One may support or oppose the Trump administration’s grand design in terms of home security: the building, or the “updating,” of a 3200-kilometer barrier between the United States and Mexico. One cannot deny, however, that such structures — hermetic and heavily monitored separations, instead of merely classic borders — are quite common today.
While the Iron Curtain and Bamboo Curtain separating the USSR and Red China from the rest of the world were partially dismantled, some other 20th century barriers are still extant. And new ones are being erected all over the world at steady pace.
Le Point, a French right-of-center weekly, has published a comprehensive map in this respect. According to it, and other documents, the oldest existing barriers are the outcome of wars of aggression:
The “demilitarized zone” (DMZ) between North and South Korea — in fact, one of the most militarized fences in the world — was created in 1953 as part of the armistice agreement that ended a three-year war initiated by the Communist North Korean regime. The 180-kilometer long Attila that separates the Muslim-Turkish populated Northern Cyprus from the Christian-Greek populated southern Republic of Cyprus was unilaterally set up by Turkey after it invaded the Mediterranean island in 1975. The Sand Wall, a 2720-kilometer barrier put in place between 1980 and 1987 and manned by 100,000 Moroccan soldiers, marked Morocco’s 1975 unilateral annexation of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara.
Read the rest of the story HERE.
Comments are closed.