Solidarity Rising: “Sahrawis know a lot about the world, even though the world doesn’t know about them”
Benjamin Ladraa, left, and Sanna Ghotbi, right, co-founders of Solidarity Rising / Photo courtesy of Solidarity Rising 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,
