives are dominated by electrified fences, locked gates and a constant swarm of armed soldiers.This unique and intimate documentary shares their private world, allowing a glimpse of the constant struggles and the small, endearing details that sustain them. THE COLOR OF OLIVES is an artistic and beautifully affecting reflection on the effects of racial segregation, the meaning of borders and the absurdity of war.

Irish Peace Laureate Shot By Israeli Troops at Non-Violent Protest -- Why Isn't This News?

Related
Yours truly at another site
Israeli troops shoot Nobel Peace Prize winner: 12424 reads
This amount of reads at this particlular site indicates a high level of public interest.
So what gives Big Media?
---
04.24.2007

Robert Naiman

If you listened to Democracy Now Monday, you already know the following:

Irish Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire was among a number of people shot Friday by Israeli troops at a nonviolent protest of the "apartheid wall" in the Palestinian village of Bil'in, near Ramallah.

But if you didn't listen to Democracy Now yesterday, you probably didn't know that.

Why isn't this "news" in the United States? There's nothing on the web sites of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times, not even a wire story.

Those who blame the Palestinian people for their fate, attributing it to Palestinian violence, and faulting the Palestinians for not emulating Gandhi, King, or Mandela (whose role in the "armed struggle" is always conveniently elided for the purpose of this comparison) should periodically ask themselves, when Palestinians do engage in nonviolent protest, and are subjected to brutal repression as a result, how come the mainstream U.S. media don't pay any attention?

Wouldn't this be a precondition for a successful nonviolent protest strategy? That people find out about it? Imagine if U.S. news organizations had not reported on lunch counter sit-ins in the South, Freedom Rides, or the Montgomery bus boycott -- and the repression that resulted. What if no-one reported on the deaths of Evers, Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney. Would these protests have been as effective?

That U.S. political, diplomatic, and financial support for the Israeli government's policies in the West Bank provide crucial support for these policies should be beyond debate. Don't the American people have a right to know what's going on?

And if a Nobel peace laureate is shot at a non-violent protest using weapons paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, isn't that news?

A great deal of ink has been spilled about how the United States is perceived in the Middle East. Too little of that ink has addressed whether the perception of the United States might be the predictable result of unjust U.S. policies, and whether changing some of those policies might be part of a strategy for changing the perceptions.

A new poll from World Public Opinion.org finds that nine in ten Egyptians thinks that the U.S. is at war with Islam, and wants the U.S. to "remove its bases and military forces from all Islamic countries." Eight in ten Egyptians support attacks on U.S. troops in the region to bring this about.

U.S. policy towards the Palestinians is surely not the whole story, but it is surely an important part of the story. If the U.S. cannot, in the short term, compel Israel to accept a political settlement with the Palestinians along the lines of the international consensus -- withdrawal to the 1967 borders -- can't we at least get them to stop shooting unarmed demonstrators? Or, if even that is too much to ask, how about no shooting Nobel peace laureates?

Wednesday night Bill Moyers will examine on PBS how the U.S media failed us in the run-up to the Iraq war. Perhaps Mr. Moyers could look into how the U.S. media is failing us on our policy towards the Palestinians.
...

Get involved:

www.justforeignpolicy.org

Robert Naiman is National Coordinator of Just Foreign Policy, a membership organization devoted to reforming U.S. foreign policy to reflect the values and serve the interests of the majority of Americans. Naiman edits the daily Just Foreign Policy news summary.
JFP's web site is www.justforeignpolicy.org.

Ghettoizing Baghdad

April 25, 2007

By Felicity Arbuthnot

The world has seen America's little President declaring 'Mission accomplished' staged on a warship, geared up in a dinky flying suit (which did some strange things to his lower organs) 'milestones', the 'surge' and now the ghettoization of Baghdad. As the Nazis in Warsaw, the US in Vietnam, the Israelis in Palestine. America also plans a wall between itself and Mexico and Iraq and Saudi Arabia, reportedly to be built by the Israeli company, Zeef Belinsky, who have pioneered the new Berlin Wall between Israel and Palestine. Falluja of course was the first US experiment at 'gating' and having 'gated' this ancient city, they slaughtered the encircled with impunity. The Baghdad plan is reportedly the newest brainchild of former CIA darling Ahmed Chalabi (www.uruknet.info?p=32367) the man who also told the US administration that the invaders would be greeted with sweets and flowers.

Baghdad's turbulent history has dealt it many tragedies and mischiefs, but it has been Mesopotamia's heart since its founding in 762, after Caliph Abu al Mansur slept at the site of this former Persian village and declared that he had spent 'the sweetest, gentlest night on earth' there 'and decided to build a great city, laying the first brick himself "in the name of God" '.It became known as Dar Es Salaam - City of Peace. It has survived twenty one bloody invasions. Each time it has rebuilt itself and the people have started their lives over again.

But never has it been ghettoized. It has taken the residents of a fledgling country and history to built blast walls, encase, enclose and rape this city which, when celebrated in song and poetry, is frequently compared to a beautiful woman. Wondrous sculptures and monuments which dotted its streets and squares have been erased, even that of Mansur himself . Is Mohammed Ghani's flying carpet still there, soaring skyward, based on One Thousand and One Nights? Sheherazade and the haunting, shimmering Ali Baba statue, depicting the thieves getting their come-uppance in boiling oil - but the dispenser of the oil is a woman as glorious as pre-invasion Baghdad itself, standing atop the forty urns - and the oil is a superb, sparkling fountain, which cascaded, constantly, in glistening perfection.

Mohammed Ghani, creator of these and many wonders is the first Muslim sculptor to be commissioned by the Vatican. He made two huge doors depicting the stations of the cross for the largest Catholic church in Baghdad. He was working on them during the 1991 Gulf war, when the electricity was bombed. When it got dark, he used to take them outside his studio and in to the street and everyone in the neighborhood came and held candles and lamps for him to work by: 'I tell people that we are not just a country of tents and camels. We have a civilization that goes back thousands of years. Culture is in our blood, in our veins.' Ghani's works are also on display in Rome, Paris, Sicily and Lebanon.

'Iraqis need to move away from zero sum thinking', said the mortifyingly patronizing new US Ambassador, Ryan Crocker on April 23rd., cowering in the Green Zone, which Iraqis have renamed 'The Texas Bubble.' (Oil, Bush, Texas, get it?) Perhaps Crocker should pay a visit to Mohammed Ghani's studio, where Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart play as creation is born. If the invasion has not killed him, Baghdad's 'exuberant sculptor.' Ghani would remind Crocker that for the first five centuries of its existence, it was the most famous place of learning in the world, with books translated from Chinese, Indian, Greek and Latin and where scholars from afar studied at the Bayt al Hikma (House of Wisdom.) The first paper arrived in Iraq in the eighth century, probably from China and shortly afterwards a paper mill was established. Iraqis need no lessons on how to think.

'The width of the Tigris in Baghdad is about four hundred yards, a noble stream. It is ..the sweet, fresh thoroughfare of the town - not clear water, but lion colored ... ... Its broad flowing surface is dyed by the same earth of which the houses and minarets on its banks are built, so that all is one, in tawny harmony. Its low winter mists in the early morning ... its many craft, evolved through centuries ... all this, a perpetual joy.' (Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches, 1932.)* Now this 'perpetual joy', this historic jewel in humanity's history, wreckers are to destroy to ghettoize maybe thirty districts, according to Brigadier General John Campbell, who says: 'barrier walls will outline selected neighborhoods around Baghdad in an attempt to help protect the Iraqi population from terrorists.' Crocker adds the lie that 'terrorists' have stalked Iraq 'for at least four decades.' Unless anyone messed with the regime, it was a place of remarkable safety. 'Terrorism' came in on and in the wake of one of the stupidest and most criminal invasions in history. Incidentally, early in the invasion, US tanks had writing on them declaring the troops conquerors and kings of the 'tigress'. They could not even spell this Biblical 'noble stream'. 'He builds palaces, whilst his people starve', was a broken record bleat of the US and UK government, as they hijacked the United Nations and starved Iraq under the thirteen year (1990-2003) embargo. (The UN, in fact recorded that free monthly food distribution on a crippled budget, since Iraq could not trade, was the most efficient they had ever witnessed.) Now the invaders squat illegally, in those very palaces and vandals from the 407th Brigade Support Battalion of the 82nd Airborne, build walls, whilst an average of one hundred people a day die violently under their watch, unemployment is perhaps seventy percent and more die than even under the embargo, not alone of the violence but in hospitals starved of equipment and medications by the 'liberators'.

