Recently, the Palestinians and the Pakistani’s have been moaning about the Israeli and Indian fences being constructed. There is something which is very human about the desire to erect fences to keep out undesirable elements. History is full of the skeletons and remains of these structures. Once we take a look at the history of mankind’s attempts to keep people apart by fences, we see that these fences do work for a period of time and then go down in history as supreme follies or are considered with incomprehension or visited with awe as tourist objects. While saying that, this short period of time does help in keeping peace (of sorts).
Funny this, just as I decided to write this column, National Geographic came up with an article on fences in its January 2004 edition and in particular, on the Israeli wall coming up. Very neatly for me, they also mention the Indo - Pak fence, the Kuwait – Iraq fence, the North Korea-South Korea Barrier, the USA-Mexico fence, Zambia-Angola Fence and the Cypriot Fence. While this is a nice little list, I would like to add a few, namely the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, Berlin Wall and the Belfast wall.
The granddaddy of all walls is the Great Wall of China. The wall is the largest construction project ever undertaken in the history of mankind, with a total length of about 7300 kilometres in North China. It was made over 15 centuries, from the 7th century BC to as late as 1644 when the Manchu’s came to power. The original objective of the wall back in the 7th century BC was to protect the little kingdoms against each other but by the 3rd century BC, the threat had moved to the northern tribes of Hsiung-nu, Jou-jan and Ch'i-tan who would sweep down frequently from the plains of Mongolia. Based on my rough calculations (and I admit this may be completely off), a total of about ½ billion people have worked on the wall over the centuries. This is a mind boggling figure and does not include the number of soldiers who were stationed on or just behind the wall. After 1644, the Manchu Dynasty took power and since it ruled over the territories beyond the wall itself, the wall fell into disuse and was left to crumple in many places.
Did the wall work? Yes and no. In the recorded history of the wall, there hasn’t been any one frontal assault on the wall, in its entire length and down its history. So it did work after a fashion. Did it protect the people inside from the outsiders? Yes, but only to a certain extent, because regimes nevertheless fell to the outsiders and invaders through bribes, bad management and internal decay. There was another problem, that the frontiers of China extended out beyond the wall, hence it became an internal wall and totally useless in many cases. So the wall did not really function as planned for many moons.
The next wall in our list is Hadrian’s Wall, in the north of England, which was built on the orders of Roman Emperor Hadrian in 122 AD. The 117 km long wall, almost across the waist of England, was built over a period of 6 years by professional roman legionnaires. Hadrian’s Wall, just like the Great Wall of China, was not meant to be fought ON, but only as a measure to control the movement of people and to protect the developed farmlands and towns to the south from the Caledonian Picts and the Brigantes in the north. By the 400’s, the Roman Empire was in decay with Britain being cut off. Lines of communication were severed from Rome and the much vaulted Roman Army disintegrated after there were salary stoppages. Border raids started in earnest and the whole area just descended back into barbarity. So did it work? Yes, it did work brilliantly for the first couple of hundred years by keeping the northern tribesmen away. It’s a different matter that they started sweeping down the coasts in boats. Did it protect the people living inside? Yes it sure did. Only when the Roman Empire collapsed from the inside, did the wall become useless.
Then we come down to the last century, where there was a rash of walls and fences. We wouldn’t talk about the Atlantic Wall, last overseen by Rommel, as we all know what happened to that and it was mainly a war time wall just like the Bar Lev Line in Sinai. The 250 km long Korean wall, on the frontier/ceasefire line between North and South Korea was erected after the Korean Civil War of 1950. It’s the ceasefire line, separated by a 2 km de-militarised zone (DMZ) on either side of the line. While there is no wall per se’ (despite some fanciful thinking by the North Koreans), it is full of minefields, fences, motion detectors, tank traps, automatic artillery and military patrols. It is the world’s most heavily fortified frontier. Aside from ONE crossing point, it’s almost completely sealed off. Does it work? Yes, it has taken on the permanence of a border even though the Korean War has technically not ended. North Koreans keep trying to dig tunnels under this 4 km wide stretch but get foiled regularly. Does it protect the South Koreans from the North Koreans? Well, yes. The terrorists and special operation forces from North Korea have to either come in through the sea or fly into South Korea.
The Berlin Wall was also created as an off-shoot of the cold war, just like the Korean DMZ. A 350 km long wall in different sections was created on the weekend of August 13, 1961 in and around Berlin. It was first just barbed wire and steel sections and made mainly to stop people from escaping from East Germany into West Germany. Then slowly over the years, it got converted into concrete walls with watchtowers. It was finally pulled down in 1989 after the iron curtain collapsed. Did it work? To a certain extent it did work. How? By restricting large scale migration of the Ossies into West Germany, but a small trickle of escapees always managed to get through, but sadly not all. 192 people have been ‘officially’ killed on the Berlin wall while trying to escape, while another 200 odd people have been injured by shooting. A key difference, it was made to keep people in, rather than keep people out and it basically burst in 1989 when the regime collapsed.
