Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (10 page)

These playful claims misjudge Bir Tawil’s somber reality, but it is hard to be too disapproving. Bir Tawil excites the geographical imagination because it disorients our expectations of the modern world, and more specifically our expectations of what nations and borders are trying to achieve.

It seems natural to define the world around what is sought after, but geopolitics can also be considered in terms of what is not wanted. There are a number of ways this happens. First, as we have seen with Bir Tawil, there are “anti-claims” designed to bolster positive claims. Such cases are not uncommon, although usually there is a keen recipient for such apparently unloved places. The borders of China have a number of them. A recent summary of the situation showed that China has given ground in 17 out of 23 of its ongoing border disputes, giving up 1.3 million square miles of land. In the long-running dispute between Greece and Turkey, whose peoples were once intermingled but, over the course of the last century, became isolated into separate, ethnically discrete states, a lot of attention has been given to defining where is
not
“historically” Greek or
not
“historically” Turkish. Greek and Turkish irredentism is shot through with as many denials as affirmations. In the quid pro quo of territorial disputes, declaring a lack of interest in a region often turns out to be the key claim.

Bir Tawil is easily overlooked on the world map as an oddity, an area of minor confusion where geopolitical certainty has broken down into a series of dashed lines. Yet its story is of universal importance. For Bir Tawil is one of the few places on earth where one of the key paradoxes of border-making is being explicitly played out. Borders are about claims to land, but as soon as you draw one you limit yourself. Every border is also an act of denial, an acknowledgment of another’s rights. By contrast, the claim to want no borders, much prized by corporate executives and anticapitalist activists alike, is a claim to the whole world. Borders have a far more ambivalent and complex relationship to territory; they combine both arrogance and modesty, both demand and denial.

14° 03′ 05″ N, 88° 08′ 57″ W

When borders change, some unlucky communities end up on the wrong side of the wire and wake up to find they are foreigners in their own country. This has been the experience of the people of the remote mountain region of Nahuaterique, which was handed over by El Salvador to Honduras in 1992. The story of Nahuaterique also shows how places once thought to be so important that they were worth fighting for are often forgotten once the battle is over.

Honduras and El Salvador have been bad neighbors for a hundred and fifty years. They have been fighting over their shared border for much of this time. The most recent conflict was a four-day war in 1969. It’s often referred to as the Soccer War since it was preceded by clashes between fans of the two national sides during the games they played in the second North American qualifying round for the World Cup. The war, however, wasn’t actually caused by a soccer brawl. Its true cause was demographic pressure. For years there had been a steady influx of landless people from the small and crowded country of El Salvador into Honduras, which is four times as big. They were looking for work and land to farm and moving across an ill-defined and disputed border. In retrospect it looks as if they were migrating from one country to another, but that isn’t how many of them understood it at the time. As far as they were concerned, they were just moving east, going up into the relatively empty lands of the mountains.

The Soccer War has another, more fitting name: the War of the Disposed. However innocent these settlers’ intent, they were treated as illegal immigrants and as land snatchers. Thousands of Salvadorans were thrown out and new laws were introduced that took land away from Salvadorans in Honduras and gave it to native Hondurans. It was this bitter intervention that started the war. It lasted only four days because the Salvadoran army quickly made deep inroads into Honduras until, under considerable international pressure, it was forced to fall back.

A long series of border negotiations began, eventually ending up at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and it wasn’t until 1992 that a new and definite border was announced. Most people seemed content with the outcome. Roberto Hidalgo Castrillo, the Salvadoran ambassador to the Netherlands, announced that “we can celebrate with great joy.” El Salvador lost Nahuaterique, but this was just one of six disputed areas. The fact that a few small communities would soon find themselves on the other side of the border was seen as a price well worth paying. Twelve thousand Salvadorans found themselves in Honduras, while three thousand Hondurans were informed they were living in El Salvador.

