The SAHARAWI
50 Years in Exile
By Dr Tom Corcoran.
Published by ETHNOMAD
2025 Marks 50 years of life deep in the Sahara, on the wrong side of the world's longest wall
"Behind the Sahara's Great Divide:
The Saharawi's Fight for Freedom"
The camel was slaughtered shortly before sunset.
In a place where food is scarce and every resource is carefully rationed, it was an extraordinary gesture. The animal had been prepared for a gathering in the Saharawi refugee camps near Tindouf in the Algerian Sahara. Word had spread quickly through the settlement. Guests had arrived.
We sat in a large tent on low cushions as plates of meat and rice were carried in. Tradition dictates that the men eat first. Yet as the meal began, something unusual became clear. The men took very little. After a few quiet minutes, the best portions were quietly sent back out of the tent to neighbouring households.
Later, when most people had eaten, several women entered and took their places around the low table. They began speaking about the sea.
Many of them had never seen it.
Their families had once lived along the Atlantic coast of Western Sahara, where generations of Saharawi fishermen worked some of the richest fishing waters in the eastern Atlantic. But for nearly half a century, those shores have been out of reach, separated by war, politics, and a massive military barrier that cuts across the Sahara.
Here in the refugee camps, the ocean survives largely in memory.
The story of the Saharawi people is one of the longest unresolved struggles for self-determination in the modern world.
Western Sahara was once a Spanish colony. When Spain withdrew in 1975, Morocco moved quickly to assert control over the territory. The Saharawi liberation movement, led by the Polisario Front, declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and began an armed struggle for independence. During the conflict, large numbers of Saharawi civilians fled eastward across the desert, seeking refuge in the harsh and remote lands of southwestern Algeria.
By the early 1980s, Morocco had constructed a vast defensive barrier across the desert, effectively separating many Saharawi from the lands they had traditionally inhabited. Known as the Berm, the structure stretches more than 2,700 kilometres across Western Sahara. Reinforced with watchtowers, radar systems and one of the densest concentrations of landmines on Earth, it remains one of the longest continuous military barriers ever built.
To the west lies territory controlled by Morocco. To the east are areas administered by the Polisario Front and, beyond them, the refugee camps in Algeria where much of the Saharawi population has lived in exile for nearly five decades.
The wall has divided families, communities and traditional grazing lands across a landscape that nomadic peoples once crossed freely.
Western Sahara on the Atlantic edge of North Africa. Claimed by Morocco since Spain withdrew in 1975, the territory remains one of the world’s longest unresolved political disputes, with tens of thousands of Saharawi people still living in refugee camps across the border in Algeria.
I first encountered the Saharawi story in 2004 during a documentary film course in London. A young woman in the programme spoke about her homeland and her ambition to tell her people's story.
A year later, I had the opportunity to travel there myself.
Alongside a small group from Ireland, I boarded a flight to Tindouf, a remote town in southwestern Algeria. The plane crossed the Mediterranean in darkness. When dawn broke, the desert appeared beneath us.
From the air, the Sahara seemed endless. A pale expanse of sand and stone stretching to the horizon.
At the airport, we were greeted by a young translator named Mohammad Saleh. He spoke English, Arabic, French and Spanish with ease. His ambition was to become a journalist and document the story of his people.
Over the following days, Saleh guided us through a society built almost entirely in exile. The six of us shared space in his family’s tent, sleeping and eating together as guests of his household. Despite the scarcity of food in the camps, his family prepared generous meals, and neighbours quietly contributed what they could from their own limited supplies. In a place defined by hardship, hospitality remained a deeply held tradition.
Spread across the barren plains near Tindouf are four main Saharawi camps. Each is named after towns in Western Sahara. El Aaiun, Smara, Awserd and Dakhla. The names preserve a connection to places many residents have either never seen or have not seen for as long as five decades.
At first glance, the camps appear fragile. Rows of canvas tents stand alongside simple mud structures built to withstand the desert winds.
