King Mohammed VI of Morocco was visiting a hammam when a genie appeared.
“I can offer you one wish,” the genie said.
“I’d really like to see my late father, Hassan II,” Mohammed replied.
“That’s a difficult request, bringing a person back from the dead,” the genie said. “Have you got another wish?”
“Well, I’d like Western Sahara to become part of Morocco,” said Mohammed.
“Hang on while I’ll look for your father,” said the genie.
Saharawi joke
In the far western expanse of the Sahara is the world’s longest continuous wall. It starts in Morocco and slithers down through the desert for 2,400 kilometres to the Atlantic Ocean. More than 130,000 soldiers line its perimeter. Made of sand and stone, it stands one and a half metres wide and between two and three metres tall, and has command posts every two miles. Motion sensors, barbed wire and several million landmines provide an extra layer of defence. For most of its course, it cuts across a sparsely populated region that Morocco regards as its southern provinces. On maps the area appears as Western Sahara. The UN calls it a “non-self-governing territory”. It is Africa’s last colony, where a near-forgotten liberation war lies dormant.
The wall is sometimes referred to as Hassan’s Wall, after King Hassan II of Morocco, who annexed most of what was then called Spanish Sahara when Spain pulled out in 1976. About half of the indigenous population, the Saharawis, who had been promised a vote on self-determination by Spain, fled across the desert to refugee camps in an inhospitable corner of Algeria in order to escape Moroccan rule.
They were assisted by the Polisario Front, a poorly armed but fiercely determined nationalist movement. Unable to prevent attacks on his troops by Polisario guerrillas, King Hassan ordered a series of joined defensive walls to be built around the main cities and installations in Western Sahara. Bulldozers bullied the barrier into place, eventually enclosing about four-fifths of the territory. Forced ever deeper into the Sahara, the Polisario was left with a ribbon of desert that it called the Liberated Zone.
The wall should have come down. In 1991, Morocco and the Polisario agreed to end their 16-year war. The UN was to oversee a referendum on independence for Western Sahara within nine months. Morocco first blocked the vote and then abandoned the poll altogether when it realised the result would not go its way. Eighteen years and nearly $1bn in UN expenditure later, the Polisario camps – and more than 100,000 refugees – are still there. So is the wall, though few outside the Maghreb know that it exists. I didn’t until one day I saw it represented as a thick black line on a map of Africa I bought a few years ago. I was intrigued, and resolved to see the wall and hear the stories of the Saharawis living on both sides.
As I drove through the flat desert plains in the Liberated Zone, the wall appeared to me as a caramel stripe on the horizon. Two Moroccan soldiers on lookout ducked out of sight when they saw the Polisario Land Cruiser approaching. “Rabbits! Cowards!” The man cursing was a 39-year-old Saharawi journalist and independence activist, Malainin Lakhal. He had unbrushed hair, a goatee and silver-rimmed glasses. “The wall of shame,” he spat out. He knew all about the wall – he had crossed it one moonless night nine years earlier. Back then, he was running to escape the Moroccan secret police, leaving behind his relatives, his future wife and the intifada brewing in the “occupied territories”. Which was where my journey began.
On a cold and rainy night in January last year, I boarded a bus in the Moroccan seaside town of Agadir and headed down the coast. At dawn, we reached Tarfaya, a small settlement 60 miles across the water from the Canary Islands. Mist rolled in off the Atlantic. A few men ambled in the sand-dusted streets, ghostly in their thick, hooded djellabas. It was here, in late 1975, that 350,000 Moroccans gathered under the orders of King Hassan before setting off on the “Green March” into Western Sahara, in a show of intent during the last days of Spanish rule. In the afternoon, I caught another bus, following the marchers’ route south through scrubland, crossing an invisible frontier. On the outskirts of Laayoune, the territory’s capital, a policeman boarded the bus, checking the identity cards of all passengers. I handed over my passport, hoping he would not deduce my profession. Journalists are not welcome in Western Sahara; to question Morocco’s “territorial integrity” is to break the law.
