“Returning Fallujans will face clampdown,” by Anne Barnard, Boston Globe, 5 December 2004, http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/12/05/returning_fallujans_will_face_clampdown/ (from Democratic Underground).
Life in Fallujah…
The US military is drawing up plans to keep insurgents from regaining control of this battle-scarred city, but returning residents may find that the measures make Fallujah look more like a police state than the democracy they have been promised.
Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned.
This is the bloody end of apartheid. More and more, Sunni Arabs are realizing that they have lost. Their actions have alienated the Kurds and the Shia (even the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani didn’t condemn the Fallujah assault), and their political fate is bleak. In South Africa, the Afrikaaners were able to join the ANC and loose influence quietly. Imagine them, but more hated.
In 1946 Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland expelled their German resisdents. In Iraq, we’re just creating perpetual prisons.