But beneath this modest appearance lies a remarkably organised society.
Each camp operates through elected councils and neighbourhood committees. Food distribution, education, health care, and local administration are largely managed by the Saharawi themselves, with most systems developed, managed, and maintained by women.
A Saharawi woman in the refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria. For nearly five decades, women have sustained the social and political life of these desert settlements, organising food distribution, education, and neighbourhood councils while an entire nation waits in exile for the chance to return home.
Women play a central role.
During the years of war, many men fought on the front lines. Women assumed responsibility for running much of the daily life of the camps, and they continue to play a prominent role in governance and social organisation.
In neighbourhood courtyards, they organise literacy programmes, distribute aid supplies and maintain cultural traditions that stretch back generations.
One community leader we met, Aisha, coordinated weaving groups where older women taught traditional techniques to younger members of the camp. These gatherings were not simply workshops. They were places where stories, songs and memories moved quietly between generations.
Conditions in the camps are severe.
Summer temperatures regularly exceed 50 degrees Celsius. Water is scarce, and economic opportunities are extremely limited. Most food arrives through international humanitarian assistance.
Daily meals revolve around lentils, rice, couscous and pasta supplied by the World Food Programme. Oil, sugar and fortified flour form the backbone of most diets. Canned fish and legumes appear when supplies allow.
Yet even in this harsh environment, people experiment with ways to grow food. Small gardens appear in sheltered corners where residents attempt to create microclimates using shade structures and water-retaining soil treatments. A few hardy vegetables manage to survive in the desert heat.
In the evenings, life returns to the open air.
During the summer months, it becomes difficult to move during the heat of the day. The ground absorbs the sun’s energy and radiates it back long after sunset.
“Sometimes the road becomes hot enough to soften the tyres on cars, and the stones stick to the partly melted rubber”, Mohammad Saleh explained.
Once the sun dips below the horizon, people come outside to cool off and catch whatever breeze the desert night might offer. Many of the younger Saharawi walk toward the small hills surrounding the camps, where the air moves a little more freely. These higher points are also among the few places where a mobile signal can sometimes be found, and where young couples quietly meet in the evening air.
Saharawi refugee camp near Tindouf in southwestern Algeria. Established in the mid-1970s after the conflict over Western Sahara, these desert settlements have grown into organised communities where tens of thousands of Saharawi people have built a society in exile while waiting for the chance to return to their homeland.
Education has always been one of the most important pillars of Saharawi society.
Schools operate throughout the camps, and many young Saharawi receive scholarships to study abroad in countries such as Cuba, Algeria and Spain. Like several other doctors and nurses we met, Fatima El Mahdi, studied medicine in Cuba before returning to work in the camps as a paediatrician.
"While their medical equipment and resources are limited," she explained, "the staff are second to none and could easily slip into any country's health care system, but they choose to return."
This pattern repeats itself across the community.
Young Saharawi leave to study, but most will return.
Doctors, engineers, teachers, and lawyers return to serve the society that raised them. The expectation of return is deeply embedded in Saharawi identity. Exile is seen as temporary, even if it has lasted decades.
Culture remains one of the most powerful forces holding the community together.
Music and poetry fill the camps during celebrations and gatherings. The rhythms of traditional Saharawi music carry across the desert at night.
Instruments such as the tidinit, a four-stringed lute, accompany sung poetry. Women often play the tbal, a large drum used during weddings and festivals. Much of this music follows the traditions of Haul, a desert-blues style that blends Arab-Berber scales with West African rhythms.
Songs often speak of exile, longing and resistance.
No voice carried these themes more powerfully than Mariem Hassan's. Born in Western Sahara in 1958, Hassan became an international symbol of Saharawi identity. Her music carried the grief of displacement and the determination of a people who refused to disappear.
Even in exile, her songs continue to echo through the camps.
Mariem Hassan, often called the voice of the Saharawi people, used music to carry the story of exile and resistance to international audiences. Born in Western Sahara and later living in the refugee camps near Tindouf, her songs became an enduring expression of identity, memory, and the struggle for self determination.