A military base guarded the entrance to the city, whose desert-pink buildings rose up beyond a wide green river. I checked in at a cheap hotel. My room looked out on to a bank of radar dishes and seven military jeeps in a sandy lot.
It was evening, and soldiers in peak caps and faded uniforms were cycling home. Moroccan flags flew on every block. The city had an orderly, if sterile, feel, different from the frenetic atmosphere of cities such as Fez and Marrakesh. There was another feeling, too. In the traffic and parked on the roadside was an inordinate number of police vehicles, mostly new sedans and minivans, painted white or dark blue, with metal grilles over the windows and headlights.
The city had eyes, as Aminatou Haidar, a petite woman in her early forties with brown-tinted spectacles, knew only too well. The “Saharawi Gandhi” to her supporters – and a dangerous traitor, according to Morocco – Haidar has come to symbolise the non-violent struggle for Saharawi rights. One evening she picked me up in her old black Renault sedan and drove me to a friend’s apartment, as hers is under constant surveillance. Once the translator arrived, she told me her story.
Born in Laayoune, she was nine when Moroccan troops entered Western Sahara; relatives on both sides of her family fled to Algeria. Within months, hundreds of Saharawis with Polisario sympathies who stayed behind had been sent to clandestine prisons in Morocco. An uncle of Haidar’s was one of the Disappeared. “My mother would often cry about her brother,” she said. “My uncle had six daughters, and the strain on them was terrible. This made me understand that something was horribly wrong.” In late 1987, while studying for her baccalaureate, Haidar was secretly involved in organising a pro-independence demonstration to coincide with a rare visit by a UN delegation to Western Sahara. At 3.30am on the morning before the UN mission landed, plain-clothes policemen swooped on her parents’ house.
Still in pyjamas, she was bundled her into a van and blindfolded. As many as 70 other young Saharawis were seized at the same time. They were taken to a secret prison in Laayoune, where she was strapped to a plank, face down, with her hands and feet tied. Officers kicked and slapped her, threatened her with rape and gave her electric shocks. “We tried to move our blindfolds a bit to allow us to see out the bottom. But the police would shine lights in our eyes; if we reacted they knew that they had to tighten the blindfold.”
Her “disappearance” lasted three years and seven months. She had been blindfolded most of the time. Years later she wrote in an online testimony: “19 June 1991 is the day of my liberation. The first day of summer and a music festival elsewhere. I am liberated, I was only a shadow of myself. A phantom, one of the living dead, a young girl out of a nameless hell.”
By then Western Sahara had changed. Morocco had spent many millions of dollars on infrastructure projects – though just a fraction of its earnings from selling the territory’s phosphate and fishing rights – while using subsidies and promises of jobs to entice tens of thousands of its citizens to move in. According to King Hassan, this was only fair; he told his people that Morocco had exercised authority over Western Sahara before Spanish colonisation in 1884 and that most Saharawis favoured integration. It was a lie. In 1975 the UN, which for more than a decade had been pushing Spain to hold a referendum on self-determination, sent a fact-finding mission to Western Sahara. It concluded that the Frente Popular de Liberación de Saguía el Hamra y Río de Oro, or Polisario Front, formed two years earlier, represented the most significant expression of Saharawi opinion, and that “the majority of the population within the Spanish Sahara was manifestly in favour of independence”.
Morocco, meanwhile, had taken its case to the International Court of Justice. But, in a 14-2 ruling, the court found that the evidence did “not support Morocco’s claim to have exercised territorial sovereignty over Western Sahara” before Spain arrived. A claim by Mauritania, made on similar grounds, was also rejected. Bizarrely, King Hassan interpreted the court’s decision as a victory, and the next day announced plans for the Green March. Spain, in political disarray with General Franco on his deathbed, capitulated to Moroccan pressure; within a month a deal was struck to allow the king and the Mauritanian government to divide the colony between themselves.