That it is incumbent for each leader to leave something more magnificent than the previous one, is a belief followed since the Caliphs. It says all that the legacy of Iraq's current puppet, quisling government, it seems, will be destruction, death - and hideous barrier walls. Lady Baghdad has become a pearl cast before swine. Time, however would seem to be running out for this US/UK folly, as their troops die in ever greater numbers. Baghdad's streets are up in arms and if anything will unite its residents as before the invasion, it is the opposition to the gated ghettos. Further, a massive demonstration last week, mostly missed by the western media, saw Iraqis carrying coffins. On them were written 'the security surge' and 'the Maliki government'. The last (British) imposed Prime Minister was, ironically, like Maliki, called Nuri. He came to a very unpleasant end. History repeats itself uncannily in Iraq.

*Historic details: Van der Gaag and Arbuthnot, 'Great Cities: Baghdad' World Almanac Books 2006. Mohammed Ghani: authors' interviews.

---
To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child.

paraphrase from an observation by Cicero

Baghdad: The Adhamiya Wall and the "political process"

Related

What the separation-walls mean
---

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

One man's view

Haroun Muhammad writes in an Al-Quds al-Arabi op-ed:

When the American invaders and their agents ...decided on Adhamiya city to build their separation wall to surround it and to impose [all forms of] compulsion on the million Iraqi persons who live there, this was not some random choice. Rather, there was a prior plan aiming at the collective punishment of its people, because it is a city that is known historically and politically as a proud Arab stronghold, home to the forces of nationalism, that has played an unforgettable role in the resistance to the occupation, and in standing up to its policies and its methods and its governmental structures, and they have written splendid pages in [the history of] the fight...in spite of all that they have faced and still face by way of military sieges and oppressive break-ins and security-raids over the course of the past four years.

And Adhamiya is also an outstanding cultural landmark in Iraq, and was for many years the beating heart of Baghdad, when it extended from Adham Gate [and he names the neighborhoods, each with its cultural resonance]...

So his first point is that this isn't just a random neighborhood. This was picked because it is known both for its steadfastness in resisting the occupation, and something of parallel importance, its cultural weight in Iraq.

The writer then adds:

So it is clear that the American occupiers, with their well-known stupidity and their swagger, were responding to the instigations of their own agents, the sectarians, and began to build this wall to separate Adhamiya from Baghdad, as a message to the Sunni Arabs that Adhamiya is just the beginning...

And the reason the Americans didn't believe Maliki when he told them to stop construction of the wall, this writer says, is that Maliki's own appointees in the Iraqi military are dead set against backing down in the execution of this plan.

Pointing to the symbolic significance of Adhamiya as starting point for this strategy in Baghdad doesn't mean there haven't been instances of the walling-off strategy elsewhere in Iraq.

And here is where the writer gets down to his main point about the relationship of all of this to the "political process".

In particular, the writer says, there have been reports of this isolation strategy in

several cities in the provinces of Anbar, Mosul, Diyala, Kirkuk and Salahaddin, including Haditha, Hit, Falluja, Tal Afar, Samarra [and others], that have been surrounded by earthen berms of various heights, with the cutting-off of food supplies, electricity, drinking water, even the distribution of the food-rations... in collective punishment, without the slightest response from even one single individual from among the participants in the so-called political process, and especially the Islamic Party...

And there is a reason why the writer picks on the Islamic Party in particular.

The latest news about the Islamic Party is that they have become evangelists for the occupation, going around sending messages to tribal leaders and other personalities in the Sunni Arab provinces, inviting them to work with the Americans and cut their ties to the resistance, telling them that the Americans are prepared to end their connections with the Shiite organizations and substitute for them an alliance with the Arab Sunna, if only they will cease their resistance, and pacify their areas.

In other words, the leaders of the resistance are being invited, by people in the Islamic Party among others, to raise the white flag, in the hopes that eventually the Americans will deign to name one of them as the new representative of the occupation.

His conclusion:

The geographical and sectarian isolation strategies ...have failure pre-written upon them, because they rely on the brute force of the foreigners and the coertion of power. The brave persons who have blown up their tanks and their vehicles protected by armored steel, are capable of blowing up the Adhamiya wall or any other wall, or concrete or cement dividers, and proud Adhamiya will remain, protected by its people, dead-set against the occupation and the miserable mercenaries who are its agents, a thorn in the side of the invaders, and in the chest of the Shuubiin and the Safavids.

If you've been following this blog, you know the walls are still being built. Maliki has taken back his demand to halt construction. This article exposes in part who benefits from the walls - some of the insurgent groups. Surprised? Don't be. The neocons win too. You have to figure out why for yourself(I expect my readers to be thinkers not consumers). No sense in asking Fred Kagan, the 'surge' planner, though. He'll just lie to you.

Related
Regional players don't want the US to depart Iraq
Maliki withdraws statement, wall construction continues
Work on Baghdad wall continues
Israelis with Ahmed Chalabi are building the walls in Iraq
Time: Is the Surge Backfiring?
Iraq: Walls Will Increase Violence, Specialists Say
Surge 'Has Failed' Says UN Assistance Mission for Iraq
---

Tuesday, Apr. 24, 2007

Why Walls Don't Work in Baghdad

By Charles Crain/Baghdad

The walls the American military planned to erect in Baghdad seemed like a simple solution to a deadly problem: Sunni and Shi'ite enclaves would be physically separated, preventing each side's fighters from attacking the other's civilians. But simple solutions tend to fall apart when confronted with Iraq's complicated reality.

Walls, if they worked, might serve the overriding American interest of halting Baghdad's sectarian war long enough for the U.S. to declare victory and bring home its troops. But neither the Sunnis nor the Shi'ites want to halt the war — they want to win it. Barriers designed to lock in the status quo were bound to provoke opposition in both communities.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni political organization, condemned the plan Sunday. Anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr, whose militia is heavily implicated in attacks on Sunni civilians, denounced the idea too. Iraq's Shi'ite Prime Minister, Nouri al Maliki, followed suit Sunday and called for a halt to the construction of the barrier in the Adhamiya district, one of the last remaining Sunni enclaves in Shi'ite east Baghdad.

Sunnis have the more obvious cause for alarm. The Sunni residents of Adhamiya are already prisoners in their own neighborhood. Leaving the neighborhood necessitates traveling through Shi'ite territory, so few take the risk. Meanwhile access to basic goods and services is slowly being choked off as the area comes under frequent mortar attack. With this ancient Sunni community slowly being strangled to death, its residents were unlikely to rejoice at the prospect of being surrounded, "for their protection," by a 15-foot high barrier of gray concrete slabs.

A wall is only as effective as the guards manning its gates, and Sunnis have every reason to mistrust the men who would hold the keys to their neighborhood. Several months ago, in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya, a series of smaller concrete barriers was supposed to separate Shi'ite militiamen in the north from Sunni insurgents in the south. But the access points were manned by unreliable members of the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi security forces. They allowed militiamen to pass through, attack Sunnis, and then flee north again. The checkpoints were mostly useful as a way to slow the pursuit of Sunni gunmen and guarantee Shi'ite killers a safe exit. When the Americans pulled Iraqi soldiers off the checkpoints, the attacks actually declined.

