Mandera Wall will keep out Al-Shabaab militants

The Kenya Government has apparently decided to build a wall along the more than 200 km border between Somalia and Kenya, the major purpose of which is control the entry of Somali nationals into Kenya.

The wall is part of a larger strategy to keep out Al-Shabaab militants in particular and illegal immigrants more generally, and to prevent what some have already termed serious encroachment on Kenyan territory.

The Mandera County government is concerned with crimes committed by Somali nationals who retreat across the border to the border town of Bula Hawa in Somalia and, thus, escape arrest and prosecution by county and national authorities.

The programme reflects a belief that clear demarcation of national boundaries is itself a legitimate government project.

As I write, the project appears not to be a joint Kenya-Somalia effort.

The Kenya wall project brings to mind the other walls that have been constructed by countries around the world for the same general purposes, some of which are still in existence.

The key question, then, is what good are these walls? What purposes do they legitimately and effectively serve? What are their limitations and with what consequences?

A prior question is what good for whom?

Since I am not familiar with Mandera County, I will stipulate that the wall may be useful for the county for deterrence and pursuit of local criminals fleeing across the national border.

The evidence on whether and to what extent, at a macro level between nations, walls like this one serve useful purposes appears to be mixed at best.

OBSOLETE

Minimally, the record suggests that walls between nations around the world have not been lastingly useful, because events and circumstances have made them obsolete or anachronistic.

One of the most famous of walls, the Great Wall of China, kept the Mongols at bay until the imperial Chinese government invited the Mongols to help it suppress a peasant rebellion. Today it is one of China’s major tourist attractions.

Roman emperor Hadrian fashioned a wall in the north of today’s England to protect the Roman outpost from the Scots, but it did not long survive the decay of the Roman empire itself.

The Berlin Wall separating East and West Germany from the end of the Second World War to 1989 was an affliction for Germans with family and friends on both sides of the wall. It did not prevent or survive the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a united and vibrant Germany exists in its place today.

A Washington Post story I read last fall identified 14 walls still standing around the world for similar but, I would argue, also divergent purposes.

These include walls separating India and Pakistan, Georgia and South Ossetia, Gaza and Israel, Egypt and Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, the US and Mexico, North and South Korea, India and Bangladesh, Spain and Morocco, Turkish and Greek Cyprus, North Ireland and the Irish Republic, Morocco and Western Sahara, Sunni and Shiite sections of Baghdad, European Union barriers to Middle Eastern and North African refugees, Botswana and Zimbabwe, Malaysia and Thailand, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Iraq and Iran, and Kuwait and Iraq.

So the new Mandera County wall will not be the only one, even as the two most famous are history.

As I look at the list of still extant walls, it seems to me that while they share common purposes, there are also significant differences in the relationships between the countries and peoples involved that add distinctive nuance to these purposes and also differentially impact their legitimacy and efficacy.

For example, the rationale for the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea closely resembles that of the Berlin Wall, separating peoples who are culturally one nation and who, in a better world, should share one state, not be separated.

Other examples are the barriers separating Gaza and Egypt and Gaza and Israel and the West Bank and Israel.

Here, clearly, the quest for a two state solution to the decades long struggle between Israel and the Palestinians adds a critical element not present in the other circumstances: The issue of the birth of a new state.

The border wall between the US and Mexico is different from the others in that, as much trouble as there is with illegal immigration into the United States, the countries are economic partners and broadly speaking friends, policy differences notwithstanding.

I suggest that the new Mandera County wall is also unique among these walls in that there is a degree of inter-dependence between Kenya and Somalia and their peoples in cultural as well as economic and political terms that war and conflict over half a century cannot erase.

It is a degree of inter-dependence between political entities, the rivalries notwithstanding, that one does not find in any of the other cases of walls on this list.

Somalia and Kenya share membership in the African Union with its expanding list of functions that none of the other walled off rivals do.