Today, there are about 200,000 people in Laayoune – nearly a tenfold increase since 1975 – and close to 400,000 across Western Sahara. Most are Moroccans. Many of the Saharawi activists I spoke to described this influx using the Middle East lexicon of “creating facts on the ground”. But a genial Moroccan who owned a car hire firm and who, after some persuading, drove me to see the port one day, saw himself filling an employment gap. “The problem with the Saharawis is that they are lazy,” he said. “They are like the Saudis who get poor people from Asia to do all their work for them. They just want money from the government, and then to sit at home.”
Staying at home was the only option for Haidar after her release, because Morocco had refused her a passport and banned her from going to university. After numerous appeals, she was finally allowed to study philosophy in Rabat – the location and course were of Morocco’s choosing. If the intention was to get Haidar to understand King Hassan’s point of view, it failed. She began to document human rights abuses against the increasingly frustrated Saharawis. The promised referendum had raised hopes for many that they would at last be reunited with relatives on the other side of the wall. But dubious attempts by King Hassan to classify more than 120,000 people living in Morocco as eligible Saharawi voters – and his decision to launch appeals after almost all were rejected by the UN referendum team – had stalled the process. In 1999, the year Hassan died and his son assumed the throne as Mohammed VI, patience snapped. First Saharawi students in Morocco launched small protests for better conditions, and then demonstrations spread to Laayoune. After a fortnight, the police moved in, beating and detaining hundreds.
The “first intifada” had begun. The taboo of public dissent had been broken for the first time since the occupation started. Six years later, when it became obvious that Mohammed had no intention of allowing the Saharawis a vote – autonomy is the best they can expect, he says – the second intifada erupted. Haidar, who by now had a young son and daughter, joined one of the demonstrations to show solidarity. A policeman attacked her with a truncheon. Blood streaming from her face, and with three broken ribs and a broken collarbone, she was rushed to hospital, where she was arrested.
As Haidar was telling me her story, Ali Salem Tamek, a stocky 36-year-old with a goatee, dressed in the traditional blue draa robe, arrived at the apartment. Tamek has been to prison several times and is famed for his hunger strikes, which, on one occasion, took him to the verge of death. A Moroccan magazine once put his face on the cover under the headline “Public enemy number one”.
Shot glasses of tea and plates of dates were passed around, and Tamek nodded as Haidar continued her story. She went on hunger strike for 52 days in Laayoune’s notorious Cárcel Negra (“black prison), losing 17 kilogrammes. Following pressure from the European Union and Amnesty International, she was released after seven months. “This time in jail was worse,” she said. “Before, I had no children. It was just for myself. I had no feeling of motherhood. Now the suffering was double.”
To escape the creeping paranoia of Laayoune – a stranger at a café had casually mentioned that he knew where I was staying a few hours after I arrived – I hired a car and driver to take me to Smara. The third-biggest city in Western Sahara and the only one of any size not on the coast, Smara was also the closest I was likely to come to the wall, about 30 miles away. Beyond the police post on the edge of Laayoune, we were in the open desert. After two hours we reached Smara, where we were stopped and questioned at two further checkpoints. The main street had a few cafés. Virtually all the customers were soldiers. There were several billboards of King Mohammed, and numerous riot vans parked on the roadside.
A policeman refused to give us permission to enter a poor and densely packed neighbourhood. “This is not a tourist town, it is a military area,” he said.
Back in Laayoune, I called Brahim Dahane, another activist and formerly one of the Disappeared. He told me to meet him outside a travel agency on a busy corner. When I reached there, I heard a voice behind me.
“It’s you?”
“Yes.”
“Follow me.”
His apartment was nearby. Dahane hurried inside and walked over to the window, pulling the curtain back slightly to look down the street. Just a few days earlier, one of his colleagues in the Association of Saharawi Victims of Human Rights Abuses had been arrested for meeting a delegation from the European Parliament, which, having been blocked by Morocco from visiting Western Sahara since 2005, had been allowed in to Laayoune for a half-day visit.