With examples like this in mind, it's no wonder that Sunnis are wary of a city-wide plan to isolate their communities behind walls erected by their enemies

But what's bad for the Sunnis isn't necessarily good for the Shi'ites, who have no interest in being constrained by arbitrary barriers erected by the Americans. They have the upper hand in Baghdad. They outnumber Sunnis and control the national government. They have a de-facto ally in the United States, which has little choice but to support the "Iraqi Security Forces" even though those forces are often little more than Shi'ite militiamen in government uniforms.

The Americans claim that any security walls would be temporary, but Iraqis know that temporary walls have a way of becoming permanent. The analogy that springs to Iraqi minds is the Israeli barrier in the West Bank — justified as a security measure but viewed by Iraqis and other Arabs as a permanent seizure of territory. As the Shi'ite advance in Baghdad continues — slowed substantially but not halted by the American troop surge — the walled away Sunni neighborhoods could just as well become U.S.-protected bastions, carved out of what, in Shi'a eyes, should be Shi'ite territory.

As Sadr pointed out, barriers can be used against Shi'ite neighborhoods as easily as Sunni ones. The Americans have persistently, if sometimes obliquely, laid the blame for sectarian violence at Sadr's doorstep. If the Americans begin unilaterally throwing up walls across Baghdad, Sadr will have to fear that sooner or later those walls will start closing in on him and his militia.

Shi'ites are unlikely to buy the American claim that these walls will make it harder for Sunni terrorists to continue their recent wave of car bombings. America lost its credibility on the security issue years ago, and no new strategy will reverse that. As a practical matter, too, it's hard to imagine a few walls would seriously hinder a bombing campaign as deadly as any seen in the city since 2004. Some car bombs are constructed inside Baghdad, but many more are made outside the city in Sunni areas where the Americans have only a small presence. It's simply not possible to protect all large Shi'ite population centers from all directions without draconian measures like daytime curfews and bans on all vehicle traffic.

Right now the fate of the walls is uncertain — U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Monday the U.S. would respect the wishes of Maliki and the Iraqi government, but stopped short of saying the plan would be scrapped. It's difficult to imagine, though, that the plan could proceed as intended without the support of Shi'ites or Sunnis. If these walls are erected in some form it will likely be the product of a disingenuous compromise, and they will stand as monuments to the Americans' inability to impose their will on Baghdad.

What the separation-walls mean

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Al-Hayat brings together some comments on the Great Wall of Adhamiya:

A member of parliament for the Islamic Party said resort to this policy reinforces the tendency to sectarianism among the population, in fact this decision relies on [or sanctions] the sectarian factor in isolating the area, pointing out that "this is an index of the fact that this government has not yet grasped that while military effort is needed, it is not he solution of every problem."...

The official spokesman for the Sadrist trend told Al-Hayat "A policy of enclosing neighborhoods is not going to make the Baghdad security plan succeed. Adopting this approach is a result of the fact that the Iraqi military forces have voluntarily submitted to the American occupation". ...

A resident by the name of Ali Ibrahim said "it appears that federalism, with its desire to partition Iraq, will also include Baghdad in its partitioning. People here are talking about a decision by the government to issue special identity [cards or badges] to the residents of Sunni neighborhoods."...

Computer programmer Mustafa, age 25, stressed "uneasiness with the thrust behind the wall [policy] because it will turn Adhamiya into a giant prison."

The journalist balances this with explanations by government people, and a mocking comment by the Islamic State of Iraq. But the gist of the above-noted comments, representing Sunni political opposition, Shiite political opposition and the views of residents, is that this wall isn't just a random bad idea. On the contrary, the idea here is that the wall embodies and symbolizes the fact that "Iraqi forces have submitted to the occupation"; that the Maliki government and the Americans are relying on and sanctioning the principle of sectarian separation; and that the occupation appears to be taking the partition/federalism scheme right into the heart of Baghdad. In a word: The wall embodies and symbolizes the fact that the Americans are not merely responding to violence to try and minimize it. Rather, they are implementing by force a proactive strategy that exploits the sectarian problems in the interests of partition and further weakening of the country; and the Iraqi forces are going along with that.

A lot of the "progressive" American criticism of the war is based on the contrary idea, namely that the Bush administration lacks a coherent plan, that they are buffoons, that they are already way past plan B, and absurdly up to the letter F or G. That they are continually being outwitted by the mercurial action-hero Sadr. And so on and so forth. This is the view that sees the Bush administration as the short guy in the old tall-guy/short-guy vaudeville routine, a sad story, supposedly, that will lead to inevitable defeat and withdrawal. The point here is that a discussion that stays within that framework is missing the other side of the story, namely that there really is a proactive American strategy, and that they are not really there as peacekeepers.

Let's give credit where credit is due. The building of isolation-walls around troublesome residential areas in Iraq was part of a series of war-winning ideas published over four months ago by the neo-con Nibras Kazimi, former Chalabi employee and De-Baathification implementer, now at the Hudson Institute (see his personnel blurb there), in a December 1 2006 post that included this:

I propose a ‘closed canton’ method for Baghdad’s Sunni-heavy suburbs of Hai al-Jami’a, ‘Amiriya, Jihad, Ghazaliya, Yarmouk, Dora, Khadra’ and ‘Adhamiya, closing each off unto itself. A similar fix should be extended to the rural Sunni satellite towns (the housing clusters) to the north, west and south of Baghdad: Mushahdeh, Khan Dhari, Mahmoudiya, Yusufiya, and ‘Arab Jbour.

This should be done using the Israeli method: fence them with concrete and technology. The Israelis have been building a separating wall between them and the Palestinians over the past two years....

Israeli separation walls for Iraq seemed a bizarre figment of the neocon imagination at the time, but now that it appears to be US policy, it's worth taking a look at the politics of this. Kazimi called for high-profile development projects to be undertaken in the walled-off areas, and also this: "...a systematic effort to match the Saddam regime's personnel archives to the current addresses of these ex-officers from the military and intelligence services should be undertaken. Most of these officers were given state-sponsored housing in the above mentioned neighborhoods during the Saddam era..." In other words, if we take Kazimi as an index of the neo-con approach, it would appear a major political aim of this walling-off strategy has to do with more-efficient hunting down of ex-Baathists, contrary to the supposed US strategy, which is to ease de-Baathification and try and negotiate with the domestic (non-AlQaeda/ISI) resistance.

So while we are being told that the US recognizes the damage caused by the initial de-Baathification excesses, and is supposedly pressing the Maliki administration to do more by way of national reconciliation, the Israeli-wall strategy points in the other direction, toward an intensified exploitation of the sectarian issue, hand in hand with an intensification and militarization of de-Baathification.

U.S. to 'Respect' Iraqi Wishes for Wall

Monday April 23, 2007 3:16 PM

By LAUREN FRAYER

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD (AP) - The American ambassador said Monday the U.S. would ``respect the wishes'' of the Iraqi government after the prime minister ordered a halt to construction of a three-mile wall separating a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shiite areas in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, bombings killed at least 46 people and wounded nearly 90, authorities said, including a suicide attack that killed at least 19 in a restaurant near Ramadi, 70 miles west of the capital. A parked car bomb also exploded outside the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad, killing one civilian, and a drive-by shooting wounded two guards at Tunisia's Embassy, police said.

Any plan to build ``gated communities'' to protect Baghdad neighborhoods from sectarian attacks was in doubt after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said during a visit to Sunni-led Arab countries that he did not want the 12-foot high wall in Azamiyah to be seen as dividing the capital's sects.

However, confusion persisted about whether the plan would continue in some form: The chief Iraqi military spokesman said Monday the prime minister was responding to exaggerated reports about the barrier.

``We will continue to construct the security barriers in the Azamiyah neighborhood. This is a technical issue,'' Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said. ``Setting up barriers is one thing and building barriers is another. These are moveable barriers than can be removed.''

Al-Moussawi noted similar walls were in place elsewhere in the capital - including in other residential neighborhoods - as part of a nearly 10-week-old security operation. But hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Azamiyah to oppose what they called ``a big prison.''