The Salvadorans argue that the people of the twenty-one villages that are scattered across Nahuaterique have since been neglected by their feckless new owner. In fact, the Honduran government is not unsympathetic to the region’s plight. Honduras is understandably concerned about having a lawless no man’s land on its border, but its expressions of concern have been low-key. The people of Nahuaterique rarely vote in Honduran elections and have few real friends in its capital city, Tegucigalpa.

Writing for the Salvadoran newspaper
La Prensa Grafica
in April 2013, Siegfried Ramirez recalls how the villagers woke to find themselves abandoned. “When the people first heard the rumor that the land where they lived was not part of El Salvador but in Honduras,” Ramirez writes, “many believed it was just a bad joke.” Honduran officials soon arrived in the area demanding that its residents register their land as Honduran, but the registration process was never completed. As a consequence, only a minority of land in the area is legally owned. It has also taken decades for citizenship cards to be distributed, preventing residents from having any access to basic state services or getting a driver’s license.

The villagers feel forsaken: no longer in El Salvador but disowned by Honduras. The public and legal services available in Nahuaterique remain nonexistent or unpopular. Although schools have been built, until recently many children preferred to walk three hours across the border to go to school in El Salvador. The 1992 border also put an end to the area’s main trade, which was supplying timber to El Salvador. Overnight it turned from a legitimate business into illegal trafficking. The status of a uniformed state presence in the area is even more uncertain. The only sign of Honduran authority is a military post at Palo Blanco, and the soldiers there report that their only task is to secure the border from lumber smuggling. Locals complain that schoolchildren have been robbed by thieves right in front of the Palo Blanco post. When asked why they didn’t intervene, the soldiers claimed that “school safety” was not their concern and, in any case, they didn’t have the power to make arrests.

So at the moment one man, a wiry farmer called Marcos Argueta, is the law.
La Prensa Grafica
reports that as “he walks down the center of town, people look at him with respect.” Argueta’s authority is based entirely on a local and unofficial election, but it has thrust him into the limelight as the voice of the people. “Many people here didn’t want to be Honduran,” he explains, “but they couldn’t leave as they didn’t have land elsewhere.” Since the transfer, Argueta says, “there have been serious issues with security. Anyone can come in—drug traffickers, criminals.” It’s a situation that he struggles to manage. Drunks and bandits are dealt with by Argueta through a combination of rough justice and wishful thinking. Along “with other reliable men” his technique for dealing with bad behavior is to knock the offending party to the ground and bind his hands and feet till he promises to behave or, ideally, leave.

Such is the despair in Nahuaterique that twelve of its residents started an “indefinite” hunger strike in 2012 outside the National Congress in the Honduran capital. In their press statement they demanded their own regional government as well as “schools, health centers equipped with personnel and medicines, agricultural support and the free movement of people and goods.” It’s a long list, but it does not meet with animosity in Honduras, where the public and political attitude mixes sympathy and neglect. Though the abandonment of Nahuaterique is widely reported in Honduras, there is no sense of urgency. It is pointed out that since 1998 dual citizenship has been granted to people in these once disputed borderlands and that they have the privilege of going freely between the two countries. The deputy minister of the interior and population, Salome Castellanos, has warned the villagers to stop complaining. What they need to do, he says, is to learn to live as Hondurans.

While the Honduran newspapers report on the plight of the people of Nahuaterique, they spin it into a good-news story of steady progress. Thus recent headlines in
Hondudiario
and
El Heraldo
have announced how thankful the people of the area are to the Honduran human rights ombudsman for sticking up for them and how much they are looking forward to working hard to make what one resident quoted in the papers apparently described as “a new Nahuaterique completely and actively integrated with the social, economic and political life of our new homeland, Honduras.” Alongside these happy thoughts we find government promises of a police station to be built “in the coming months” and the appointment of a doctor for the area.

But if and when Nahuaterique does become “completely and actively integrated” into its new homeland, questions will still remain: Why did it take so long? After having fought so hard and having won back such a sizable chunk of territory, why did Honduras choose to turn its back on the region? It seems that, for Hondurans, the meaning of the place was all in the fight. It also suggests that Nahuaterique just has too many Salvadorans to ever be taken seriously in Honduran politics.