Dahane had opened a cybercafé at a prime location to serve as a kind of Saharawi cultural centre. But the police kept raiding it, customers stopped coming, and he was forced shut it down. Other activists had told me similar stories of harassment of anyone considered to have ideas of independence, no matter how young. While giving me a lift home late one night, Haidar pointed out a school that even had a permanent police presence to suppress any dissent. If people like her and Dahane were the second generation of Saharawis to strive for independence, there was now a third taking it on, spray-painting walls with the flag of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) – the state declared by the Polisario in 1976 – challenging teachers, shouting pro-independence slogans.
“We have a guarantee in our children,” said Mohamed Fadel Gaoudi, a former political prisoner who later invited me to his apartment for dinner with several others. “Kids of ten or 12 now participate in demonstrations, which we never did. They say that there is no alternative to self-determination.”
A note of dark humour drifted into the conversation. The Green March was the “Black March”, the UN the “United Nothing”: its mission in Western Sahara has an annual budget of $50m, but no mandate to monitor human rights. But when, at midnight, Haidar joined us, the mood lifted. I asked her if she had been tempted by offers of asylum in Europe. “I prefer to live in my home country, in effect in prison, but with dignity and determination. As long as Saharawis have not decided [their future] for themselves, we will not stop,” she said.
The next time I spoke to Haidar was by telephone many months later. She was on hunger strike at an airport in Lanzarote, Spain, having been expelled from Laayoune for refusing to state “Moroccan” as her nationality on the arrival form as she returned from United States, where she had been awarded the latest of several human rights prizes. Brahim Dahane and Ali Salem Tamek were in jail again in Morocco and facing a military tribunal, having been arrested with other Saharawi agitators after visiting the Polisario refugee camps in Algeria.
If Western Sahara has a tourist draw, it is Dakhla, which sits on a finger of land pointing into the sea two-thirds of the way down the coast. In 1976, as part of the agreement with Morocco and Spain, Mauritania took over the city, but after three years of Polisario attacks it withdrew and renounced its territorial claim. Morocco moved in, and by September 1985 it had extended the wall from the north to protect the city. I caught the bus there one morning. A few camper vans passed us on the road.
I was in Dakhla to meet a Saharawi civil servant whom, for his own safety, I’ll call Mustafa. I wanted to find out what life was like for somebody not actively involved in the struggle. We met on a side street near a busy plaza perfumed with the smell of flame-grilled camel sandwiches and drove to his apartment. We made small talk for a while, until his room-mate Abdallahi emerged from a bedroom with his girlfriend, who said hello and left. Abdallahi was Saharawi; she was Moroccan. Mustafa had waited for her to leave before speaking freely. “There are informers everywhere, guards, shopkeepers . . .” he said.
Mustafa had written a novel, which, if published, would be the first English-language novel written by a Saharawi, he said. I read the first few pages on his laptop; it was good, but it will never see print here. “Living in the occupied territories, when you are deprived of using the language that you want to give an opinion – not even a terrorist opinion – and to think freely, to write freely, you feel like you are living in internal exile,” he said. A few nights later we sat watching television: al-Jazeera was reporting on the conflict in Palestine. “At least Israel allows Palestinians to publish their own books in Israel,” Mustafa said. “It is better to be a Palestinian in Israel than a Saharawi here.”
To one side of a quadrangle lined with captured Moroccan tanks, armoured personnel carriers and cannon stood a set of heavy metal doors. Pulling them open, the curator of the Polisario military museum in south-western Algeria flipped a light switch to reveal a scale model of Western Sahara, with a string of red lights tracing the path of the wall. Malainin Lakhal, the secretary general of the Saharawi Journalists’ and Writers’ Union who was my guide in the camps, pointed to the southern section of the wall, bordering Mauritania. This was the least well-defended section and it was there that he had crossed from the occupied territories in early 2000.