``The main aim of these barriers is to protect civilians and to guarantee that security forces are in control and prevent terrorists from moving between areas,'' al-Moussawi said.

The U.S. military announced last week that it was building a three-mile long concrete wall in Azamiyah, a Sunni stronghold whose residents have often been the victims of retaliatory mortar attacks by Shiite militants following bombings usually blamed on Sunni insurgents.

But al-Maliki ordered construction halted on Sunday and U.S. officials said that the plans could change.

``Obviously we will respect the wishes of the government and the prime minister,'' U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Monday.

He said the barrier was aimed at protecting Azamiyah, not segregating it. Sunni leaders and residents of the neighborhood, however, complain that it is a form of discrimination that would isolate the community.

``There are other methods to protect neighborhoods,'' al-Maliki said Sunday in his first public comments on the issue, ``but I should point out that the goal was not to separate, but to protect.''

``This wall reminds us of other walls that we reject, so I've ordered it to stop and to find other means of protection for the neighborhoods,'' he added during a televised live news conference during a state visit to Cairo, Egypt.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman, indicated that there may have been a miscommunication.

``Discussions on a local level may not have been conveyed to the highest levels of the Iraqi government,'' Garver said.

Al-Maliki is seeking to drum up support for his Shiite-led government among mostly Sunni Arab nations and his comments may have been aimed at appeasing them.

``Whether the prime minister saw this plan or not, I don't know. With him in Cairo, it complicates things,'' Garver said.

Hundreds of demonstrators in Azamiyah shouted slogans and carried posters saying the concrete barrier would make them prisoners of their own neighborhoods and an easier target for terrorists.

Protesters carried banners with slogans such as the ``separation wall is a big prison for Azamiyah citizens'' and ``Azamiyah children want to see Baghdad without walls.'' No violence was reported.

Dawood al-Azami, deputy director of the Azamiyah city council, said a questionnaire that was handed out in the area on Sunday indicated that 90 percent of the respondents strongly oppose the barrier.

Crocker, who replaced Zalmay Khalilzad as U.S. ambassador, urged Iraqi legislators to pass key legislation that it is hoped will help bring minority Sunnis into the political process, saying ``these months ahead are going to be critical.''

He said the security plan was important but its main purpose was to ``buy time for what ultimately has to be a set of political understandings among Iraqis.

Crocker said the intention of the barrier in Azamiyah as well as those constructed around markets in the capital is ``to try and identify where the fault lines are and where avenues of attack lie and set up the barriers literally to prevent those attacks.''

``It is in no one's intention or thinking that this is going to be a permanent state of affairs,'' he added.

Peace campaigner shot by Israelis: Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Corrigan

[Published: Sunday 22, April 2007 - 09:28]

By Ciaran McGuigan

Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Corrigan has been shot by Israeli troops during a protest on the West Bank, according to peace activists.

The Nobel laureate from Belfast was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet when a protest exploded into violence last Friday near Ramallah on the West Bank, said fellow protesters.

The veteran peace campaigner had been in the Palestinian village of Bil'in last week to speak at an international conference.

For the past two years the village has been the scene of weekly protests against security fences erected by Israel.

Speaking after the incident on Friday, Mrs Corrigan who was later treated in hospital, said she wanted to say that "this separation wall, contrary to what the Israelis say, will not prevent attacks and violence.

"What will prevent attacks and violence is a peace agreement between the two peoples, and I am sure the Israeli people, like the Palestinian people, want peace."

Campaigners said that 24 demonstrators, including Corrigan, were hurt when Israeli troops blocked the protest march last Friday afternoon.

One campaigner, from the International Women's Peace Service, who took part in the protest told how troops fired between 30 and 50 canisters of tear gas into the crowd before opening fire with rubber bullets.

Speaking from Haris, she told Sunday Life: "Mairead was able to walk after being hit by the rubber bullet, but she was clearly suffering badly from the effects of tear gas.

"(The disturbance happened) when soldiers prevented people getting to the wall. The soldiers then started throwing gas canisters into the crowd."

Corrigan shared the Noble Peace Prize in 1976 for her work with the Peace People.

We build walls, not nations

The 5-kilometer-long, 3.7-meter-high concrete wall being built to contain the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah in Baghdad will fail, even if Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki doesn't manage to get it stopped. The US cannot cut off the head of the resistance in Iraq - simply because there is no head. Talking to the nine recently united leading Sunni Arab resistance groups would be a better idea.

Middle East
Apr 24, 2007

THE ROVING EYE

By Pepe Escobar

DAMASCUS - No British soccer players, Czech supermodels or Chinese infotainment moguls have been lining up to get a piece of the new exclusive gated territory in the global market - courtesy of Pentagon real-estate developers and lavishly promoted as The Great Wall of Adhamiyah.

But then, who wants to live behind a 5-kilometer-long, 3.7-meter-high concrete wall, being erected in haste by the 407th Brigade



support battalion of the famed 82nd Airborne Division, currently based in sprawling Camp Taji, north of Baghdad.

It's being built, Dubai-style, by semi-slave labor - underpaid Iraqi crews, although the engineers and the cranes are all-American. And when it's ready, by the end of April, what's inside - the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah - will look exactly its same sorry self: no cappuccino al fresco Starbucks style, no Versace outlets, no fit blondes on in-line skates.

No wonder Pentagon "engineers" - imperiously impervious to irony - have been mumbling about how the local population will react to their new development.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has already expressed his concern, calling on Sunday for construction to be halted. The US military did not say whether it would comply.

Call it the first instalment of The Baghdad gulag (Asia Times Online, April 14), apartheid in Mesopotamia, or Balkanization with Arabic subtitles.

"Suicide bombers" and/or "death squads" - whose life, according to the Pentagon, will be "more difficult" with the arrival of the gated community, have already celebrated by lobbying a few Katyusha rockets inside the walled-off area. Similarities with the wall of shame being built by Israel in the Palestinian West Bank are also to the point: no concrete wall peppered with checkpoints will be able to block the main fact that every hour in Iraq, day in, day out, there are at least seven or eight bloody bombings or attacks, 75% of them against the US occupation, 17% of them against the so-called Iraqi security forces.

The US cannot cut off the head of the (resistance) snake in Iraq - simply because there is no head: a Buddhist monk would say the snake now is one with the river itself, and it flows non-stop. Walls are irrelevant - either to the resistance or to the militias or death squads.

The surge promoted by US President George W Bush is no more - its metaphorical wall already smashed by almost 100 car and truck bombings since February, perpetrated either by strands of the Sunni Arab resistance, some more nationalistic, some more Islamic, or by al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers.

If walls were such a brilliant idea - as Pentagon "engineers" don't seem to remember one in Berlin - then why don't neo-cons of the French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy variety propose walling inner Paris from the suburban Islamic throngs that invade it every weekend? Oops, maybe because recent Europol research on Islamic terrorism in the European Union detected only one Islamic terror attack in the EU in 2006 among 498 incidents.

I want my nation back
Nine leading Sunni Arab resistance groups, including the Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna, the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance - all with no "foreign" connections, meaning basically al-Qaeda - have recently united all their know-how against very clear enemies: the US occupiers, the inefficient, corrupt Maliki government and al-Qaeda.

According to all recent polls, 80% of Iraqis are against the occupation: this includes virtually all the Sunnis - including those in the Adhamiyah gated area - and more than 70% of Shi'ites. Sixty percent of all Iraqis think the US controls everything in Iraq - no wonder, when gated areas are erected without consulting the local population, or when the key security agency - the dreaded Iraqi National Intelligence Service - is basically a phenomenally expensive Central Intelligence Agency asset (US$3 billion already consumed in less than three years).

