Ramparts in the service of politics

Ramparts in the service of politics

Berlin

On August 13, 1961, the East German Communist Party raised with the blessing from Moscow and tacit consent from Washington, the wall that will divide Berlin, Europe and the world for the next 28 years. The two superpowers did not want to go down the path of mutual nuclear destruction because of the Germans, only 16 years after the end of World War II. On November 1989, 40, in the midst of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, the decapitated East German Communist Party opened the gates of the Berlin Wall in the vain hope of securing its own survival. Marking 81 years since the erection of the wall, German newspapers these days write that 270 men lost their lives during that time trying to overcome the Berlin Wall; state prosecutors have launched investigations into the death of 960 people on the inter-German border, and some archives mention about XNUMX victims.

NOVIA WALLS: Ever since the time of the Roman limes against the barbarians and the Chinese wall built for the same purpose, the building of ramparts among men has been a widespread means of state policy. On the threshold of the 21st century, new walls are emerging in various forms - from completely concrete, concrete and with barbed wire, through visas as the embodiment of bureaucratic sadism, to attempts to nationally demarcate "cyberspace".

Last year, at least 370 Mexicans froze to death or died from the heat in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico while trying to evade border controls after entering the US illegally. Their goal is to look for a job somewhere deeper in the US and thus save themselves and their family from poverty. About a million Mexicans were caught trying to illegally enter the "promised land" last year, probably three times as many succeeded despite tens of thousands of police, high border walls, automatic night-vision cameras, devices that detect movements and even sounds on several hundred meters away from the border zone.

Unlike the North American border guards, who are supposed to control the three thousand kilometer long border, the Spanish "Civil Guard" (Guard civil) oversees only eight and a half kilometers long between the Cheuta Peninsula on the African coast and Morocco. Nevertheless, the Spaniards erected a steel wire wall 3,20 meters high, installed 25 observation posts, mounted 42 remote-controlled cameras and installed about a hundred powerful searchlights. The goal is to prevent the encroachment of Africans in search of work in "Schengenia" - an area that includes almost all the countries of the European Union, most of which have abolished mutual border controls. The sea throws out drowned people every day who tried to bypass that rampart and reach Spain.

FORCED I VOLUNTARY: The demilitarized zone between North and South Korea is five to seven meters wide and is actually anything but what its name says. The South Koreans, for their part, built anti-tank obstacles fearing an invasion from the north. Koreans cannot visit each other (except in rare exceptions), exchange mail, or even watch television originating from the "brotherly state".

At the market in Nicosia, just a few steps away from the "green" line that divides the Turkish and Greek parts of the capital of Cyprus, you can meet people who have not been "over" for a quarter of a century, where their houses are, from where they were expelled during the island war. Foreigners are allowed to cross the demarcation line and reach the old addresses of refugees and exiles in fifteen minutes' walk, where other people have been living for a long time.

People, however, are not always unhappy about the existence of walls that divide them. In north Belfast, between the streets that divide the Protestant from the Catholic areas, the authorities have erected high barriers that prevent people from even looking at each other. Whoever wants to fight now has to go to the city center, where it is easier for the police to control the crowd.

People have also volunteered to surround themselves with walls in South African suburbs, where the wealthy pay private guards to protect them from crime. Such ramparts exist in both North and South American cities, in the neighborhoods of the rich throughout the former Soviet Union, in Turkey, Tunisia and elsewhere in the Mediterranean where foreigners fly and poverty reigns.

There is hardly any rural Albanian house in Kosovo without a high wall that surrounds it and separates it from its neighbors. The Ibar has now become a kind of wall that separates the Serbs and the Albanians in Kosovska Mitrovica, and the two banks of the Vardar in Skopje look more and more like that. With the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, hard, inhuman demarcations were established - who else in Serbia hopes that one day they will again spend their summers freely on the sea of ​​their youth in Croatia?

Freedom of movement, especially in Europe, is also limited by the humiliating visa regime introduced by the European Union countries for Russia, Ukraine and other countries, such as Serbia, which are still far from Western European integration. Anyone in Ukraine who wants to travel to Great Britain can now schedule an interview with a consular officer at the embassy in Kyiv - for some day in February next year. For many people in Eastern Europe, the Schengen visa is for East Germans a permit to visit West Berlin for a day.

MOVING, TO EVERYTHING DESPITE: People are clearly not free to move where they want, nor can they hope to. With the advent of the Internet, however, the hope was born in many minds that, if not in this world, then in the one in cyberspace, a boundless human community, resistant to division and politics, a model of equality and originally democratic, could be created. However, it already exists. the term "digital divide", which should express the gap between those who have the money to go online and those who, for example, will never make a single phone call in their life, because there is neither a telephone wire nor electricity in their environment, let alone a computer... In addition, countries have started to raise borders on the Internet as well: Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Iran and South Korea filter the content that is available to Internet users in those countries. In China, there are quite a few political prisoners whose sin is exercising freedom of opinion on the Internet. At the end of the NATO attack on Serbia, when graphite bombs extinguished electrical installations, Washington was preparing to disconnect Serbia from the Internet.

After this enumeration of new and old ramparts, perhaps the thought of the British historian Hugh Brogan "Human history is mostly a story of migrations" can provide some consolation. In other words, the obstacles could never permanently stop the intenders. So, all that is needed is patience, even for 28 years, as in the case of the Berlin Wall.