Transiting Western Sahara (selected pages)

  ,          !""##$  !  &-  .   % &''((()    )*%' '*+*   %/0* 1 ,* *           !" #$ %"# " # " & '() *+,&-)./0(0/--0( ,  2 *            !" #$ " ! %  & ! ' %( )  * )+ $!, !!  -.$/+    0!%%! %!0  ! )))! 0  % $ !%  & !10 $! 2& !+ 3%&% JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 2019, VOL. 20, NOS. 1–2, 17–38 https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2019.1609213 Transiting Western Sahara Benita Sampedro Vizcaya Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Western Sahara has recently been termed the last colony in the world and the largest prison in the world. This essay will attempt, by focusing on daily points of transit, to assess the ways in which the regional conflict that has unfolded there is negotiated from within, and to reckon with the pervasive failure of decolonial logic, through the prism of geographic border crossings. It will further assess how, through border management and movements, the relationship between Western Sahara, Morocco and Spain is constantly reconfigured by the conflating geopolitics of human circulation and human containment. The unresolved colonial conflict in Western Sahara cannot be disassociated from former Spanish colonial interventions and the current Spanish possessions of Ceuta and Melilla. Some of these legacies will be explored through the lenses of two video essay exercises by Ursula Biemann: Europlex (2003) and Sahara Chronicles (2006– 2009). Both projects engage in a visual theoretical analysis of the confluence of the politics and economics of mobility and migration, on the one hand, with contention and confinement on the other, as displayed in these territories. Europlex follows the trade routes and the daily border crossings and transactions between Morocco, the Spanish colonial strongholds of Ceuta and Melilla and the Straits of Gibraltar, as a metonymic passage between two continents. Sahara Chronicle follows various concurrent West African migration routes towards Europe stopping at pivotal sites of both passage and containment, including two heavily transited points at either end of Western Sahara: in the south, the Guantanamito migrant detention center of Nouadhibou in Mauritania and, in the north, the Cárcel Negra deportation prison in Laayoune. The two documentaries invite us to rethink patterns of migration and transit in relation to signifiers of the Spanish colonial presence in North Africa: Ceuta, Melilla and Western Sahara. Western Sahara; Ceuta; Melilla; Europlex; Sahara Chronicle This essay will attempt to relate a colonial and subsequently neocolonial border condition of intercontinental proportions to the pervasive failure of decolonial logic, while mapping some of the contours of the so-called Global Hispanophone through instances of historical border dynamics in transiting Western Sahara and other North African localities, namely, Ceuta and Melilla. It will do so through the geographic depiction of border crossings, and it will assess how, through the politics of mobility, border management and human CONTACT Benita Sampedro Vizcaya Benita.Sampedro@hofstra.edu © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 18 B. SAMPEDRO VIZCAYA and material movements, the relationship between Western Sahara, Morocco and Spain is constantly being renegotiated through the conflicting geodynamics of human circulation and human containment. I will work from the premise that, in relation to historical and political accountability, the unresolved postcolonial condition of the Western Saharan territories cannot be disassociated from former Spanish colonial interventions, or from the current Spanish possessions of Ceuta and Melilla. I will explore some of these legacies, and their interconnectedness, within the larger frame of migratory routes between West and Central Africa, the Maghrib and Europe, and will do so through the lenses of two video essay exercises by Ursula Biemann: Europlex (2003), and Sahara Chronicle (2006–2009). Biemann, a Zurichbased visual geographer, author of multiple installations and scholarly projects, is – as I am, here – invested in engaging with technologies of transfer, mobility and space as deployed at the Moroccan-Spanish borders. In both Europlex and Sahara Chronicle, she engages in a theoretical analysis addressing the confluence of the politics and economics of gender, mobility and migration, on the one hand, and with containment and confinement, on the other, in these territories. These two visual projects, although in a nonlinear and of course nonexclusionary way, are suitable for reflecting on late Francoist and postdictatorship articulations of decolonization, the nation-state and belonging, as expressed in relation to these localities. Western Sahara has been termed “Africa’s last colony” (Shelley 2004; MartinMárquez 2008; Zunes 2013; Camprubí 2017; Isidoros 2017b), “the last and lasting colonial conflict in Africa” (Campoy-Cubillo 2012), “the last colony in the world” (Ruddy 2007;1 McConnell 2013), “the refugee nation” (San Martín 2011), and “the largest prison in the world” (San Martín and Allan 2007). The authors make compelling arguments for their claims; regardless of whether these terms have become commonplace, or a set of convenient keywords for political purposes and vindications, none of them is hyperbolic. They all point to a fundamental failure in the process of Spanish decolonization of Africa, providing a geopolitical and historical link with the Global Hispanophone, through the pressing human rights conditions and citizenship status of the ubiquitous figures of the migrant and the transient and displaced subject. Spain’s decolonization of the territories formerly known as the Overseas Province of the Spanish Sahara was, in large part, a result of pressure from the Polisario Front, which had first emerged in 1973 as an armed resistance movement opposed to Spanish colonial