Instead of building gated areas, the leading Sunni Arab resistance groups want to talk real business. They have laid out their conditions for - among other things - not bombing any future Pentagon real-estate projects

They want direct negotiations with General David Petraeus, the Pentagon supremo in Iraq, and the US Embassy in the (walled, but breachable) Green Zone. They want Washington to drop the Maliki government (that's more or less on the way). And they want two things they know they will never get: financial compensation for all the horrors inflicted on Iraq since the 2003 invasion (maybe they should request a meeting with Iraq liberator-in-chief Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank); and the smashing of all L Paul Bremer's neo-liberal laws, especially making sure that Iraq's oil wealth will not be sold out to Anglo-American Big Oil.

The Bush administration will obviously say no to most, if not all, of these conditions. What's left couldn't be anything other than building exclusive gated areas.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.

Iraqi PM Halts Wall Construction

Sunni-Shiite Wall Construction Halted

Sunday , April 22, 2007
AP

CAIRO, Egypt —

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Sunday that he has ordered a halt to the construction of a barrier that would separate a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shiite areas in Baghdad, saying there are other ways to protect the neighborhood.

The U.S. military announced last week that it was building a large concrete wall in the northern Azamiyah section of Baghdad in an effort to protect the minority Sunnis from attacks by Shiites living nearby.

The decision drew sharp criticism from residents and Sunni leaders who complained it would isolate their community.

In his first public comments on the issue, al-Maliki said he had ordered the construction to stop.

"I oppose the building of the wall and its construction will stop," al-Maliki told reporters during a joint news conference with the Secretary-General of the Arab League Amr Moussa in Cairo, Egypt. "There are other methods to protect neighborhoods."

He did not elaborate but added "this wall reminds us of other walls," in an apparent reference to the wall that divided the German city of Berlin during the Cold War.

Nobel peace laureate Corrigan injured in anti-fence protest

Noble Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan was treated for injury in leg sustained by rubber bullet

Ali Waked

Published:

04.20.07, 16:47 / Israel News

Nobel Peace Prize Mairead Corrigan has been injured during confrontations between security forces and left-wing activists protesting the security fence route near Bilin, activists said.

Corrigan, who won the prize in 1976 for her work in encouraging a peaceful solution to the Northern Ireland dispute, was hit in the leg by a rubber bullet and was transferred to a hospital for treatment. She was also said to have inhaled large quantities of teargas.

Policemen and soldiers used teargas grenades and rubber bullets to disperse the routine Friday protest against the security fence near the Palestinian village of Bilin and were confronted by a hail of stones.

Two Border Guard policemen were lightly injured by stones.

The security forces say the area where activists hold their protest is a no-access military zone which they have to evacuate of Palestinian and Israeli protesters every Friday.

Activists say the fence route near Bilin was designed to expropriate Palestinian farm land which will be used to expand a Jewish settlement in the area.

Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti and Deputy Prime Minister Assam al-Ahmad also took part in the protest.

"I salute the residents of Bilin for their peaceful struggle in a region that is so violent and I call on the Israeli public, whom I know

is for justice and peace, to support the residents' struggle," Corrigan told Ynet.

Tito Kayak was also there

"I want to say that this separation wall, contrary to what the Israeli say, will not prevent attacks and violence. What will prevent attacks and violence is a peace agreement between the two peoples, and I sure the Israeli people, like the Palestinian people, wants peace," Corrigan added.

Puerto Rican peace activist Tito Kayak climbed a tower on which the army had planted security cameras and hoisted a Palestinian flag.

"All I did was to express my identification with the villagers against the wall which is believed to evil and illegal by the whole world and many leaders like Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter and the United Nations," Kayak said.

Kayak, who was arrested in 2000 for climbing to the top deck of the Statue of Liberty in New York, was apprehended along with six other activists by policemen.

Kayak was a key figure in the 1999 Navy-Vieques protests in Puerto Rico against the US Navy's use of the Vieques Island for bombing exercises. The protests forced the US to end its activities on the Island.

Worse than Apartheid?

Christians fleeing faith's birthplace

Israeli policies, security wall fuel Palestinians' feelings of hopelessness

April 9, 2007
ROBERT NOVAK

novakevans@aol.com

BETHLEHEM, West Bank -- Hani Hayek, an accountant who is the Christian mayor of the tiny Christian-majority Palestinian village of Beit Sahour, was angry last week driving me along the Israeli security wall. "They are taking our communal lands," he said, pointing to the massive Israeli settlement of Har Homa. "They don't want us to live here. They want us to leave."

Har Homa, dwarfing nearby dwellings of Beit Sahour, seemed larger than when I saw it at Holy Week a year ago. It is. The Israeli government has steadily enlarged settlements on the occupied West Bank.

Jimmy Carter raised hackles by titling his book about the Palestinian question Peace Not Apartheid. But Palestinians allege this is worse than the former South African racial separation. Nearing the 40th anniversary of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, the territory has been so fragmented that a genuine Palestinian state and a "two-state solution" seem increasingly difficult.

The security wall has led to the virtual elimination of suicide bombings and short-term peace. But life is hard for Palestinians, whose deaths due to conflict increased 272 percent in 2006 while Israeli casualties declined. The Britain-based Save the Children organization estimates half the children in the occupied territories are psychologically traumatized.

Palestinians argue things have gotten worse because of pervasive feelings of hopelessness. Students at Bethlehem University (run by the Catholic Brothers of De La Salle with an enrollment 70 percent Muslim) sounded more pessimistic and radicalized than a year ago. Ahmad Al Issa, a fourth-year journalism student, spent a year in an Israeli prison on charges of throwing stones at Israeli troops. Now he has bought into the libel that Jewish employees at the World Trade Center were warned in advance of the 9/11 attacks.

The U.S.-backed boycott after the election victory of the extremist Hamas in early 2006 has made the Palestinian Authority destitute. Deprived of help from the authority with the economy in a shambles, city governments are bankrupt. Bethlehem's Mayor Victor Batarseh has a special problem because tourists and pilgrims no longer stay overnight in the city of Christ's birth. Out of money and credit, he is ready to lay off the city's 165 staffers.

Batarseh, a U.S. citizen who practiced thoracic surgery in Sacramento, Calif., is pinned down in Bethlehem. A Christian and political independent who calls himself a private enterprise democrat, Batarseh is on the Israeli blacklist because he contributed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a State Department-designated terrorist organization). Denied permits for Jerusalem, the mayor must drive to Amman, Jordan, to get to meetings in Europe.

Republican Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, at the university the same day I was, was given a tour of Jerusalem to see that the separation barrier in most places is a big, ugly and intimidating wall and not merely a fence.

Smith, a Catholic layman, was drawn here because of the emigration of the Holy Land's Christian minority. They leave more quickly than Muslims; contacts on the outside make them more mobile. Catholic Brother Peter Corlano of the Bethlehem University faculty told Smith and me: "We live the same life [as Muslims]. We are Palestinians." Concerned by the disappearance of Christians in the land of Christianity's birth, Smith also could become (as I did) concerned by the plight of all Palestinians. If so, he will find precious little company in Congress.

ROBERT NOVAK

THE GATES ARE LOCKED FOR PASSOVER

Sunday, April 01, 2007

As the Jews in Israel and throughout the world celebrate Passover, the Festival of FREEDOM... the very thing that is celebrated is denied to an entire nation. Palesinians will be welcome to stay at home... or wander if they wish... but only within their own villages and only behind the wall that separates them from family and friends.

Christian Palestinians will be able to attend Easter services and visit family members, again creating an apartheid within apartheid by distinguishing between the Christian and Muslim residents.

And yet Israel talks peace.... promises to end closures.... promises to remove roadblocks.... WHEN????

As I said above, Passover is the Festival of Freedom.... to the Palestinians it has become the Festival of Continued Suffering.

Following is a report from Ynet about the closure...

Closure on territories

Full closure imposed on West Bank ahead of Passover. IDF to allow Christians to enter Israel for family visits during Easter holiday

A full closure has been imposed on the West Bank starting Saturday night, and will be in effect for the remainder of Passover. The closure will be lifted following another security assessment after the holiday is over.