“It was a very difficult decision,” he told me. “I had always been against people leaving the occupied territories to join the Polisario. I would say: ‘They don’t need you. They have fighters. We need you here.'”
He had been an independence activist since the early Nineties, working alongside Aminatou Haidar at times, and had already been jailed several times. Now the police were on his trail, forcing him to sleep in a different house every night. Besides his guilt at abandoning the cause within the occupied territories, there were personal relationships to consider. He had a steady girlfriend, and his father was getting old; Lakhal knew that if he left he might never see him again. His father sent him a message: “Whatever you decide, be a man about it.” With the note was a commando knife. Approaching the wall late at night, Lakhal could see an army post, but scrambled across undetected.
I had taken a more comfortable route from Western Sahara, flying north from Dakhla to Casablanca, east to Algiers, and finally south to Tindouf, where Lakhal was waiting for me in the chilly early hours. We drove past the Algerian military post on the edge of town, into the darkness of the desert and the Saharawi state-in-exile, with its own elected government, justice system, number plates (“SH”) and second language, Spanish having outstripped the French used in the rest of the Maghreb. In addition to the Liberated Zone, which runs along the eastern flank of Western Sahara, the Polisario administers four large refugee camps scattered over 100 square miles in Algeria. The camps are named after cities in the occupied territories – Laayoune, Smara, Dakhla and Awserd. We were heading for a fifth, much smaller, camp named Fevrero 27, after the day the SADR was founded by the Polisario.
My host family, a refugee couple with three young children, lived in a small house on a hillock. In the evenings I’d sit outside as the dropping sun turned into a gold coin that gave the western sky an aura of yellow, then orange, and finally, once it had slipped below the horizon, ivory white. The only sound was that of goats bleating in their pens.
One night Lakhal and I headed out in the darkness to the house of Mohammed Yeslem Beisat, the SADR’s minister of African affairs. Just over 40, he is one of the youngest of the top Polisario officials. Over a dinner of camel meat and couscous, Beisat told the story of how, at the age of seven, he came to the camps from Western Sahara. He and his brother had spent their holiday in the desert with relatives while their parents stayed in Laayoune. Amid the panic when Moroccan troops moved in, the young boys were swept up in the exodus to Algeria. They never saw their parentsagain. “It was a huge trauma. You are no longer the same person after that,” he said.
Even for a people used to living in the desert, the area around Tindouf is harsh; there are fierce sandstorms and little vegetation. Summertime temperatures are as high as 50°C and winter nights are harsh and cold. Food and water have to be trucked in by the Algerian government, whose support has allowed Morocco to claim to this day that the Polisario exists merely as a proxy for Algiers.
The Saharawi camps were clean and organised. The Polisario Front had adopted a socialist model, as much out of necessity as ideology. Everybody lived in the same-style tents and ate the same food. Livestock was owned communally. Tribal identities – the Saharawis are not a homogeneous group – were intentionally obscured. There was no money in circulation. Because virtually all the men were fighting on the front line, women ran the camps and played a leading role in society – rare in a Muslim country. Education, both for children and for adults, received priority. When the Spanish left Western Sahara the Saharawi literacy rate was under 10 per cent; in the camps it has risen to an estimated 90 per cent.
There were abuses, particularly against political dissenters who disagreed with the Polisario leadership, but few outside visitors to the camps left unimpressed.
By the time Beisat finished school the conflict was nearly over. He studied in Algiers before returning to the camps to work in the information ministry, the president’s office and then the referendum committee. That the vote has never happened is the fault not only of Morocco, Beisat said, but also the western powers. The African Union and 80 countries, most of them in the developing world, have recognised the SADR, though 25 of them have since frozen or severed relations under pressure from Rabat. By contrast, no country has formally accepted Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. Yet, despite the clear injustice and illegality of the occupation, Washington has refused to put pressure on Rabat to allow self-determination, because Morocco is an important ally in Islamic North Africa. France, which has large economic interests in Morocco, has proved even more one-sided, and the Spanish government fails to speak out for a people it betrayed.
