Sahara ‘wall of shame’ separates families
tindouf (Algeria) — It has been dubbed the world’s oldest functioning security barrier, but is also called a “wall of shame” by Western Sahara residents and leaders who want independence from Morocco.
“I was raised behind the wall and my children were born in its shadow,” says Anzouga Mohamed Ahmed, one of around 165,000 Sahrawis living in camps in neighbouring Algeria.
Draped in the traditional fourmetre-long “melhfa” cloth seen by many as a symbol of Sahrawi culture, the 36-year-old says she has lost hope of returning to Western Sahara.
The Algeria-backed Polisario Front seeking independence for the former Spanish colony controls the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic on one side of the security wall that snakes through the desert.
Morocco fought the Polisario from 1975 to 1991, and insists the Western Sahara is an integral part of its kingdom, despite UN resolutions calling for a referendum on self-administration for the territory.
Between 1980 and 1987, Morocco built six mostly sand barriers some 2,700km long around the 90 per cent of the Western Sahara that it controls. The berm cuts across El Mehbes, a vast ochre desert marked by the green of acacia shrubs and the white of a sparkling salt lake.
Barbed wire, trenches and minefields surround it, and Moroccan soldiers can be seen on the other side. “It’s one of the longest walls in the world and it has tightly sealed off Western Sahara,” says Aziz Haidar, who heads a local group of Sahrawi victims of mine explosions.
Polisario chief Brahim Ghali calls it a “wall of shame that shares one land but separates families”.
Zghela, 45, has family on the other side that her 14-year-old son has never seen.
She recently took him on a threehour trek from Tindouf across the desert to show him the wall “behind which his family lives”.
Many Sahrawis say that just being near the wall feels like they are closer to their relatives.
But some have actually gone to the other side, like 66-year-old Demaha Labchi. Between 2004 and 2014 the UN refugee agency UNHCR organised more than 20,000 family visits across the wall. — AFP