I. Walls
by Haifa Zangana
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Iraqis say that concrete walls and the US embassy are the only real construction in occupied Iraq. One is built to wall-in Iraqis in whole towns or city neighborhoods, the other to wall-in the occupiers and their stooges. The gigantic one billion dollar new embassy itself has been built next to the old Iraqi presidential palace, which had few if any concrete walls during Saddam Hussein’s rule. The US embassy is a neocolonial fortress replete with three concentric circles of concrete walls, manned from the outside by Iraqi and foreign mercenaries, then by the US marines, and then again by the US Special Forces— not counting the walls around Baghdad’s Green Zone as a whole. When rockets fall, the security men, the officials and the prostitutes who work there have several concrete shelters handily scattered every hundred yards or so for them to hide. These walls are called “security walls” from the Green Zone. Most Iraqis, however, call them the 69 |inside69 “occupation walls.” In general, walls, especially in Baghdad, are made of three-meter-high concrete blocks. During the surge—the 30,000 US soldiers increase in Baghdad—“the coalition forces [had] erected more than 3,000 individual sections of concrete blast walls throughout the city….[T]hese barriers included both Jersey barriers — short concrete dividers commonly seen on roadways in the United States—and larger twenty-foot blast walls that commonly surround bases and living areas.” The highly publicized “success of the surge” has scarred Baghdad with barriers, checkpoints and walls. Every wall has one entry checkpoint and one exit, boxing closely linked communities into ghettos and gated communities. Box, box, box. Likewise, Iraqi people and their districts have been labelled according to the occupier’s vocabulary. Iraqis are no more. They are: Sunnis. Shias. Radical Shias. Sunni terrorists or Muslim extremists. Subduing Iraq required the creation of propaganda on sectarian violence, and on how to quell it. Walls, in a US Military statement, were seen as “one of the centrepieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence,” and, as part of “a series of measures long sought by the White House [that were] aimed at advancing reconciliation between the warring Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs”. Yet, walls as a means of control were never mentioned.