Entry into Israel from the West Bank during Passover will only be permitted in humanitarian cases.

International organization workers, lawyers, medical professionals, clergymen, and other populations will also be permitted entry, under the coordination of Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.

Security forces have also prepared for Easter which overlaps with Passover this year. Thousands of the West Bank’s Christian residents will be permitted entry into Israel to celebrate the Easter holiday with their families.

Israeli citizens will be allowed entry to Jericho, Bethlehem, and the Gaza Strip in order to participate in religious ceremonies and family visits.

In addition, hundreds of Gaza’s Christian resident will be permitted to leave the Strip in order to take part in religious ceremonies taking place in Israel.

posted by DesertPeace @ 2:22 PM 10 comments

Must read UN Committee message to Israel

ADALAH'S NEWSLETTER
Volume 34, March 2007

UN Committee Urges Israel to Revoke the Citizenship Law, Dismantle the Wall, Bind
the Jewish National Fund to Anti-Discrimination Principles, and
Recognize the Unrecognized Villages

Adalah: “The UN Committee, which is composed of legal experts, reached these concluding observations based on the principles of anti-discrimination. Therefore the concluding observations constitute an official statement that institutionalized discrimination exists in Israel.”

On 9 March 2007, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (“the Committee”) issued its Concluding Observations, following its review last month of Israel’s implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (“ICERD” or “the Convention”). In its Concluding Observations, the Committee emphasized 25 areas of concern and recommendations regarding Israel’s compliance with the Convention concerning the rights of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Representatives of Adalah, Attorney Sawsan Zaher and Rina Rosenberg, Esq., and other Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations participated in the UN sessions held on 22-23 February 2007 in Geneva.

The Concluding Observations reflected numerous issues highlighted by Adalah in its reports to the Committee noting Israel’s violations of the ICERD.

A high-level delegation of 13 state representatives, headed by Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Yitzhak Levanon, also participated in the Committee’s sessions. Nevertheless, many of the questions sent in advance to Israel remained unanswered, as the Committee noted at the outset.

The main concerns and recommendations adopted by the Committee, which is composed of eighteen independent experts including law professors, lawyers and former judges, included:

1) The right to equality and a prohibition on racial discrimination should be explicitly included in the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.

2) Israel should ensure that the definition of the state as a Jewish state does not result in any systemic distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin in the enjoyment of human rights.

3) Israel should ensure “equality in the right to return to one’s country and in the possession of property”.

4) Israel should ensure that the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, which manage land, housing and services exclusively for the Jewish population, are “bound by the principle of non-discrimination in the exercise of their functions.”

5) Israel should revoke the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order) – 2003, and “ensure that restrictions on family reunification are strictly necessary and limited in scope, and are not applied on the basis of nationality, residency or membership of a particular community.”

6) Israel’s policy of affording highly advantageous benefits, particularly for housing and education, to those who perform military service is incompatible with the Convention, bearing in mind that most Arab citizens do not perform national service.

7) Israel should assess the significance and impact of Israel Land Administration’s “social suitability” admission criterion to small communities, as it may allow in practice for the exclusion of Arab citizens from some State-controlled land. The Committee recommended that Israel take all measures to ensure that State land is allocated without discrimination, direct or indirect, based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin.

8) Israel should assess the extent to which discriminatory attitudes by employers against Arabs, scarcity of jobs near Arab communities, and lack of daycare centers in Arab villages are a cause of high unemployment rates, particularly for Arab women.

9) Israel should enquire into possible alternatives to the relocation of inhabitants of unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev/Naqab to planned towns, in particular through the recognition of these villages and the recognition of the rights of the Bedouin to own, develop, control and use their communal lands, territories and resources traditionally owned or otherwise inhabited or used by them.

10) Israel should address concerns that the psychometric examinations used to test aptitudes, ability and personality indirectly discriminates against Arab citizens in accessing higher education.

11) Israel should ensure that laws and programmes be equally devoted to the promotion of cultural institutions and the protection of holy sites of both Jewish and other religious communities.

12) Israel should increase its efforts to prevent racially motivated offences and hate speech, and ensure that relevant criminal law provisions are effectively implemented by prosecuting politicians, government officials and other public figures for hate speech against the Arab minority.

13) “A high number of complaints filed by Arab citizens against law enforcement officers are not properly and effectively investigated and that the Ministry of Justice’s Police Investigations Unit (Mahash) lacks independence.” The Committee regretted that Israel provided no comments in this regard as requested or information as to whether the persons responsible for the October 2000 killings have been prosecuted and sentenced.

14) Israel’s position that the ICERD does not apply in the OPT “cannot be sustained under the letter and spirit of the Convention, or under international law as also affirmed by the International Court of Justice.” Moreover “the Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.”

15) Israel should cease the construction of the Wall in the OPT, including in and around East Jerusalem, dismantle the structure, and make reparation for all damage. Israel should also “give full effect” to the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice.

16) Severe restrictions on the freedom of movement in the OPT targeting a particular national or ethnic group, especially through the wall, checkpoints, restricted roads and permit system, have created hardship and have had a highly detrimental impact on the enjoyment of human rights by Palestinians, in particular their rights to freedom of movement, family life, work, education and health.

17) Different laws and practices apply to Palestinians and to Israelis in the OPT, in particular the unequal distribution of water resources to the detriment of Palestinians, the disproportionate targeting of Palestinians in house demolitions, and different criminal laws leading to prolonged detention and harsher punishments for Palestinians for the same offences.

18) While stressing that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is an important cultural and religious site for people living in the OPT, the Committee urged Israel to ensure that the excavations in no way endanger the Mosque and impede access to it.

19) Israel should increase its efforts to protect Palestinians against violence perpetuated by Jewish settlers, particularly in Hebron, and ensure that such incidents are investigated in a prompt, transparent and independent manner, are prosecuted and sentenced, and that avenues for redress are offered to the victims.

The Committee also recommended that Israel make its reports and the Committee’s concluding observations readily available to the public in both Hebrew and Arabic.

Israel should submit answers to questions not provided in its submission and representations within one year, together with information on any first steps taken towards implementing the Committee’s recommendations. Israel should submit its next periodic reports and address all points raised in the concluding observations in February 2010.

For more information, see Adalah’s Special Report on UN CERD available at: http://www.adalah.org/eng/cerd.php

URL

Part and parcel of the settlements

12/03/07

A PALESTINIAN VIEW

by Ghassan Khatib

Israel is currently having an easy time expanding its settlements and constructing the separation wall that is snaking its way in and around the occupied West Bank.

Partly this is due to the ongoing internal Palestinian problems that have distracted the focus of Palestinian leaders from their struggle against these colonialist Israeli policies.

Partly it is due to the absence of any firm international commitment to the principles of international law under which both the wall and Jewish settlements in occupied territory are illegal.

In the Palestinian perception the separation wall is, at least where it veers into occupied territory, a part of the overall settlement project. If there were no settlements, the wall could have been built on the green line and cause no Palestinian objections. But Israel is building part of the wall inside the occupied territories because of the existence of settlements. Thus, the wall is part of the settlement project.

The ongoing construction of the wall has been aided by the rather weak attitude of the United States and Europe, the only parties with influence on Israel. These parties have singularly failed to impress upon Israel that commitment to international law and the findings of the International Court of Justice are important factors determining the relations of these countries with Israel. This leaves the impression that neither the US nor the EU cares whether Israel abides by international legality.

This is a regrettable repetition of history. In the mid-1990s, Israel's illegal settlement program in occupied territory was the single most damaging blow to the peace process, and the international community's failure to seriously address the settlement issue was a major contributing factor.

There have been several other negative consequences of the wall. In many areas, the wall has created enclaves that have almost completely curtailed any freedom of movement for Palestinians inside them. Access to health and education services has been sharply reduced, as has the ability of a majority of Palestinians to exercise their right of worship, particularly in Jerusalem. The increased hardship resulting from the wall has also caused more anger and further radicalization among Palestinians.

