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Atrocities
of War: Qalqiliya and the Apartheid Wall
by
Mina Hamilton
October
20, 2003
Atrocity: A word to handle with care. Used too often the word loses its power,
slips into insignificance.
Over
the years memories of unpopular or controversial wars tend to coalesce around a
signature atrocity, one particularly brutal episode. The event becomes the
perceived norm for the war. It's the
act or sequence of acts that we know, even without proof, was repeated in other
less publicized, but equally appalling, acts of annihilation.
For
the Korean War, it wasn't until 1999 that the 1950 massacre at No Gun Ri hit
the news. In this case US troops fired
upon South Korean civilian refugees huddled underneath a railroad bridge. The slaughter went on for several days
during which 100 to 400 refugees died.
The details of the slaying are murky.
Despite conflicting memories of Korean survivors and US veterans, even
the US Army admits an "unknown number of Korean civilians were
killed." (1)
For
the Vietnam War, the atrocity was My Lai, the 1968 massacre by US troops of 300
to 500 peasants in an impoverished village in Quang Ngai Province. The court-martial trial of Lieutenant
Calley, the wrenching photographs in Life magazine, the interviews with
soldiers who participated gave Americans a sickeningly clear picture of innocent
civilians executed in cold blood and thrust into mass graves. (2)
As
one moves closer in time to more recent wars it's harder to select one event
that is the most horrendous. For Gulf
War I, some might focus on the attack on the Amariyah shelter where, in 1991,
300 to 1500 innocent civilians were incinerated by two US bombs. (3)
For
the War in Afghanistan can the horrific event be anything other than the
suffocation of an estimated 3000 Taliban prisoners in sealed metal
containers? First revealed in Newsweek
magazine the 2002 crime involved captives who were being transported to
Sherbeghan prison in Northern Afghanistan by troops under control of the ruthless
Uzbek warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum.
Packed for four days into the sealed containers with no ventilation
holes and no water virtually all the prisoners died. (4)
Which
act or acts would one select to represent all the cruel suffering, the terrible
miseries of Gulf War II? It's perhaps
too soon to know. And what about the
other contemporary war, the Israeli-Palestinian War? Each side would have many candidates.
Atrocities
are about death.
Alas,
humans in their ingenuity have designed many kinds of deaths. There is the quick, bloody snuffing out of
physical murder. Then there are the
slow, excruciatingly slow, deaths. The
death may be the bitter attrition of a population starved of jobs, food, water,
and hope. It may be being imprisoned,
surrounded by towering slabs of dark gray concrete. It may be the oppression of living day by day with a terrible
injustice.
|
Such is the building of the Apartheid Wall at Qalqiliya in Palestine, such is the immense concrete cage around Qalqiliya. The residents of this city of 42,000 can only leave through one -- yes, that's one -- military checkpoint. This checkpoint is supposedly open from 7 AM to 7 PM. It's often closed at the whim of the occupying soldiers. What's happening in the ghetto-ized city of Qalqiliya, is certainly one of the signature frightful events of the Israeli-Palestinian War. The Western media and many politicians continue to |
name
what the Palestinians call the Apartheid Wall a "fence" or a
"separation barrier."
This
is not a fence. This is an immense,
sky-obliterating, concrete edifice that belittles the walls at Sing-Sing
prison.
This
is not a fence. This is an act of
war. Described as a security,
anti-terrorist fence by the Israelis, the wall is redrawing the boundary between
Israel and Palestine. Gone is the Green
Line (the boundaries established after the 1967 war), arrived is the boundaries
of the Apartheid Wall. In the first
phase alone, the wall will confiscate 160,000-180,000 dunums or 40,000-45,000
acres of Palestinian land in the West Bank and much of this acreage is prime
agricultural land. (5)
|
Twenty-five feet high, punctuated by giant "sniper"
towers, and entrapping Qalqiliya on three sides, the wall is a brazen attack
on what is vital to life in a dry environment - water. In villages around Qalqiliya and nearby
Tulkarem over 30 Palestinian wells have been lost due to the construction of
the wall. This may not sound like
many wells, but since Israeli law prevents Palestinians from drilling any new
wells, this means no water for drinking, for agriculture, for life. (6) Even more ominous is the attack this represents on one of the
most important water resources in Palestine, what Palestinians call the
Western Aquifer and Israelis call the Mountain Aquifer. This aquifer is, after the Jordan River,
the largest source of water in historic Palestine. (7) Used as Americans are to plentiful rainfall and aboveground
water supply reservoirs, the word 'aquifer' is foreign to many of us. But in a land of low rainfall, an aquifer,
which is an underground reservoir of water, is the key to agriculture and
life. |
Not
only has Qalqiliya been cut off from the Western Aquifer, but also the town has
been severed from the rich farmlands that used to make Qalqiliya
prosperous. Fifty-five percent of
Qalqiliya's farmland is now on the other side of the Apartheid Wall. (9)
|
Prevent the residents of Qalqiliya from being able to water and tend their groves of olive trees and citrus trees and you cut a livelihood - and a people - off at the knees. This was the town that, formerly, exported its fruits and
vegetables to Israel and the Gulf.
This is the town that used to be wealthy - at least, by Palestinian
standards. Income is now averaging
$60.00 a month instead of the pre-Wall $1000 a month. (10) What else has the wall done to Qalqiliya? We could try to
pin down the disaster in more facts and figures: Six hundred shops and businesses out of a total |
of
1800 have been closed. (11) Unemployment has reached 80%.
(12) And, according to the city's mayor, since the
concrete cage was constructed, 20 % of the residents have been forced to leave
in what some bitterly call "voluntary transfer." (13)
Numbers
and words walking across the page can only faintly trace the horror. As one resident says: "It is always
there, me and my family no longer see the sky, nor the sunset, nothing but a
ten-meter-high concrete wall." (14)
The
Wall at Qalqiliya. It's an atrocity.
Mina Hamilton
is a writer based in New York City. She
can be reached at minaham@aol.com. Photos
by Pengon/Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (http://stopthewall.org/index.shtml)
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(1) Department of the
US Army, Inspector General, Review of No Gun Ri, Executive Summary, 2001, p.x
(2) Hersch, Seymour, My
Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It's Aftermath, 1970.
(3) Clark, Ramsey, The
Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf, 1992, p. 70.
(4) Democracy Now,
"Afghan Massacre: the Convoy of Death," May 26, 2003.
(5) The Apartheid Wall
Campaign, Report #1, November 2002, p 4, available at www.pengon.org.
(6) Ibid, p. 19.
(7) Al Tamimi, Abdel
Rahman, "Theory into Practice into Final Implementation: The Wall's Path
is Based on Ultimate Control over Palestinian Water Resources," August
26th, 2003, at www.stopthewall.org.
(8) Al Shanti, Khaled,
"The Apartheid Cage around Qalqiliya: Qalqiliya's Struggle for Survival
since 1948," August 26th, 2003, at www.stopthewall.org.
(9) Humpries,
Isabella, "Building a Wall, Sealing an Occupation," Middle East
Report, September 29, 2002, available at www.merip.org/mero/mero.
(10) Jensen, Michael,
Letter from Qalqiliya, Middle East International, December 26, 2002.
(11)
Pengon/Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, 2003, "Conquest of the West Bank: UN
Report Calls Wall 'Annexation.'
(12) Cook, Catherine,
"Final Status in the Shape of a Wall," Middle East Research and Information
Project, September 2003.
(13) Williams, Emma,
Letter from Qalqiliya, Middle East International, May 16, 2003.
(14) Al Kharouf,
Hassan, "Personal Testiomony," October 3, 2003, at www.pengon.org