dividing walls:
The latest wall to divide city neighborhoods went up in Baghdad in April, built by American soldiers using 12-foot (3.7-metre) high grey concrete slabs weighing more than six metric tons each. The 3-mile-long construction separates a Sunni Muslim district from a Shi’ite area. It provoked protests from both communities and Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr termed it “racist.”
(...) Many of the ruses used when the Iron Curtain was still up — hollowed out hiding spaces in cars, tunnels, hook ladders — are still used now. Then, successful crossers were hailed as heroes of freedom. Now they are seen as a threat or a burden.
(...) That applies to one of the least known but longest border barriers of modern times, built by Morocco in the 1980s to curb attacks by the Western Sahara independent movement, Polisario, on territory it claims for itself. It lies behind a set of walls some 1,700 miles long and 10 feet high made of earth, rock and sand built in the 1980s. The wall is defended by thousands of Moroccan troops and fortified by bunkers and fences, barbed wire and landmines — between 200,000 and several million of them, depending on who does the estimating.
(...) Saudi Arabia has quietly invited bids for a 550-mile high-tech fence — complete with sensors, night vision cameras, face-recognition software, barbed wire — to seal off its border with Iraq.
(...) Almost invariably, governments that decide on physical separation from a neighbor predict that it would reduce tension but, at times, that remains wishful thinking. In April, for example, a firefight broke out between Afghan and Pakistani troops after the Afghans tried to tear down parts of a fence running through a tribal area. Pakistan started building a fence along part of the 1,500-mile (2,500-kilometer) border under U.S. pressure to close the routes of Taliban fighters heading to Afghanistan to join the war against U.S. and multinational forces.
(...) But Spain has built double fences 10 to 20 feet high and topped with razor wire around its wealthy enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco to keep immigrants out.
(...) The fences have had an effect similar to the walls on the border between the United States and Mexico: would-be immigrants from poor countries looked for other ways to reach a rich country. Stepped-up Spanish coastal patrols and better radar systems prompted African migrants to make riskier voyages to the Spanish-owned Canary Islands. Hundreds have drowned.
(...) If history is a guide, no border fortification can seal off a country entirely. Even the mother of all walls, the Great Wall of China, at around 4,000 miles the longest border wall ever built, failed to keep out the northern barbarians against whom it was meant to protect.

toni solo on resistance:
The Rif independence campaign led between 1920 and 1927 by Emir Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi was just one instance of global resistance to colonial domination before and after Versailles and the end of the 1914-18 war. Resistance flared from Ireland to Iraq to India, from Algeria to Syria to Indo-China, and from Java to the Congo. Sandino's war against the US marines in Nicaragua began in 1926. Revolt in China against Chiang Kai Shek's pro-imperialist regime lasted from 1925 through 1926. The period between the two world wars was marked by repeated outbreaks of such resistance - invariably repressed with ruthless barbarity by the colonial powers and their allies among local elites.
(...) The impetus for French and Spanish dominion over Morocco came with the 1906 Treaty of Algeciras, part of that era's crude imperialist game of swap between Britain, France, Germany and the other colonial powers. In 1907, French troops occupied Casablanca. A Berber uprising in 1911 led France to move into the Moroccan interior and later to declare Morocco a French "Protectorate" in 1912, the same year Italy imposed dominion over Libya. Spain bagged control of the northern coastal Rif region and of the tiny pocket of Tarfaya/Ifni. The status of Tangier was dubious until, in 1923, it was made a tripartite international port controlled by Britain, France and Spain. In his earlier career, Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi had worked with the Spanish colonial authorities until his imprisonment in 1917 for criticising Spanish designs on the Rif, for its mineral resources, which before then had remained outside the sphere of direct colonial rule. In 1919, el-Krim returned physically to his native region around Ajdir and morally to the salafiyyah inspired ideas of national and cultural renaissance of his student days in Fez. From that time on, he worked to organize resistance in the Rif to Spanish colonial dominion.
(...) Youssef Girard observes, "For Spain, Anoual was one of the most grievous defeats in its history. The Spanish troops had not just suffered a defeat but had lost face to an enemy judged to be technically and racially inferior. In a world marked by racist and ethnocentric prejudice, Anoual was a symbol : it was that of the victory of people of colour over a nation of whites ; it was the effacement of the Cross by the Crescent ; it was the revenge of the Orient over the West."
(...) The Moroccan king, afraid of the threat to his own position posed by el-Krim, refused to fight. Instead, the monarchy collaborated with the colonial powers in their war on the Rif. (Its successors have used similar aggression against the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic in the western Sahara. Morocco invaded Western Sahara in 1976, bombing fleeing refugees with napalm. Today it applies systematic repression against Western Sahara's occupied population.)
(...) The French-Spanish counter-offensive in the Rif did not discriminate between civilians and combatants. Losses among the Berber population have been reckoned at around half a million just for the years 1925 and 1926. Villages were subject to artillery and aerial bombardment both by conventional munitions and by poison gases including mustard gas, following the example of the British in Iraq in 1919. The overwhelming offensive by Spain backed by Europe's strongest military power, France, forced el-Krim to negotiate. By 1927 active resistance in the Rif was effectively over. Spain had secured its colony.
(...) It may be the case that history teaches nothing except that people learn nothing from history. Santayana believed peoples who forget their history are condemned to relive it. In any case, events seem to survive somewhere between interpretation and remembrance as well as through their immediate physical and economic aftermath. It is hard to contemplate the aggression against Iraq and the genocide against the Palestinians without wondering about the relevance of previous imperialist wars against Muslim countries. The resourceful, ferocious and determined asymmetrical campaign of Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi against the vastly more numerous and better equipped conscript and mercenary forces of France and Spain is relevant to the war on Iraq and the pending attack on Iran.
(...) Despite overwhelming air superiority and the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons, the subjugation of a hostile population requires huge numbers of infantry. Since such numbers can only be secured via a military draft, colonial wars by modern democracies cannot be "won" in the conventional sense. Despite this, the United States government has chosen to abandon the façades of democracy and prepare for an endless series of colonial wars. The Bush regime's pursuit of that alternative vindicates its critics who argue that two main objectives of the Iraq war were the enrichment of Bush regime corporate cronies and a deliberate wrecking operation on democracy in the United States.
(...) Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi himself insisted he harboured no hatred towards Spain or its people, that his resistance was aimed at the colonialist policies of the Spanish government. He wrote, "The Rif isn't fighting the Spanish and holds no hatred towards the Spanish people. The Rif is fighting that arrogant imperialism that wants to strip it of its liberty using the moral and material sacrifices of the noble Spanish people......people of the Rif fight against the Spanish military who try to abuse their rights, and at the same time hold their doors open to receive unarmed Spanish people such as technicians, business people, industrialists, farmers and workers." (2)
(...) One returns again to Steiner's paradox of Bluebeard's Castle, a paradox consistently noted earlier over centuries by many anti-colonialist writers : utter barbarity coexists readily with advanced cultural achievement. The spiralling genocide in Palestine and US threats to use nuclear weapons against Iran are the latest colonialist outrages in a long history of criminal barbarism inflicted by countries that preen themselves on democratic processes many of which in reality are mostly nugatory, rendered trifling by the power of corporate elites. The story of the Rif Republic is just one of innumerable episodes in that bitterly shameful history worth revisiting and remembering.