31° 19′ 2″ N, 34° 48′ 2″ E

A place is not a thing, like a pencil or a watering can, something that can be thoughtlessly disposed of and replaced. The ferocity and ingenuity with which people hang on to the place they care about shows that it is a defining feature of who they are; that to lose one’s place can seem like losing everything.

In an era in which the importance of place is often overlooked, we need to turn to desperate places such as Twayil Abu Jarwal, a Bedouin village in Israel’s Negev Desert, to be reminded of the urgent and necessary nature of topophilia. It’s up a dirt track off the smooth tarmac of Highway 40 that runs north of Beersheba. There are no road signs to the village and it doesn’t appear on any maps. But like the forty other “unrecognized” Bedouin villages in the Negev, Twayil Abu Jarwal grips onto this bone-dry landscape with a stubborn energy. It has been demolished by the Israeli authorities so many times that accounts vary widely on the exact number, but conservative estimates suggest that the bulldozers have rolled in and pushed over some part of the village between twenty-five and fifty times. Today there are no permanent structures for its 450 residents, only tents and tin shacks.

In the aftermath of each demolition a group of villagers gathers to assess the damage. Israeli activist Yeela Raanan recorded one such exchange: “The bulldozer driver took his time,” says one, “he worked slowly and thoroughly, he left nothing standing, nothing.” This time, says another, “they buried alive the doves’ hatchlings.” But as soon as the bulldozers leave, the village reemerges—shelters and pathways are reestablished; it becomes a place again, awaiting the next visit from the Israeli authorities. Talking to an observer from Human Rights Watch, a village woman, Aliya al-Talalqah, describes how it takes “five to six days after the demolition to make these tents.” In the meantime, everyone has to sleep “outside on mats, like wild animals, with the sun in the day and the cold at night, with small children.”

Interviewed in the
Jerusalem Report
, Ilan Yeshurun, a local director of the Israel Land Authority, explained the ceaseless round of demolition by simply stating, “This is not a village.” Without irony, he added, “It doesn’t exist on any map or in any legal registration. It’s only a village in the eyes of the Bedouin.” In other words, it is because Twayil Abu Jarwal doesn’t exist that it both can and has to be bulldozed again and again.

The tents of Twayil Abu Jarwal, flapping bleakly amid the rubble, offer a broken echo of a time when the Negev Bedouin were a nomadic people, moving with their sheep and goats across the desert. The Bedouin were pretty much ignored by the area’s past rulers, the Ottomans and later, briefly, the British. Israel’s was the first government that took an interest in them. From the 1960s the Israeli government pursued a policy of “sedentarization” and concentration, relocating the Bedouin in seven new towns in a triangle of land in the Negev called the Siyag. It was hoped that this ancient people would be reshaped into a modern community. In 1963 Israeli general Moshe Dayan looked forward to a time when the Bedouin would constitute “an urban proletariat” and each man “would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on.” But the Bedouin carried with them a huge sense of loss into the Siyag’s new towns, and they were ill prepared for urban life. The new towns soon became associated with social breakdown, crime, and unemployment. Many drifted back to their ancestral land. No longer nomadic, and with an increasingly fragile connection to traditional Bedouin identity, the al-Talalqah clan chose to build the village of Twayil Abu Jarwal near their old tribal cemetery.

Settlements like Twayil Abu Jarwal deliver the goal of a sedentary lifestyle but on the Bedouin’s own terms. The Bedouin sense of place, which once extended across the Negev Desert, has become anchored in such locales. But their attempt to make this transition on their own terms has been continually challenged. The urban planner Steve Graham offers the word “urbicide” to describe the Israeli government’s policy toward the Palestinians, referring to the attempt to smash political resistance by breaking up the physical and social infrastructures of urban life. But at least the Palestinians have places to break. The problem for the Bedouin is that their villages are not even acknowledged. Ironically, as a cultural and ethnic group, the Bedouin receive a lot of attention. Their traditional clothes, food, and other items of ethnographic interest get tourist and state attention and even respect, but without the acknowledgment of place, respect for mere artifacts means little.