Belfast in Northern Ireland has walls and fences all over the place. It separates the Catholics from the Protestants. The city is hyper segregated and this segregation is done with a vengeance through the use of these socalled “peace lines”. There are roughly fifteen of these peace lines, made from a variety of materials ranging from corrugated iron to permanent brick and steel walls. While the Northern Ireland peace process is proceeding in fits and starts, nobody has even attempted to talk about removal of these peace lines. Did it work? In a sad way, yes it did, although projectiles would be lobbed over the walls and frequently, one would find wastelands on both sides of the fence, it kept the two warring sides apart. It also stopped the daily grind, the in-your-face confrontations and allowed the authorities to manage the two groups. Did it protect the inhabitants on both sides? Not really, but then, it’s very difficult to completely seal off a city into two, based on religious grounds. Before the ceasefire, shootings would occur because terrorists from both sides would slip in from the open areas. But the walls were not full enclosures so for what it is worth, it did and continues to work. Welcome to terrorism indeed.
Now we come to the Israeli wall. In June 2002, Israel started constructing a wall around the west bank and it is planned to be about 700 kms long. The wall consists of reinforced cement and concrete blocks, barbed wire, electrical fences, trenches, electronic motion sensors, guard towers and security roads. It will cost $1 million per kilometre and will be twice as long and three times as high as the Berlin Wall. The construction is apace and so are the shrill denunciations against it. Accusations of illegal construction, land grab, dispossession, and the like are flying about thick and fast. Leaving aside the legal and economic considerations, the question arises, will this work? Tough question, but on the whole, yes, it will work. The wall is designed not only to make it tougher for the suicide bombers to cross over into Israel proper from the West Bank (quite a lot of the current attacks are happening at the checkpoints – which I guess is better than having them in crowded restaurants and buses which these cowards run towards). It is also designed to explicitly comfort the Israeli’s by creating a physical barrier. It is difficult to pinpoint the efficacy of this wall because we do not know how many attacks have been prevented by it, but based on historical precedents, the number of prevented attacks would be high. A look at the Gaza Strip fence is instructive, not one suicide bomber from the Gaza strip has managed to infiltrate into Israel proper as opposed to almost 300 from the West Bank. Go figure.
The other border fence which is being constructed is between India and Pakistan. Similarly, the Pakistani’s are upset about the Indian fence and until recently, showed their displeasure by firing on the soldiers constructing it. India plans to fence off the entire 1800 kilometers long border with Pakistan and has been building the fence since the 1980’s. While the Pakistani’s were generally sanguine about the normal border from the Rann of Kutch to the Punjab, it was the construction of the fence in Jammu and Kashmir which really got them upset. Their arguments? That the fence will establish a fact on the ground, that it’s not an international boundary, that it’s a working boundary and those unilateral attempts to change the character of the ceasefire line are illegal under international law. What did the Indians do? They sniffed and went on with the fencing. Why are they fencing off the boundary? To stop terrorist infiltration from Pakistan. It’s a pretty substantial fence with barbed wire, motorable roads, thermal imaging equipment, motion detectors, minefields, and the like and crucially, is well inside Indian territory (as opposed to comparisons made with the Israeli one). Will it work? Indeed, in the fenced off section, the number of infiltration attempts under the cover of Pakistani artillery fire dropped from 39 in 2000 to only 2 in 2003. A funny factoid here, the USA, which is publicly against the Israeli fence, is all for the Indian one, another one to go scratch your head about.
When I started off writing this column, I was rather ambivalent about the fencing as such, but after the research and thinking more about it, I have come down on the side of the quote which says, “strong fences make good neighbours”, no sitting on the fence for me (if you excuse the pun!). Frankly, some conflicts are just too violent and deep-seated to rely on normal policing methods to stop infiltrators. The fencing in India and Israel is not a defensive line (it cannot be, given the destructive power of today’s munitions, any defensive line can be breached very easily as we have shown with the example of the Atlantic Wall and Bar Lev Line). These fences are anti personnel, anti terrorist fences. The fences and walls are temporary in nature but can show extra-ordinary resilience (the Chinese and Hadrian’s Wall stayed in use over centuries) and until and unless the regime changes, the wall stays up. So be it, if it takes a wall to protect the people from terrorists. Yes, its expensive, yes, it can be illegal, yes, it can take years, yes, people will be killed making it, yes, they are made because of fear, yes, it is suffocating, and yes, it also makes people feel secure.
All this to be taken with a grain of salt!
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