After the Great Wall of China, the second-longest wall in the world is in the Sahara. Around the 1,700-mile sand-and-stone wall runs a belt of more than 10 million landmines, believed to make up one of the densest minefields in the world. It cleaves Western Sahara in two.
To the west is the Atlantic coastline, the seaside oasis city of Laayoune, rich fisheries, and streams of white phosphate rock carried there from the mines by the largest conveyor belt in the world. Since 1975, this side has been under Moroccan occupation. A 15-acre Moroccan flag draped in 2010 across an empty square in Dakhla, a city in this occupied territory, makes that country’s claim clear.
To the east is desert — liberated territory controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. It is from this side that militants of the Libya- and Algeria-backed Sahrawi independence movement Polisario waged an artillery-heavy guerilla war from 1975 until a ceasefire in 1991, when the Moroccan king promised the people of Sahara a referendum. Today, Sahrawis are still waiting to cast their vote, in refugee camps in the Algerian desert, in exile, and in occupied territory. It is on the eastern side of the wall that Sahrawis gather annually to demand that the wall come down, and that what lies behind it be returned to Sahrawis.
Morocco broke the ceasefire in 2020 — which is to say that a war for independence in Africa’s last colony is taking place at present, unbeknownst to much of the world. The political and public space of occupied Western Sahara is tightly controlled by Morocco, and while the United Nations mission set up decades ago to oversee the pending referendum is still there, thanks to France’s veto power in the UN Security Council, it is the only UN peacekeeping mission since 1978 that lacks a human rights mandate. This impotence, plus a total media ban since 1975, has effectively given Moroccan police, military, and settlers free reign over Sahrawi life in occupied Western Sahara.
Last year, human rights activists Benjamin Ladraa and Sanna Ghotbi quit their jobs and, capitalizing on the strength of their Swedish passports, embarked on a cycling tour longer than the circumference of the equator, through 35 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa — for the sole purpose of raising awareness about Western Sahara.
Ladraa’s first trip to occupied Western Sahara was in 2019; he passed through 10 military checkpoints and found himself followed by secret police in the city. One day while his Sahrawi friend was driving him, they were followed by almost a dozen vehicles. Their escape was like a Hollywood car chase; they called more Sahrawis to join in the drive, cutting off the Moroccan security personnel, and Ladraa switched into different cars. At a safehouse, Ladraa filmed interviews with Sahrawis, many of whom were former political prisoners. Ladraa asked them if they would risk arrest for speaking on such a topic. “Of course,” Ladraa remembers them saying. “Our life here is a prison.”
Ghotbi visited Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria for the first time in January 2022, after the camps reopened to international visitors. (The pandemic had crippled the camp’s already-frail healthcare facilities.) Ghotbi, who is Kurdish and whose parents have not returned to the Kurdish region of Iran for 40 years, related to those Sahrawis under the age of 50 who had never seen their home country, whose heritage existed in the memories of their parents and grandparents.
Ladraa and Ghotbi’s particular configuration of solidarity — connecting, both in conversation and in trajectory the parallel struggles of occupied territories globally — piqued my interest. I reached out to them when they were in Fukushima, on a slower stretch of the trip while Ghotbi recovers from an injury. At the time of our call, Ladraa had been whisked away to speak to a Japanese journalist and later shared that he’d been invited by his host to visit a family that cultivates the bonsai trees of Kyoto’s imperial garden; the bonsai experts shared their trees, and Ladraa shared the story of Western Sahara. In the meantime, Ghotbi spoke to me about their 25,000-mile Bike4WesternSahara tour.
— April Zhu for Guernica
Guernica: Though Western Sahara may appear to be in perpetual stasis, locked in stalemate, there have been significant political developments in the last three years. Could you speak about them?
Ghotbi: There has been a ceasefire for about 30 years between Morocco and the Polisario, but in 2020, Morocco began building a road in one of the demilitarized zones. A group of Sahrawis protested this road, making a protest camp in tents where it was going to be built. Morocco responded with their military. They were pretty violent and arrested a lot of the Sahrawis who were protesting — and that restarted the war. In the past few years, dozens of civilians have died. Even Algerian and Mauritanian civilians have been killed by drones, bought from China and Israel, that Morocco flies along the wall. The nomadic Sahrawis who used to live on the unoccupied side of the wall have had to move into the refugee camps.
