Booksmart Breakdown

Earlier this year, Freedom House gave Western Sahara a freedom rating of 4 out of 100. Say what you will about the metrics they use or any criticisms of their templates; a 4 out of 100 is pretty bleak. They assessed that the political rights of the people within Western Sahara were a -3 out of 40, and their civil liberties were 7 out of 60. To further illustrate what that means – Freedom House gave North Korea a 3 out of 100, with their political rights being 0 out of 40. It is of little surprise that these low numbers meant Western Sahara fell within the “Not Free” category of the world. This series is geared towards shedding some light on a 50-year conflict and the people who have fought in it. To do that, I need you to know why you should care about this vast desert land, a country called Morocco, and a historically nomadic people called the Sahrawi. 

Western Sahara is a disputed territory on the Northwestern African coast underneath Morocco. It also borders Algeria to the east and Mauritania to the south. It has 690 miles (1,110 km) of coastline, with the vast majority of the territory being desert. While it’s not a huge area (Western Sahara is roughly the size of Colorado or about half the size of Great Britain) – it is still one of the larger disputed territories in the world. It has been repeatedly called “Africa’s Last Colony.” Yet no one knows much about it. If you take nothing else from this series, I hope you will remember some of the following four points: 

Western Sahara is home to the longest active border wall and the second longest wall in the world called “the Berm,” which carves the territory in half. The largest wall is the Great Wall of China – which should hopefully surprise no one. It’s unclear how long the Berm is, but most estimates say it’s roughly 1700 miles (2700 KM), with much of the wall expanding North into Morocco between the Algerian and Moroccan border. 

To give some context, let’s compare the Berm to the US-Mexico border. On October 31^st, 2020, the BBC reported roughly 669 miles (1076.65 kilometers) of primary wall erected between the 1,954 mi (3,145 km) long US/Mexico border. In the case of Morocco and Western Sahara, the wall is mostly sand and ditches, but there is more than one way to make a wall strong. 

This brings me to my second point, Western Sahara contains millions of active landmines currently fortifying the border wall, with some even estimating that it is the longest minefield in the world. I’m not going to lie to you; finding concrete information about this area is HARD (possibly due to the media blackout that many Sahrawi claim Morocco has placed over the entire conflict), and I’m not sure how many mines there are. But what I can say for sure is what makes the Western Sahara wall so impregnable is the millions of mines planted beside it. Oh, and the roughly 120,000 soldiers that guard it.

According to Al Jazeera, at least 2,500 people have been wounded by landmines since they were installed, a thankfully low number considering the decades the mines have been active, which likely means the mines are more of a deterrent, albeit a very lasting one. This observation should also not diminish the fact that more than 2 thousand people have been harmed trying to protest, get into the Moroccan-controlled area, or get out. 

Point number three, this conflict has created an enormous refugee problem. In fact, from what I’ve been able to find, there are roughly the same number of Sahrawi living inside of Algeria as there are in Western Sahara, and many more Sahrawi refugees are residing in Mauritania and Spain. It is believed that many fled the fighting, Moroccan settlements or were exiled (more on all of these accusations later). Today, thousands of Sahrawi are born in the Algerian refugee camps, never knowing life inside Western Sahara and never meeting family living on the other side of the Moroccan-controlled wall. 

Finally, it must be said that the UN is in Western Sahara with a peacekeeping mission to ensure the ceasefire agreed upon in 1991 holds. The mission’s name is the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). However, it does not have a human rights component to its mission – something that many other missions have. The human rights component would allow for human rights tracking and reporting (something other international actors cannot easily do right now). Now why is this important? There have been numerous accusations of Moroccan crimes against the Sahrawi people, including torture, use of napalm, forced cultural appropriation, and police brutality, just to name a few. Having the UN there to either validate or disprove some of these claims would go a long way in helping unpack some of the complexity and uncertainty surrounding this dispute. 

The following article will discuss the ongoing conflict, its origins, and the uptick in violence seen in 2020. 

Major Updates Since Writing of Article

• Israel recognized Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara July, 17 2023

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