At the core of the Saharawi displacement lies a combination of political power, economic interests, and international silence.
At first glance, Western Sahara appears to be little more than a vast and empty desert. Yet beneath its sands lie some of the world's largest phosphate reserves, a mineral essential to modern agriculture. The Bou Craa mine alone contains enormous deposits that feed global fertiliser production, supplying industrial farming systems far beyond the Sahara.
Just offshore, the cold currents of the Canary Current create one of the richest fishing zones in the eastern Atlantic. For decades, foreign fleets, including vessels operating under European Union agreements, have fished these waters. The catch supplies supermarkets across Europe while the people whose coastline once sustained them remain in exile.
These economic activities continue despite the unresolved status of the territory under international law. The United Nations still considers Western Sahara a non-self-governing territory whose people have yet to exercise their right to self-determination.
Meanwhile, companies and institutions across the world operate as if the dispute does not exist. Aircraft bring tourists to the coastal city of Dakhla. Phosphate from Western Sahara enters global commodity chains. Fishing licences are issued for waters whose legal status remains contested.
The result is a quiet paradox. The resources of Western Sahara circulate through global markets while more than two hundred thousand Saharawi continue to live in refugee camps across the border in Algeria.
The region also plays a broader role in the planetary system. Each year, vast plumes of Saharan dust rise into the atmosphere and drift westward across the Atlantic. Carried by high altitude winds, these mineral-rich particles fertilise marine ecosystems and help replenish the soils of the Amazon rainforest.
What appears from a distance to be an empty desert is in fact deeply woven into global ecological and economic systems. And within that system lies a long unresolved question about land, resources, and the rights of the people who once moved freely across this landscape.
For governments, corporations, and distant markets, Western Sahara often appears primarily as territory, resource, and strategic geography. But for the Saharawi, it is something far more fundamental. It is the homeland, memory, language, and the inheritance of generations who crossed these lands long before modern borders were drawn.
Nearly fifty years have now passed since many Saharawi families left their homeland. An entire generation has grown up in exile. And yet the idea of return remains central to Saharawi identity.
In conversations across the camps, people spoke about the towns their parents once knew. The grazing lands that their grandparents crossed with camel caravans. The Atlantic coast, where fishermen once launched their boats into waters that many younger Saharawi have never seen.
The camps are not understood as a permanent home.
They are a waiting place.
On our final night, the desert wind moved quietly through the tents. Families gathered outside to escape the heat trapped inside the mud walls and tin roofs. Children played in the dust while elders spoke softly beneath the stars.
Beyond the camps, the Sahara stretched out in every direction.
Somewhere far to the west, beyond thousands of kilometres of desert and a heavily fortified wall, lies the homeland many of them still expect to see again, or to discover beyond the stories of their parents and grandparents.
For the Saharawi people, exile has now lasted half a century. An entire generation has grown up in the refugee camps of the Algerian desert, far from the Atlantic coast and grazing lands their families once crossed with camel caravans.
Beyond the camps, a heavily fortified wall stretches more than 2,700 kilometres across their homeland, surrounded by millions of landmines and watchtowers.
For much of the world, the conflict over Western Sahara remains distant and largely unseen or unknown.
But for the Saharawi, it is not history.
It is daily life, it is the extremes of human endurance.
And each year that passes in the desert raises the same quiet question that echoes across the world's forgotten refugee camps.
How long can people wait to return home?
The Berm, a vast military barrier built by Morocco during the 1980s, stretches more than 2,700 kilometres across Western Sahara. Reinforced with watchtowers, radar systems, and millions of landmines, the wall divides the territory and separates many Saharawi families from the lands they once travelled freely across.
Rohingya People And the Meaning of Belonging
The Saharawi are not alone.
In Bangladesh, nearly one million Rohingya refugees now live in camps after fleeing violence in Myanmar. Their story is another chapter in the global struggle for land, identity and belonging.