The second thing that happened is the 2020 Abraham Accords, the deal that the Trump Administration made in an attempt to normalize relations between Israel and many Arab nations, including Morocco. Basically they made the Moroccan government agree to recognize Israel’s occupation of Palestine in exchange for the US and Israel recognizing Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara. No one had done that before. About 80 countries recognize Western Sahara’s territorial integrity as a country, but the US became the first country to erase Western Sahara from its official map, to start teaching children that this is Moroccan Sahara. Israel recently became the second country to do that.
Guernica: Why isn’t there more international awareness of Western Sahara?
Ghotbi: One of the reasons people don’t know about Western Sahara is there are no international press offices there, and no major international presence except the UN mission, which is pretty useless. The occupied territory has never been open to journalists. Journalists can only go there if they manage to sneak in and not show their press credentials.
In occupied Western Sahara, there are citizen journalists and groups against human rights violations. The situation for them is very difficult because, if they hold up a camera or phone trying to film when Moroccan soldiers are beating Sahrawis, their cameras and phones are confiscated and they’re jailed. So they’ve had to develop skills like climbing on rooftops and lying there. They call themselves “snipers” — though obviously with cameras rather than guns. It’s unimaginable being in that situation but that’s the only way we’re getting reports from the occupied territories.
There are still a lot of occupations globally that people don’t know and don’t care about, but when it comes to Sahrawis, one thing is their population is quite small. There are only half a million Sahrawis. When you look at exiled communities, Palestinians, for example, are in so many countries — and that’s important because meeting people is the first step of sympathy — but people don’t meet Sahrawis because most of them live in the camps or the occupied territories. The few Sahrawi people who live outside of Western Sahara are usually in Spain or France.
And then there is the fact that Western Sahara is in Africa. It’s horrible, but I really feel that people outside of Africa don’t care about Africa. And of course the Moroccan lobby is very strong, pressuring countries not to talk about Western Sahara. One example is the corruption scandal that happened in the European Union recently where an Italian politician received bribes from Moroccans. It was quite a big news story, at least in Europe, but they never mentioned in the news that part of the bribes was about [not speaking on] Western Sahara.
Guernica: Why enact solidarity in such a physical way, cycling around the world? Why not just a series of webinars?
Ghotbi: Both of us have been human rights activists for a long time, and when you just have a protest in your own city, maybe fifty people come; it’s not that special, and it doesn’t leave an impact. What we felt like Western Sahara needs is attention, because it’s surprising how little people know about it. I studied global studies at university; the place was never mentioned. We were at an academic convention recently about decolonization; no one there knew about Western Sahara. I’ve been to the refugee camps and met Sahrawi people, and they all say “We need people to know about us!” But we’re not Sahrawis, so we felt like what we could offer was our time. We have pretty good passports compared to Sahrawis, so we’re able to go and physically meet people. And online meetings just don’t have the same impact.
I also think sacrifice is important for getting people’s attention. It’s not really a sacrifice to protest in Sweden. But leaving your country for two-and-a-half years, leaving your family and friends . . . And everyone knows biking for two and a half years isn’t easy! They know that we’re struggling, so they’re curious: Why are you struggling? And why are you struggling for a country you’re not from? We use that to talk about Western Sahara. It opens a door for us. We’ve been able to talk to parliamentarians in other countries, to journalists, to people who wouldn’t care if we called them up on Zoom like, “Hey we’re Swedish . . . ” But now we’re coming to them, to their offices, directly on our bikes.
Guernica: The beauty of a world cycling tour, too, is that your trajectory connects communities who have their own experience of occupation and can offer solidarity in a meaningful, substantial way, no?
Ghotbi: Yes. I don’t know if you already knew but I’m Kurdish, my parents are Kurdish, so I naturally have an interest in the Kurdish movement. We actually biked through the Kurdish part of Turkey — though we didn’t have the flag on our bikes because we felt we had to be discreet since a lot of people we were meeting had been imprisoned by the Turkish state or were being followed by Turkish police and military. But we did have a lot of interesting conversations connecting their human rights work for Kurdish people to what’s happening in Western Sahara.
We find that, when we talk to people of other occupied groups, there are so many similarities. Occupiers usually use the same tactics, and one of those is erasing indigenous and occupied people’s culture. If Sahrawi children in occupied Western Sahara speak the Sahrawi dialect of Arabic, they are hit by their teachers. For Kurdish people, not being able to speak your language, being forced to take Turkish names, Iranian names, that has always been an issue.
