The Sahara Read online

  Since the 1969 military coup by a group including a young Captain Muammar al-Gaddafi, the lot of Saharan Libyans has not seen great improvement. This lack of progress contrasts with Gaddafi’s somewhat theatrical insistence on hosting meetings in a tent, which is meant to remind his guests - as if they would ever be allowed to forget - that he was born of humble Arab-Berber stock in a tent in the desert outside Sirte.

  One of the threats to his power that Gaddafi most feared was that from the desert-rooted Sanussi, of which King Idris was once the head, and which had previously fought against both Italian and British rule in the Libyan and Egyptian Sahara until after the First World War. Seeing the Sanussi as a potential unifying force against his authority, especially in their Fezzan heartland, Gaddafi not only tried to write out of history the vital role they played in the struggle for independence but also destroyed the shrine and tomb of the movement’s founder in the otherwise unimportant Berber oasis of] Jaghbub, near the border with Egypt.

  Although Egypt became an independent kingdom in 1922 in a declaration made by British rather than Egyptian authorities, it was really only after the “Free Officers” movement overthrew King Farouk in 1952 and declared a republic the next year that it became, more or less, the master of its domain, with Britain holding onto the Canal Zone until after the Suez Crisis of 1956. Throughout this period the Egyptian Sahara was spared the convulsions that affected the cities, and the urban elites responsible for pushing independence had little or no interest in the country’s desert dwellers: from the other side, the feeling was mutual. For both Egypt and the Sudan the Nile will always be the main artery of power and influence, and the further one travels west, away from its banks, the easier it is for politicians in the capitals to ignore the Saharans, as long as they remain nominally obedient.

  Independence was granted to Sudan on 1 January 1956 under the terms of a joint British Egyptian treaty. The year before, a civil war broke out between the Arab-orientated Muslim north and the African-looking, Animist and Christian south of the country, a fault line which has remained absolute since independence. Recognizing this division, a bold attempt to bring a halt to the seemingly never-ending civil war meant holding a referendum, in January 2011, which, depending on the results, allows the country to be divided in two. While a majority of southerners are certain to vote for secession, a peaceful division of the country is a far less likely outcome. Saharan portions of the Sudan have not been spared in this conflict.

  The Islamist government in Sudan’s capital has long attempted to enforce a vision of national unity across the country. However, Sudan, at the time of writing Africa’s largest country, is also one of the continent’s least homogeneous nations. Often employing proxy militias to carry out its mission, the government has presided over unrestricted violence, most infamously by the Janjaweed in Darfur, which has resulted in the mass rape, murder and dislocation of its own generally unarmed and innocent citizenry. Since 2003, when the then American Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to the Darfur conflict as a genocide, an estimated 400,000 have been killed in the region, with another two and a half million displaced. Many of these have fled into neighbouring Chad, which has resulted in increased tension between its capital N’Djamena and Khartoum. Those Saharan regions of Chad into which the Sudanese have flooded were barely able to support the existing population, let alone the influx of foreign refugees.

  Two months after Sudanese independence, following negotiations between French authorities and Sultan Mohammed V, Morocco too became fully sovereign, with the vast majority of Spanish-controlled territory likewise being handed back in April of the same year. Morocco had become a French protectorate in 1912, after the Treaty of Fez, which also granted Spain control over the country’s northern Rif and southern Saharan regions. The French and Spanish were most interested in the Atlantic and Mediterranean coastal regions, however, the remoter corners of the Sahara remaining a largely autonomous Berber-controlled zone. Since independence Moroccan troops have pushed into the Sahara beyond their borders - as the international community recognizes them - on two important occasions. The first of these wars lasted a matter of months; the second conflict rumbles on more than 35 years later.

  In 1963, after a number of border skirmishes, Moroccan forces invaded Algeria, focusing on the oasis towns and areas around Tindouf and Figuig, thus marking the start of what became known as the Sand War. Pressing a spurious claim to an imagined Greater Morocco - an argument which has also been employed in the on-going dispute over Western Sahara - Moroccan troops hoped to secure their land claims swiftly and without much opposition. They had not, however, reckoned on spirited resistance from the militarily capable Algerian army. After initially being forced into a stalemate, the Moroccans were soon forced back across the border, at which time they renounced all further claims to the area. Even so, the border between Morocco and Algeria remains closed to all traffic, and tensions, sometimes fierce, clearly still exist between the neighbours.

  Although Morocco has dropped claims to Tindouf, the town and surrounding area remains important in Morocco’s on-going territorial dispute because Tindouf is a major centre of operations for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro, better known by its Spanish acronym, Polisario, the most prominent organization that continues to press for independence for the Western Sahara.

  In 1975, when Spain announced it was going to relinquish control of what was Spanish Sahara, and furthermore was going to do so in something of a hurry, Spanish authorities promised a referendum on the colony’s future before reneging on this decision and signing a tri-partite agreement with Morocco and Mauritania. In this agreement Spain ignored the wishes of the local population by handing the territory - which by the fact of their withdrawal would appear not to be in their gift in the first place - to Morocco and Mauritania, both countries claiming certain historical ties to the region.