“This problem in Western Sahara is not a Democratic Republic of Congo problem, with tribes and minerals,” Beisat said. “It is not a Palestinian problem of religion. It is a simple, crystal-clear decolonisation problem that could be sorted out with five hours of voting. This feeling of humiliation creates a beast inside you.”
One morning Lakhal and I drove east to Smara camp, where old artillery shells painted red and white served as traffic cones at the entrance. The refugees’ tents have been long been replaced by mud-brick houses with roofs of corrugated iron held down with rocks, and today the camps resemble desert towns rather than refugee settlements. The more than 100,000 camp residents are still reliant on food aid, but there is now a small cash economy. Mobile phones and internet links allow people to communicate with relatives in Western Sahara whom some have not seen for more than three decades – because of the wall.
For young children, the camps are not bad places to grow up, compared to other refugee sites. Schooling, which is free and compulsory, remains at a good standard, and thousands of children are hosted abroad each summer by Spanish families. The challenge comes after school. Though males are still required to do basic military training “as freedom fighters, not soldiers”, most are no longer retained in the army. But given that government jobs are scarce and low-paid, most young people must find other ways of earning a living and passing the time. Since the war ended in 1991, many thousands of Saharawi refugees have moved to Mauritania, northern Algeria or Spain – a process that the Polisario does not encourage but is unable to prevent. One of Lakhal’s colleagues, a twentysomething journalist who worked for the official Polisario magazine, told me that his mother, sister and brother all now lived in Spain. The brother travelled there on an official Polisario work trip and never returned.
“The young people will soon start to say that the Polisario can go to hell if nothing happens,” Lakhal told me. “The leaders know what war is. Normally it should bring a solution. But we have had no solution for almost 20 years. The society is boiling. The boys born in 1976 are now fathers. They don’t want to stay here. Can they suffocate their anger?”
After Lakhal crossed the wall he did 14 months’ military training in the Liberated Zone near a town named Tifariti. As I wanted to see the wall, he agreed to take me there. We left early in the morning and soon we were driving across flat desert gravel. After about 30 miles, we breached an unseen frontier, leaving Algeria for the Polisario-controlled section of Western Sahara.
Soon we saw the first nomads’ tents. During the winter months, hundreds of refugees leave the camps for the open desert, taking herds of camels and goats with them. Around mid-morning, at a place the Polisario calls the “Rincón”, where the wall makes a 90-degree turn west, I saw it for the first time – and Lakhal cursed. Rubbish strewn by soldiers piled up against the barbed wire in front of us. The wall was less imposing than I’d imagined – quite literally a barrier of sand – but the landmines and the sheer number of Moroccan troops ensured that it was perfectly effective.
We parked a short distance away. Our driver, a thin, mischievous man nicknamed “El Macho”, whose job during the war was operating a Katyusha rocket launcher, gathered sticks and made a fire. Lakhal cooked brunch: camel heart, kidney, liver and hump – a small, fatty piece of meat. It was late afternoon when we reached Tifariti, a tiny town with a few administrative offices and some bombed-out buildings. The landscape had changed; there were now craggy hills sprinkled with large boulders. At the top of one of the hills was the army command post, painted rust red; nearby was the wreckage of a downed Moroccan fighter jet. In the army mess was a poster of abuses in the occupied territories, including a 2005 picture of Aminatou Haidar with her face bloodied.
As Lakhal prepared tea, he spoke about the shortcomings of the Polisario’s attempt to persuade the international community to take its side. “The mistake is ours. Why is our representation in the UK just one or two people? We have one person in Australia; it’s a continent, not a country. Two people in New York and the UN and one in Washington. No one in China and one in Russia. But with us, you are talking mostly about nomads. We have centuries with our own system, an oral culture. The power of the world is still not understood here.”