The repercussions for the economy have been predictably dramatic, exacerbating the general economic deterioration. The most damaging economic consequence is the transformation of the economic boundaries between the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel from a soft into a hard border. Over the last 40 years, the Palestinian economy became completely dependent on Israel, and now, with little to no access to the outside world as a result of Israeli restrictions and the occupation, the economy has no possibility of recovery.

Occupied East Jerusalem, meanwhile, is one of the primary victims of the wall. The wall neither separates Jerusalem from its immediate environs nor East Jerusalem from West Jerusalem but rather separates different neighborhoods of East Jerusalem from each other and most of the city from the West Bank.

To describe this wall only in security terms as Israel does is so misleading as to be bordering on the absurd. The wall is constricting any political horizon by unilaterally taking land away from Palestinians, thus destroying the possibility that a viable Palestinian state can emerge and devastating any possibility of economic recovery.

The Hamas-led government has shown an impressive commitment to the current ceasefire. With the possible return of international attention to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the resumption of political contacts between the two leaderships, it is time that this wall is tackled head on.

The lead must come from the Palestinian leadership, which should work to persuade the members of the Quartet to take action and pressure Israel to abide by international law, whether as expressed by the International Court of Justice or in UN Security Council resolutions.

The wall must be removed and replaced by confidence-building measures that can improve the Palestinian economy and bring back hope of a peaceful end to Israel's occupation. Only that way can both sides' legitimate aspirations be achieved successfully. - Published 12/3/2007 © bitterlemons.org

Ghassan Khatib is coeditor of the bitterlemons family of internet publications. He is vice-president of Birzeit University and a former Palestinian Authority minister of planning.

Buried Alive: Life inside the Entombment Wall

Indifference is the essence of inhumanity; it is worse than hatred precisely because it does not recognize the living, breathing brother and sister who suffers the agony inflicted on them by a people who proclaim to be civilized even as they inflict bestial and barbaric acts on the helpless.

By Prof. William A. Cook
PalestineChronicle.com

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.” -- (George Bernard Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple, ACT II)

Terrorists struck once again in Jenin this past week killing four, wounding twenty-eight civilians, including two journalists and four children and women. Fifty five civilians were kid napped including six children. Three buildings used for agriculture were destroyed and 199 donums of agricultural land confiscated. Other attacks occurred in Far’oun village where six homes were demolished that stood too close to the Wall. Terrorists beat civilians in Bal’ein village, west of Ramallah who were protesting the demolitions and the extension of the Wall. The attacks continue, unreported in the United States since they are carried out by our allies, the Israeli Defense Forces.

Despite the deafening silence that accompanies the on-going construction of the illegal Wall, declared such by the International Court of Justice, despite staged non violent demonstrations in Bal’ein, Jayous, Bethlehem, Ramallah’s Bil’in village and elsewhere through out the West Bank, despite the outcry this week raised by Sinn Fein’s International Affairs spokesperson, Aengus O Snodeigh against the mounting atrocities committed by the Jews on the Palestinians, those who have a conscience, both international and Israeli, stand in the streets chanting and singing that the wall will fall and freedom will come to the Palestinian people. But no one listens. Instead, “a large contingent of Israeli forces, including soldiers, police and border guards, began assaulting the nonviolent demonstrators with rifle butts and truncheons.” (Palestinian Center for Human Rights, 22-24 February, 2007).

Indifference, Shaw tells us, is the essence of inhumanity; it is worse than hatred precisely because it does not recognize the living, breathing brother and sister who suffers the agony inflicted on them by a people who proclaim to be civilized even as they inflict bestial and barbaric acts on the helpless. That makes the citizens of the world worse sinners than the IDF and the Jews in Israel who tolerate the racist hatred that drives their government. Indifference costs nothing, requires no judgment, raises no principles, imposes no action, causes no discomfort; it is the void that rests in a soul that cares only for self and nothing for its fellow man. It is the beast that John describes in The Secret Book (11:4-5): “The rulers brought Adam into the shadow of death so that they might produce a figure again, but now from earth, water, fire, and the spirit that comes from matter, that is, from the ignorance of darkness, and desire, and their own contrary spirit. This figure is the tomb, the newly created body that these criminals put on the human as a fetter of forgetfulness.” The indifferent finds recourse in all that satisfies self, all that pleases the body – drink, food, pandering – and all that pleases the desires – gold, silver, presents – and so isolates self from the world that might disturb that absorption lost in forgetfulness. Should that isolated world be threatened, the fear aroused against such a person – terror, servility, anguish and shame – locks them in even more.

That fear can be triggered by those in power. It is a tool used to control the conscience of a people. Arthur Miller wrote about it in The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692. Citizens threatened by fear for self, even in the form of invisible forces determined to exist by their ministers, blindly accept what they cannot know and become accomplices to the criminal acts of their leaders. They have literally turned their individual consciences over to their government. That is the case in Israel. The Wall is the visible icon of an invisible threat created by Sharon’s administration to accomplish a political end, the confiscation of Palestinian land and the psychological death of the Palestinian people. The Wall is built of fear in order to engender fear in both the Israelis who see themselves as victims once more, and in the Palestinians who see themselves entombed, without hope, without compassion, without justice. Indeed, the Wall rises in all its grotesque greyness like the cement box into which a coffin is placed, and in its image casts a pall over the people of Palestine that suffocates their spirit even as it separates brothers from sisters, children from parents, friends from families, making impossible a normal life. How can one people inflict such heinous conditions on another? How can the people of America sit idly by while their representatives cow-tow to the dictates of AIPAC and the world looks on in disbelief. What has become of the America that cares for the tired and the poor?

Consider what Sharon and now Olmert have constructed. The Wall rests entirely within Palestine while it snakes over hills and valleys, down the middle of streets, carves towns and villages into parts separating people who have lived together for decades, centuries even, confiscates to the Israeli side the aquifers and wells belonging to the people of Palestine, as well as the olive groves and crops belonging to the people, and the arable land that will become the settlers fields and additional settlements for those who never lived a day in Palestine and have no history here, no memories, no culture that is indigenous if two thousand years is considered a measure. Completely surrounded, without access to their fields or mosques or friends or hospitals or employment, they have but two choices, leave or die. They are indeed buried alive by the Jews, a fate less absolute than the gas chamber since they can choose to leave, and leave behind two thousand years of history and land that has given life to generations of family embodied in 1000 year old olive trees summarily ripped from the ground by Israeli bulldozers, leave mosques in which they have worshiped decade upon decade, and leave their memories as those driven from their homes in 1947 lost theirs when their towns were razed and all that had been was no more.

Or they die; a living death that drags on day after day in poverty and need, dependent on those not indifferent to their plight: Israelis that have not capitulated to the wanton waste of human life because they know what victim hood is and recognize it; friends from all countries of the world who care enough to come as witnesses to the humiliation, the degradation, the racism that permeates the settlers and is embodied in the Israeli government; Jews from around the world who decry the inhumanity inflicted by their own on another; and Americans who care because they have faced the same threatened fear that enabled a corrupt and amoral administration to invade and occupy countries against international law. That is their fate.

Ironically, the conditions imposed on the Palestinians in their tomb, the benumbed state of their being, the years upon years of isolation and alienation, the loss of sensitivity to the rising and setting of the sun, the loss of friends and family, the loss of consciousness to all that surrounds them since it has been turned to ashes and waste, the loss of memory that gave identity to their being since none know now that they even exist behind the Wall, the loss of their very purpose to live, the loss of hope that has been entombed with them, their dependency on strangers to sustain what life breathes in their lungs is mirrored in the metaphor of Sharon lying in his sheeted shroud as day crowds on day, unable to respond to anyone or anything, entombed in his own flesh, unconscious, as the indifferent are unconscious, to his own plight or that of those he has buried alive.