  Simultaneously, the Hague-based International Court of Justice sent a mission to Western Sahara to investigate the situation. Though they accepted that Morocco and Mauritania had enjoyed historical links to the area, these were not sufficiently strong to overrule the wishes of the local people. Not only did the indigenous Sahrawis have the right to self-determination, but they had also made it absolutely clear that they wanted nothing less than independence. The Moroccan response was to send troops into Western Sahara, followed a few days later by some 350,000 civilians in what they called the Green March. This marked the start of a lengthy, wholly unlawful colonization of Western Sahara with the long-term goal of skewing the local population figures so that in any future referendum the “local” population would overwhelmingly vote in favour of Morocco.

  Mauritania abandoned its claims to a portion of the Western Sahara in 1979, after a successful military campaign by the Polisario. Those areas from which Mauritanian forces withdrew were soon filled by Moroccan troops. Today most aid workers and archaeologists who wish to gain access to the unoccupied portion of the Western Sahara tend to do so via Tindouf

  Since the start of the conflict, Algeria has sided with the Sahrawis against the Kingdom of Morocco. One aspect of this support, and in spite of Moroccan protests, comes in the form of granting the Polisario the right to operate freely from Tindouf Nervous as the Algerians are of their neighbour becoming too powerful in the region, they view the continuing nuisance caused to Morocco by the Polisario as a useful counterbalance.

  Evidence of post-independence wars littering the desert

  An uneasy cease-fire has been in place between Polisario and Morocco since 1991, which in part has held because of the presence of a 2000 mile long earthwork berm, or earthen-work wall, illegally built and mined by the Moroccans. Morocco had learnt the efficacy of such defences when they employed the same tactics against Algeria in the Sand War. Although this Moroccan Wall, which is said to be patrolled by a greater number of troops than there are Sahrawi people, is maint
ained at great cost to Morocco’s economy, it also encompasses everything of worth in Western Sahara, not least the mines that have made Morocco the world’s number one exporter of phosphates. The area to the east of the wall covers only one third of the country’s full territorial mass. This area, unoccupied Western Sahara, is a very thinly populated, flat and largely featureless, resource-free desert. Had there been anything of worth there, one can be sure that someone else would have laid claim to it by now.

  The French Legacy

  The antithesis of the relatively peaceful withdrawal of European nations from their Saharan colonies, dependencies and protectorates was the French departure from Algeria and the story of this long and bloody war continues to haunt its politics today. When Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962, it did so only after an eight-year internecine war that was remarkable for its vicious and fratricidal nature. If the worst excesses of violence occurred primarily in the cities in the country’s north, in the Sahara itself there was more violence after independence during a power struggle in the mid-1960s that saw old allies turn on one another, with the Front of Socialist Forces trying, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the regime of President Ben Bella.

  Mass unemployment and a decline in energy prices in the mid-1980s saw a significant rise in support for Algerian Islamist parties, including the founding of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in 1989. Nationwide elections held in December 1991 gave the FIS clear majorities in virtually half of the country’s electoral districts. In January the panicked government declared the elections null and void and dissolved parliament. The Algerian civil war that lasted for the rest of the decade displayed gruesome echoes of the war of independence, with shocking massacres being committed by both pro-government and Islamist factions throughout the country. Approximately 100,000 Algerians were killed before the decade’s end, when Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected president. The official returns showed him receiving seventy per cent of votes cast, in spite of all other candidates pulling out in advance of the election because of claims of widespread fraud.

  Tunisia was also forced to fight the French for independence, and although a nationalist movement had been active for decades, the final rush to independence, complete with civil disturbance, was a relatively short two-year affair, which was never stricken with the levels of violence that characterized Algeria’s struggle. The result was warmer post-independence relations with France, as well as enhanced economic growth in Tunisia. Both before and after independence, the limited population that call the Tunisian Sahara home had little or no influence on national politics. In recent years the growth in adventure-style tourism has seen a somewhat larger degree of economic independence for those living in the Saharan south.

  The new government in Chad found itself in a situation similar to that of Sudan in 1956, with the country exhibiting a de facto division between a largely Muslim Saharan north and a Christian-Animist Sahelian south. Chad’s first president, François Tombalbaye, a southerner, soon betrayed his own prejudice against the north with a series of laws that led directly to the outbreak of a civil war in 1965, billed as pitting the loyalist south against a fractious Saharan north.

  The government first called upon French troops to help them fight against the well-organized forces of the National Liberation Front of Chad (FROLINAT), which sought to end the southern dominance of the country. Meeting with limited success against FROLINAT, Tombalbaye next allied himself with the Libyan regime of Colonel Gaddafi. Although this initially meant greater success against the rebels, in 1975 Tombalbaye was ousted in a coup, not that his removal from power by any means marked an end to the war.