He told me a story about travelling to South Africa in 2006 to act as in interpreter for Haidar, who had just been granted a Moroccan passport, allowing her to travel abroad for the first time. South Africa recognises the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, and so Lakhal could use his SADR passport. The journey required him to pass through Frankfurt, where police detained him. “They looked at my passport and said: ‘This is not a country.’ They took me to the police station. I asked if they had a world map, which they did, so I showed them Western Sahara on the map. But they said: “What is this SADR on the passport?’ So I asked them to go on to the African Union website so they could see we are a recognised country. They were so surprised.”
I asked Lakhal about his wife, Mariam, who works as a civil servant in Laayoune, and whom he married in Mauritania in 2007. He said he missed her and hoped he would see her again in a few months, perhaps in Algiers.
The following afternoon we drove to a Polisario military post, which consisted of a few simple barrack huts and a neat parade ground. A steady drip of soldiers filed into the reception room, wearing new uniforms and boots. Finally the commander arrived. Trained in Cuba, Habuha Braica was the Polisario’s top artillery man, Lakhal said. Braica took us outside to view the four howitzer cannon that stood in a row next to two flatbed trucks used to move them around. There had been no fighting for more than 17 years, yet Braica said that his men remained on constant alert.
On my last night in the camps, Lakhal and I walked to the modest residence of Mohammed Abdelaziz, secretary general of the Polisario and president of the SADR since 1976. We knocked on the gate, which was opened by Abdelaziz’s wife, Khadija Hamdi, who is also the minister for culture. She led us to a long dining room with pale blue walls, blue couches and a table covered by a blue plastic tablecloth decorated with flowers.
Two Spanish women, old friends of the Polisario, soon joined us, along with the Polisario representative in Galicia.
Abdelaziz strode in a little while later, barefoot, a solidly built man in a flowing blue robe. He introduced himself to each of us boisterously. One of the Spanish women was called America. “So, America, do you speak English?” he asked.
“No.”
He laughed loudly, and so did she. I asked about the possibility of a new war. The last Polisario Congress, in December 2007, had covered that topic, the president said. The decision to resume war was made; it is only the timing that needs to be decided. “Of course we don’t want war.”
Yet Abdelaziz was not despondent. “Morocco is not sitting comfortably,” he said. “It is still living the same military situation as in 1991. With this long wall, all these soldiers are paid double salaries. That’s very expensive for a country like Morocco.”
He said he saw hope in Barack Obama and a new US foreign policy, and in the economic downturn, too, which could only make things more difficult for Morocco. “Maybe it will take a long time, but in the end the Saharawi people will prevail, as [the people did] in South Africa, Namibia and East Timor.”
Food was being brought out; salad, camel, chips, chicken, bread, a kind of desert mushroom, fruit. Abdelaziz kept putting more food on his guests’ plates. “Eat, America,” he implored the Spanish woman.
After dinner I walked back to my host family’s house. I thought about Abdelaziz’s cheerfulness and measured words. The refugees have been robbed of their independence for 19 years since the 1991 ceasefire, but, because there is no fighting, the outside world seems not to care. There seemed to be no glimmer of a satisfactory resolution at the time of my visit, and there has been none since. Yet many people in the Polisario camps believed that, in their president’s words, in the end the Saharawi people will prevail, as happened in South Africa, Namibia and East Timor.
Perhaps the refugees’ faith had something to do with the paradox of the wall. They live in exile but at least they have a kind of freedom. On the other side of the wall, in Western Sahara, their relatives remain prisoners in their own homeland. Today, Aminatou Haidar, who was eventually allowed back home after 32 days on hunger strike in Lanzarote, is still under constant surveillance in Laayoune. And Brahim Dahane and Ali Salem Tamek have been in jail for many months.
Xan Rice is a contributing writer for the New Statesman.
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