Another Wall, another protest
Christopher Kullenberg September 14th, 2007
The last few days there have been protests in Bagdad against a wall built by the US military forces intended to separate shia and sunni muslims, while Bush announces a strategy for long term plans in Iraq. Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reports that Bagdad used to be a very heterogenous city. However, during the US occupation, it has become more and more divided because of the conflicts emerging from the unrest. The wall is, according to the US military, deployed in order to protect the Bagdad citizens from terrorist attacks and other dangerous activities. The protesters, on the other hand, argue that building walls only makes secterism, divisions and difference more possible, and a counter-productive strategy in making peace possible in Iraq.
I am very interested in walls, as they have popped up in for example Israel for basically the same purpose, and have severe conseqences for dividing cities in more than just one way. Muqtada al Sadr have urged the people of Bagdad to paint the wall in a fashion showing the world “The ugly face of the US-occupiers”, so in one way there is even semi-organized resistance taking place.
Walls, wars and territorialities fuel resistance movements. Yesterday the first Resistance Seminar took place in Gothenburg (see Seminar page) and I had a very interesting discussion with Jörgen on the complicated structure of resistance the Middle Eastern regions, especially since the military forces very often have to withdraw because the guerilla warfare is too hard to combat.
As walls are interesting I would like to ask if this hypothesis is reasonable: “Wherever there is a wall, there will be resistance”. Examples: Berlin, Jerusalem, Bagdad………..
- Occupation , Protest , Resistance , War
- Comments(5)
It is true at least for the EU Wall in the Spanish territorial “islands” inside Marocco and the US-Mexico Wall against refugees where No-Border camps have happend. What about the “first” wall: the Chinese wall?!
Well, the original wall probably divided people too. However, there is another wall in China, the great firewall of China, which is being resisted all the time, and is recieving building blocks from Google and Yahoo.
Re conflicts between state armies and guerrillas. We did not had time enough to discuss this specific topic at the seminar. May be we should have a full seminar on this? But let me shortly add that these types of conflicts illustrates well the complexity of modern warfare. And ONE of the “under-discussed” sides of these wars are that they are not only fought on the battlefield between soldiers in uniform. The US army in Iraq are not loosing due to lack of violent means. Technically they could have used much more bombs and missiles and hence destroyed all opposition. But is would be a very strong backfire effect since most victims would be civilians. It is too difficult to justify use of heavy weaponry like large vacuum bombs, firebombs, napalm or nuclear arsenals. The problem is partly political/moral not a technical one. When every soldier and a number of civilians are equipped with cameras and can document atrocities the military means proves to be difficult to use in many contexts. So when the so called “CNN-effect” (in this case a more accurate term would be the “al-Jazeera-effect”) distribute news globally the military means proves to have strong limitations. To predict the “winner” is not only difficult but will also depend on your time frame. Do we talk about the next year, decade or century? Imams often reminds me that it took them 196 years to stop the first crusaders, “but they won”!
And the discussion on who is doing resistance and what resistance is must look into these variables when definitions and terminologies are defined. The argument that it must be an asymmetric relation and that the weak part is the resister is not an easy way to find a good and workable definition.
Indeed. The complexity of these issues demand a seminar! And I believe they need to be discussed and can contribute to resistance studies, because of the extreme variables.
I have only approached this subjet from a philosophical perspective so far, but it would be interesting also to find empirical studies of a kind of resistance which actually makes the world’s largest army grind to a halt.
This is interesting; since I do not know much about recent guerillas and their resistances
against state armies, my mind leads me toward more recent examples of the urban “guerillas”:
Such as the black panthers against police “armies” and black bloc against helicopters, police
forces and other technical means. In this context too, the moral and political arguments against
further repression via technical means would indeed be decisive. Not knowing who´s who in
urban battles seems to be a difficulty both for the guerilla (undercover cops) and the
police army
(activists using removable signs as hoods, scarves, sunglasses easily removed when
encountering arrest, might lead to false arrests, wrongly wielded aggressions against peaceful
activists and so on…)
Maybe one could find empirical examples dwelling within the
concrete djungle or even better still, urban desert.
I do not think that technical strength or numbers could decide the outcome
during city battles any more than in the examples mentioned above.
During monday´s small conference at the School of Gl. Studies, thematically concerned with
today’s alternatives in political and social movements (Stellan knows what I mean, I seem to
have lost the name of the conference),
Hans Abrahamsson and Galtung brought our attention toward the militarization
of recent alternativepolitical battles, most recently following the counter summits against
the WTO, IMF, EU and of course, EU top summit in GBG 2001. Militarization in the sense of
information flows and “pictures of threat” facing the police during such encounters. This
reminded me of technical supremacy, but also about the “street smartness” of small, rapid,
distributed and networked “attack groups” from these encunters.
Also in this context we of course have the issue of walls; human walls of police at Järntorget,
sudden walls built by containers to close off certain areas, certain people from others.
The incorporeal transformation of Hvitfeldska Gym into a body-prison; the media as well
as police proclaiming it to be “under siege