  By the decade’s end, any central authority in Chad had completely disappeared between a dozen independent factions. A 1981 declaration that Chad and Libya would work towards full unification spread anger and despondency in equal measure, even if it also meant a temporary reconciliation between certain rival factions who were able to push Libyan forces back through Bornu and Ennedi, into the far north of the country, where they halted their retreat in the Aouzou Strip, a desolate but mineral rich band of land that runs through the Tibesti Mountains along the length of the Chadian-Libyan border. In early 1987 the last phase of the war took place. It became known as the Toyota War after the French-supplied hundreds of pick-up trucks to the Chadians, which they used to great effect both for swift mobility of military personnel and as carriers for antitank missiles. In spite of a ceasefire agreed later in the year, Libyan forces continued to occupy the Aouzou Strip until1994.

  Since then, relations between Chad and Libya have steadily improved. However, since 2005 Chad has instead found itself at war with its eastern neighbour. Chad declared that a state of war existed with Sudan because of that country’s raids into its territory. The root of this conflict is closely linked to the situation in Darfur, which has driven hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees into Chad since 2003.

  As part of French West Africa, Niger was controlled during the colonial period from Dakar, more than 1000 miles away. In the fifty years since independence the country has endured a depressingly predictable cycle of corruption and economic mismanagement and one coup after another. At the time of writing, the last coup, in February 2010, saw the establishment of yet another military junta, which like military dictatorships the world over has chosen to adopt a most populist-sounding moniker: Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy. Whether it lives up to this tide remains to be seen.

  The discovery of oil in the Tenere desert should have brought some fringe benefits to the country’s large Saharan north: it did not. In response to the almost total lack of development in the north and inequitable treatment of the country’s significant Tuareg population, an armed anti-government insurgency has developed. Fighting a guerrilla war, including the planting of large numbers of land mines, the Mouvement des Nigeriens pour la Justice (MNJ) has been effective in terms of retarding foreign oil and gas investment and almost completely halting Saharan tourism in the country.

  Mali declared its independence of the Mali Federation in August 1960. Since then, in common with the model seen in Niger, the country has been unable to demonstrate any meaningful development through a combination of economic woes, military coups and periodic debilitating droughts that have driven people out of both the desert and the Sahel.

  When Mauritania gained independence, it is estimated that ninety per cent of the population was nomadic, which made impossible the sort of centralized, one-party control sought by the authoritarian President Moktar Ould Daddah. Daddah’s attempts to impose his will on the country, moving it away from traditional lifestyles, created social tensions that continued even after he was ousted from power in a bloodless coup in 1978. The greater tension, however, was that of colour and culture that seems to afflict the whole of the Sahara, here dividing southern-black and northern-Moorish Mauritanians, with African-Arab prejudices exploited by both sides.

  Across the Saharan south, Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania all became independent of France in 1960. During their respective periods of colonial rule, none of these countries was encouraged to look to a future of self-rule, with the result that none of them was ready for the challenges to come. The almost indecent haste with which France retreated meant that the odds were very much against any of these newly independent states becoming viable democracies, at least in the short term. For the Saharan parts of these countries, the challenges were even greater, one might argue insurmountable. As if it were not bad enough that local populations have to live in such a climate without basic amenities like a reliable source of water, the fact that central government only sheds its indifference to their plight when such resources as oil and gas are discovered adds insult to injury. Regrettably, those benefits that one might expect from a country discovering large energy supplies have too often proved to be a curse. Yet this is not to say that the situation is static.

  With widespread concerns a
bout future oil and gas supplies, the Sahara is already receiving significant attention from interested parties keen to find suitable sites for the generation of alternative energy. Plans for harnessing solar energy are well advanced, with an estimate by one European consortium, Desertec, suggesting that an area of 6000 square miles of solar panels - roughly the size of Connecticut - would be sufficient to supply the energy needs of both North Africa and Europe. Desertec also reckons that 35,000 square miles of solar panels, roughly one per cent of the Sahara’s surface, could produce the same energy as all power plants operating around the world today, not that plans are in place for such an scheme. Although in the relatively early stages of development, even the most optimistic proponents of such grand schemes recognize that the biggest obstacle to their success is the necessity of cross-border cooperation, especially between nations that are hardly on the best of terms, Morocco and Algeria being the most obvious example. While the power of the sun is the Sahara’s most obvious and readily accessed asset, plans have also been drawn up for the development of large-scale wind farms, primarily in western parts of the desert but also off the coast of Morocco and Western Sahara.

  Overall, since independence regional experiments in democracy have not been successful. A dreary succession of civil and regional wars has taken the place of dialogue, corruption has supplanted accountability and dictators, whether suited or uniformed, use their nations’ wealth, police forces, security apparatus and bribery to ensure re-election with nothing less than 95 per cent of the popular vote, which they do without any apparent shame or embarrassment.