Another tactic is total suppression of the political movement: not being allowed to have your flag, not being able to even speak the name of your country. A person in Kurdistan told us he named his daughter “Kurdistan” and got five years in prison for that. The actual words “Western Sahara” are illegal in Morocco and in occupied Western Sahara, so even Moroccan people can be imprisoned for saying “Western Sahara.” They have to call it Moroccan Sahara.
And of course a lot of colonizers and occupiers use settlers to replace the population. In occupied Western Sahara, Moroccan settlers outnumber Sahrawis now, and can harm Sahrawis without being punished — very similar to what’s happening in Palestine with Israeli settlers and Kurdish regions like Rojava, which is the Kurdish part of Syria.
We notice when we talk to people under occupation that they rarely know about each other. The Kurdish people we met didn’t know about Western Sahara, and I think a lot of Sahrawis don’t know much about Kurdish people. They know about Palestine because it’s the most well-known case, but there are a lot of occupations that are hidden from the world. Before you can even collaborate, before you start sharing experiences and strategies, the first step is just knowing about each other, that other communities like yours exist.
Guernica: That kind of solidarity work perhaps isn’t as common as it used to be, but you’ve come across many examples on your trip. Our mutual friend told me you found a Western Sahara solidarity group in Japan composed of some pretty badass elderly Japanese folks!
Ghotbi: It was surprising that there was such a well-organized solidarity group in Japan because it’s so far from Western Sahara! We really enjoyed meeting them because they’re seasoned, so to speak — they’re around 60 years old — and a lot of them used to be active, some of them for Palestine but a lot of them for East Timor, which was occupied [by Indonesia] the same year as Western Sahara. It’s so inspiring because a lot of them played a big role helping East Timor move toward independence. They talked about their experience trying to get people to care about East Timor, feeling frustrated year after year but still continuing to be part of the movement. Then, there was this moment. After struggling for so long, they told us, finally the moment when the world turned their eyes to East Timor happened — in large part because of footage from a massacre that had taken place there.
We also talked to South African activists who support Western Sahara. South Africa is one of the countries that recognizes Western Sahara, and they say international pressure and support was so important to freeing South Africa from the apartheid regime.
Right now we’re trying to map all the solidarity groups for Western Sahara around the world, so we’re contacting people in Botswana, in Nigeria . . . In Latin America there are a lot of groups; since a lot of Sahrawis are Spanish speakers, a lot of the solidarity work is in Spanish. There’s a big group in East Timor. When we were in Taiwan we managed to start a support group and we hope that they will be able to continue working without us.
Guernica: Most Sahrawis today live in the refugee camps in Algeria. Those who fled after the 1975 takeover have been there for almost 50 years. Can you tell me a bit about the camps?
Ghotbi: First, I’d say, for anyone who’s been to refugee camps, the Sahrawi ones are very different because, even though they’re in the desert and lack resources, they’re very much self-governed. The Algerian government lets them run the camps basically as their own exile government. They have elections every few years and elect presidents and ministers, they have their own laws, they have their own prisons, they have their own court system. The food that the UN gives them, they distribute by themselves. They run things very independently.
The refugee camps are the only place you can see true Sahrawi culture because they’re allowed to practice their customs, speak their language freely, form their own organizations, and live as Sahrawi people. Life in the camps is very political. If you go there and meet people you realize that a lot of Sahrawis living in the camps are heavily politicized. They know a lot about the world, even though the world doesn’t know about them.
But it is a refugee camp, and it is in the desert, 1,200 miles from the capital. The unemployment rate is over 90 percent. There aren’t a lot of economic opportunities because they are where they are, so they’re not able to produce and sell products. People generally don’t have money; the ones who do get remittances from relatives working in Europe. They can’t grow that much food in the camp, so they are dependent on humanitarian aid, which is increasingly limited: Last year, the World Food Programme cut food rations by 75 percent. A lot of Sahrawis have diseases — diabetes, malnutrition, anemia — because the food that they do get is emergency food for disasters, but they’ve been eating that for 50 years. They have their own hospitals but not enough equipment, not enough doctors. The schools are run by Sahrawis themselves but they don’t have enough teachers, so classrooms are overfilled.
One might ask, “Okay, so why stay there for 50 years?” A lot of Sahrawis say that “if all of us would move into Algerian cities and leave the camps, it’s almost like giving up. Staying in the camps is a form of protest. If we leave the camp then we’re saying, ‘Now we can’t return so let’s change our way of living and adapt to the fact that we’re never going back.’” Of course they don’t want to do that. They want to believe in returning home.