western sahara background:
Western Sahara, like East Timor, was a European colony until the mid-1970s. In a landmark 1975 ruling, the International Court of Justice dismissed Morocco's historical claims to Western Sahara and instead supported the Sahrawis' right to self-determination. The UN Security Council and Secretary General have both reiterated their support for a solution that provides for self-determination, which would entail a vote including, but not limited to, the option of independence.
(...) Though the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations had provided material support for Morocco's invasion and occupation of Western Sahara from 1975 to 1991, the first Bush and Clinton administrations maintained a hands-off policy toward the early UN referendum process (1992-1996). Indirect, high-level U.S. involvement -- in the form of former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker -- began in 1997. However, Baker's seven-year engagement was sabotaged, on the U.S. side, by larger geo-strategic concerns: Morocco's role as an ally in -- and after May 2003 a site of -- the war on terror.
(...) The stalemate in Western Sahara was originally achieved on the battlefield during a 16-year war pitting Western-supported Morocco against the Algerian-backed Sahrawi guerrillas of the Polisario Front.
(...) The idea was to grant Western Sahara four years of autonomy as a kind of trial period and then hold a final status referendum. The choices would be autonomy, integration with Morocco, or full independence. To sweeten the deal for Rabat, Baker proposed that non-Sahrawi Moroccan settlers could participate in the vote. With Moroccan colonists outnumbering the native Sahrawi population by as much as two-to-one, it came as quite a shock that Rabat rejected the proposal as soon as Polisario accepted it. Baker worked with Morocco for another year, but all of Rabat's counter-proposals demonstrated a deep unwillingness to compromise on the most fundamental issue, the right of self-determination
(...) Growing in militancy, the Western Saharan independence movement has spawned its own intifadah, a decentralized, youth-led, anti-Moroccan protest movement in the occupied region. The Sahrawi heroes of this struggle are former political prisoners who have become unashamed nationalists. Many Sahrawis living under Moroccan administration are no longer afraid to speak their mind about the Moroccan occupation, for which they suffer regular beatings and imprisonment. The flag of Polisario, once unseen in Moroccan-controlled areas, is now a ubiquitous symbol of Sahrawi resistance. The only internal feedback that Polisario's leaders are receiving is toward greater confrontation not compromise.
(...) Instead, the determinant reality is that Western Saharan nationalism is growing, not diminishing. Thirty years of exile (for the Sahrawi refugees in Algeria) and socio-economic marginalization (for the Sahrawis under Moroccan administration) have strengthened their resolve, not diminished it. In the streets of Western Sahara, an escalating dialectic of violence is being played out day by day. Protest meets repression meets counter-protest meets police retaliation in an endless cycle. How much longer can Polisario's leaders justify to their constituents, without losing all credibility, the maintenance of a cease-fire that is now considered pointless by many nationalists?

on the much-maligned "why?" in Casablanca:
Security forces in Morocco have continued their search for potential suicide bombers in Casablanca, a day after two brothers blew themselves up near the US consulate.
(...)Mohammed Vall, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Morocco, who visited the area where al-Raidi lived in a single room with her seven children said: "The slum we visited contained only a few thousand people, but there are many such slums in Casablanca. Several hundreds of thousands of Moroccans live in areas like this and these are a breeding ground, analysts say, for fundamentalists."
(...) In Casablanca's slums, many people are unemployed and families of up to twelve people are left to live in a single room.
(...) "We went looking for the reasons behind what they did and found the details of their arrests, their poor treatment at the hands of the police and the suffering and poverty of living in such a place."
(...) "If there is any relationship with al-Qaeda it is one of influence from distance. There is no proof of any coordination in terms of planning. Even the explosives used are of limited strength, unlike those used this week in Algeria."