-William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His book, Psalms for the 21st Century, was published by Mellen Press. His newest book, Tracking Depception, will be released next month. He can be reached at: cookb@ULV.EDU

The Twilight Zone / Victims of the fence

By Gideon Levy

A still-life image: a building covered with Jerusalem stone, a large memorial poster hanging high up on one of the floors, and below, a sign in broken English over the "Paradise Cafe." Second image: a makeshift soccer field, empty, on which a huge puddle formed on Sunday of this week. Across the road a barbed-wire fence encircles the abandoned airfield of Atarot, once touted as "Jerusalem's international airport." Along the fence runs a ditch - into which the boy fell and, according to witnesses, bled for a long time until he died. He was struck by a bullet in the leg and lay there, dying in agony.

Was he only playing soccer? Did he just run to get the ball, which had fallen into the ditch along the fence, as his friends say? Or did he sabotage the fence and try to take the metal for his family's livelihood, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the next day?

What difference does it make? What does make a difference is the appalling question of what prompted a soldier, or a Border Policeman, to open fire from a long way off at the boy and then to leave him bleeding on the ground until he died. What goes through the mind of the shooter, in the moments before and after he takes the life of an adolescent, who was in no way putting anyone at risk - even if he touched a fence that must not be touched? Three fences surround the abandoned airport, and last Sunday we saw no hole in any of them, three days after the unnecessary, criminal shooting.




Advertisement

In this terrible place the children of Qalandiyah and its surroundings are killed like flies. At least eight have been killed here in the past few years, along the death fence. In this space we wrote about 11-year-old Yasser and his brother, Samar, 15, the two children of Sami Kosba, who were killed at the fence a month apart, in February, 2002; about Omar Matar, 14, killed in April, 2003; and about Ahmed Abu Latifi, 13, in September, 2003. And there was Fares Abed al-Kader, 14, killed in December, 2003. Now there is also Taha Aljawi, February, 2007.

It's said that he was a good boy, the kind of boy who goes with his father to pray in the morning and evening. And he was Jerusalem-born, the bearer of a blue ID card, like us. Taha Aljawi, a nice kid from Jerusalem, not yet 17 at his death.

The Hamas memorial poster shows dripping blood. In the Fatah poster the photograph is more recent: Taha looks a little older and has the shadow of a mustache. The Al-Aqsa Mosque appears in both posters - a rare instance of Palestinian national unity these days, in the paradisical cafe in Kafr Aqab, a Jerusalem neighborhood whose residents carry blue ID cards and pay municipal taxes, but which has nevertheless been fated to be on the other side of the separation fence, north of the capital, on the way to Ramallah.

The men sit in the big space of the cafe, which has been transformed into a mourning room, and eat lamb with rice in yogurt, as is the custom. Two weeks ago we were offered the same fare in nearby Anata, on the occasion of the killing of an 11-year-old girl, Abir Aramin, by the Border Police.

Taha's bereaved father, Mahmoud Aljawi, worked for the Jerusalem Municipality part-time for 11 years as a school janitor, until he was forced to take early retirement a few months ago. He is 48 and the father of six children, including the dead Taha, who was the second child. To supplement his income, Mahmoud also made leather garments in the Old City, and had a kiosk that sold sweets at the Qalandiyah checkpoint. He learned basic Hebrew at a beginners' course at the Gerard Behar cultural center on Bezalel Street in Jerusalem. Until three years ago the family lived in the Old City, but because of the overcrowding moved to Kafr Aqab. Their rented apartment is above the Paradise Cafe.

Last Thursday, Mahmoud went to the offices of the National Insurance Institute (NII) in Jerusalem, to arrange for his unemployment insurance. Taha had a free morning: In the past few weeks the authorities lengthened the school hours on the first four days of the week and canceled classes on Thursdays. He was a 10th-grader at the school for orphans in the Old City, opposite Al-Aqsa, an educational institution for the children of poor families. He got up at 5 every morning and went with his father and his two brothers, Mohammed, 18, and Suleiman, 8, to the adjacent mosque to pray, and then at about 7:30 left for school via the checkpoints. It was 40 minutes each way, if there were no problems.

Taha wanted to learn the printing profession. He was weak in English and also got into problems with the teacher. Not long ago his father had a talk with him and explained that if he wanted to work in the print industry, he would have to be articulate in both English and Hebrew. Taha was thinking about enrolling in Hebrew lessons at a center near the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem.

Last Thursday Taha returned from the mosque at 7 A.M., after his last prayer, as it turned out. Mahmoud made breakfast for his son and at 7:30 his friends came by and asked him to play soccer with them on the field on the other side of the Ramallah road. The word "road" is a bit misleading: It's actually an intercity route peppered with potholes and puddles, flanked by garbage on both sides, on which traffic moves slowly.

According to the testimonies of Taha's friends, as related to the grieving father, shortly after the game started, the ball flew over another road that abuts the improvised playing field. Taha ran to retrieve the ball and then the kids heard a few shots. They say they ran in panic, but saw Taha slump into the ditch. No one knows for sure what happened after that. The children told Mahmoud that the shots had come from the direction of the skeleton of a tall building, which is under construction next to the soccer field. They say that the soldiers hid high up in the building and that they opened fire at Taha. Usually, they said, there are no soldiers in that building - only on that particular day.

The bullet slammed into Taha's left leg, above the knee. At the time, his father was near the government compound in East Jerusalem, on the way to the NII. Mahmoud's brother, Kamal, phoned him to say that Taha had been wounded. The two brothers rushed to Kafr Aqab. They tried to call Taha on his mobile phone - Mahmoud says he got his son a phone so he would always know where he was - but the boy didn't answer. Next to the house, people had already gathered; they related that Taha had been taken to the hospital in Ramallah. Kamal set out for Ramallah, while the distraught Mahmoud said he felt he had to stay with the mother and other children to calm them.

At the hospital, Kamal was told that Taha had been dead on arrival. He saw his nephew's body - with one bullet hole above the knee. In most cases, a bullet in the leg will kill you only if it causes a massive loss of blood. Taha apparently lay in the ditch for a long time: The children told Mahmoud that at least an hour went by before the soldiers arrived to collect their victim and take him to the Qalandiyah checkpoint. From there a Palestinian ambulance was summoned - even though Taha was Israeli - to take him to Ramallah. Kamal called his brother and told him to come to the hospital to identity his son's body. Taha was buried that evening in the cemetery on Saladin Street in East Jerusalem, next to the post office.

"I always made sure that my children were with me. I watched over them, like over my eyes," Mahmoud says. "On Fridays I would walk with them to pray at Al-Aqsa, go by the grandparents' place, have a bite to eat, always staying close together. Everyone who knows me knows how I watched over them. I hear a lot from people: You have good children - they pray, they are getting a good education, they have no problems, quiet children. Sometimes people would ask: Who is Taha's father? Good for you, having a well-educated boy like that. In the winter he went to play computer games, in the summer he went to the Casablanca Pool in Ramallah, and other than that he was with me. Maybe 18 hours a day with me. We are a family that respects its children and the children respect their father.

"How can we know what he was doing there, next to the fence? It's not important. A boy of that age, he didn't endanger the soldiers - a shy boy, not violent, quiet. I didn't see what he was doing next to the fence. I didn't see, but what if he even cut the fence? And why should he cut the fence? He has a blue ID card. I always taught him to keep away from things like that."

The response of the IDF Spokesperson's Office: "On February 1 during the morning an IDF force spotted four suspicious youths next to the Qalandiyah refugee camp south of Ramallah, while they were still engaged in sabotaging the security fence and trying to breach it. The force fired at the lower body of one of the youths and hit his leg. Minutes later an IDF medical team arrived, which worked to stabilize the wounded person's condition, but without success."

We go out to the killing field. Mahmoud hasn't been there since his son fell by the fence. It's empty, even though people live all around it. We stop at the road, looking at the fence from a distance and at the ditch where Taha bled to death. Within seconds a Border Police Jeep barrels out of the abandoned airport terminal - a long way from us - and we scatter, in panic.