Malainin says. I take olive green and the shopkeeper measures out a couple of metres. Malainin drapes one end of the cloth over my head, pulls it tightly over my chin and wraps my head with the rest. “You can pull it over your mouth when the wind blows,” he says, tugging on the flap of fabric beneath my chin. He buys a black litham for himself. “I am always losing my turbans.” Then Malainin asks me what I want to do in the camps. “I want to see the Wall,” I say. The world’s walls are supposed to be coming down. We speak of globalization, international markets and global villages. Barriers to trade keep falling, and it is now possible to communicate instantly from nearly anywhere in the world. But just as these virtual walls come down, real walls rise. In 2003, Israel built a cement barrier around the West Bank. The United States flirts with a wall along the Mexican frontier and turned Baghdad into a labyrinth of vertical concrete. India is building fences along its borders with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma. Economics and electronics may link us, but we are increasingly divided by bricks, barbed wire and steel.
M
alainin was an agitator for Saharawi independence and known to Moroccan police in El Aaiún, the largest city in the “occupied zone.” He endured two months in prison in 1992, then spent the next few years working as
a human rights activist collecting information on Moroccan abuses of the Saharawi people. The Moroccans arrested and interrogated Malainin many times. The situation in the region intensified. In the wake of mass arrests and the “disappearances” of known activists, Malainin was forced underground in his own hometown. The Saharawis had been battling the Moroccans for independence since the “Green March” of 1975, when King Hassan marched 350,000 volunteers into the Western Sahara and claimed the area for Morocco. The region was part of the Spanish Sahara at the time, but the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was dying in hospital and had little energy to resist. The U.N. insisted that the Saharawi people be allowed a referendum on sovereignty, but Generalissimo Franco signed a secret document that divided the Spanish Sahara territory between Morocco and Mauritania. The Sahawari resistance, known as the Polisario, declared war. They easily pushed the Mauritanians back to their border in the south. Then, although the Moroccan troops outgunned and vastly outnumbered the Saharawi soldiers, the Polisario troops circled and destroyed the Moroccan units one by one in daring guerrilla operations. The Moroccans were forced to change their tactics. With the help of France, Israel and the United States, Morocco devised a new strategy based on desert walls, or berms. Each time they
photo: moroccan soldiers on the wall, marcello di cintio
“YOU ARE A R E FU GE E . T H E Y HAVE A COUNTRY. YOU D O NOT.”
Fall 2009 • G E IST 74 • Page 55