Everything was smooth, with the bus making stops every 90 minutes for 90 minutes until right before getting to Laayoune.
Laayoune is the capital of
Western Sahara. There I ran into the first of six police checkpoints.
After 14 hours on the bus, I had learned to ignore the stops, only this time I was the sole reason for the stop.
The soldier poked my shoulder rudely, waking me up and demanding my passport.
He asked me for the essentials, name, date of birth, nationality, and profession, and I felt terrible for holding up the whole bus.
An hour and change later, we got stopped again.
This time the soldier made me go down to his little office by the road in the middle of fucking nowhere, and took even longer in getting my info.
Afterwards, the bus driver advised me to write down all of my relevant information on scraps of paper I could hand out to the soldiers as they stopped me.
I thought the whole thing was so silly.
The dudes were copying my information in the most random places. One dude wrote it in his planner, another on the back of some other document he had, and the others accepted my scraps with some recopying it and others just taking it as is.
Why don’t they just have a form you can fill out?
Well, what’s all the fuss about?
I was in Western Sahara which is claimed and occupied by
Morocco as part of its own territory, while the Saharawis assert that they are an independent nation oppressed by
Morocco.
Western Sahara was for centuries part of
Morocco’s empire, but it didn’t really exist as a formal political entity (as always in
Africa) until colonialism.
The French and Spanish divided
Morocco between themselves, with the French taking the tastier morsels and leaving
Spain with the scraps: the mountains in the north by the Spanish border and a large chunk of desert in the south that the Spanish renamed Rio de Orio (
Gold River) even though there was no water or gold.
Although
Morocco negotiated its independence from
France in 1956,
Spain resisted the tide of colonization and held onto
Western Sahara until Franco’s death in 1975.
The UN was supposed to administer a plebiscite to decide whether Western Sahara would be independent or join
Morocco.
King Hassan II of
Morocco though interrupted the vote (maybe forever) when he ordered the “Green March” where 350,000 Moroccans marched down into the desert to claim
Western Sahara as part of a historical “Greater Morocco.”
Really the King just understood the value of nationalism and possible foreign war in distracting people from more urgent domestic concerns, and also the value of the phosphate deposits in
Western Sahara.
Mauritania was supposed to get a slice too, but quickly withdrew after a new Algerian-backed armed independence movement, POLISARIO arose and forced them to retreat.
POLISARIO warred with the Moroccan government until a ceasefire in the 1991, although hostilities never completely ended.
The UN has a highly visible presence in Western Sahara and they are still supposed to organize a vote on
Western Sahara’s political future but there are disputes as to who is going to be allowed to vote since many Moroccans have moved in encouraged by the Moroccan governments investments and tax exemptions.
Most likely Western Sahara will remain part of
Morocco and the
Saharawis yet another nation without a state.
Again, all this meant for me was having to be woken up by soldiers several times who just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t an investigative journalist going to meet the rebels.
I just wondered why anyone would fight over this territory. I mean, honestly, it’s the desert.
There is literally nothing.
I didn’t even see the tall dunes of fine yellow sand that is burned into the Western imaginary, rather it was all dull looking, rocky scrubland.
Not very romantic at all, but still if the Saharawis want it that bad I think they have put it up with it long enough to deserve to call it whatever they want and govern themselves however they wish.