control. The immediate catalyst, however, occurred on 7 November 1975, when Morocco initiated the Green March, a mass popular demonstration advancing into the province: 350,000 Moroccan civilians, and a sizable number of soldiers, converged on the city of Tarfaya and two other points east in southern Morocco and, upon orders from King Hassan II, crossed the border into Spanish Sahara under the guise of a peaceful occupation. Within days, Spain proceeded to a long-overdue handover of the colonial possession, effective 14 November 1975 following the signing of a tripartite agreement: the socalled Madrid Accords were negotiated with two of the countries bordering Western Sahara – Morocco and Mauritania – each of which received administrative powers. The decolonization was officially memorialized in Spain with an entry in the Boletín Oficial del Estado issued on 20 November 1975, undersigned by “Juan Carlos de Borbón, Príncipe de España”.2 Each of the occupying powers faced continuing resistance from the Polisario JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 19 Front, and Mauritania eventually withdrew from the fray in 1979 (Errazzouki and McManus 2013). Since then, Morocco has controlled approximately 80 percent of Western Sahara’s land area, and the other 20 percent conforms the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Half of the Sahrawi population lives in exile in the Algerian desert, close to the intersection with the Mauritanian and Moroccan borders, in refugee camps administered by the Polisario Front, awaiting the end of the Moroccan occupation.3 Longue durée colonial legacies, including that of the Franco regime, continue to shape the contours of this unresolved crisis, an enduring reminder of the effects of territorializing a fluid, contested political space.4 They represent a conspicuous instance of the miscalculated consequences of colonial intervention.5 As Yolanda Sobero observes: “Para la potencia colonial, España, [el Sáhara Occidental] es un legado problemático del franquismo y uno de los grandes temas pendientes de la Transición que condiciona sus relaciones con El Magreb, y en particular con Marruecos, en una suerte de esquizofrenia entre el cumplimento de sus obligaciones internacionales, contraídas con Naciones Unidas, y una política de hechos consumados” (2015, 311).6 Spain had first claimed control of Western Sahara following the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, which demarcated new spheres of European expansion into Africa, although the de facto occupation of the entire territory did not materialize until the 1940s.7 Spain had also held control of other parts of Morocco, under the colonial formula of a protectorate, between 1912 and 1958, although they were administratively separate.8 The present-day autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla have a different historical trajectory, forming part of a small conglomerate of North African enclaves under Spanish territorial sovereignty, along with the military outposts of Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, Peñón de Alhucemas, the island of Perejil and the Chafarinas islands, all of which are remnants of earlier interventions in the region. Melilla, conquered in 1497, and Ceuta, first annexed by Portugal during the same period and then transferred to the Spanish crown in 1668, had been the loci of early modern Spanish expansions into North Africa, and remain sites of contention between Spain and Morocco to this date.9 These enclaves fall into the category of what Sasha D. Pack (2019) terms the “Ibero-Maghribian space” – constricted, yet unbounded – of the Strait of Gibraltar, a distinctive zone where multiple borders, and diverse imperial interests (British, French, Spanish, Moroccan, German), had long collided. Defining it as “a proliferation of many types of polities and boundaries”, Pack maps the Ibero-Maghribian space as follows: Four coastal exclaves dotted the littoral, serving as access points for global exchange and imperial power. On the north shore of the Strait stood British Gibraltar (1713–present), a two-and-a-half-square mile promontory rising to a rocky peak 1400 feet over the southern Spanish coastline between Cádiz and Málaga. On the African side, the “international city” of Tangier (1923–1956) and the Spanish possession of Ceuta (1668–present) lay on the southwestern and southeastern corners of the Strait. Another key Spanish holding in North Africa was Melilla (1497–present), some two hundred miles to the east. (2019) In a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, titled “A Forgotten Empire: The Spanish-North African Borderlands”, Barbara Fuchs and Yuen-Gen Liang (2011) have placed the role of North Africa at the forefront of the nascent early modern Spanish empire. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European political geography – they contend – the Maghrib had a critical geostrategic value. Spanish policy had focused on the annexation of politically calculated plazas, coastal sites and insular territories. 22 B. SAMPEDRO VIZCAYA Between 1982 and 1987, the Moroccan armed forces erected six military walls: more than 2,700 kilometres of defensive structures, between three and four metres high. They are composed of sand and stones and a system of anti-tank trenches, and are defended by over 130,000 soldiers. … It is, in fact, the longest military wall currently active in the world, but also the least known. (2007, 2) (Figure 1). Said Saddiki provides a different interpretation of the purpose, and the political and strategic function, of this wall, while outlining the process of its expansion at pace with Morocco’s military advances: Arguably, the construction of the Western Sahara Wall is absolutely the most important military decision made by Morocco. … Moroccan Armed Forces began the construction of the Berm in 1981 through a series of steps. The project ended in April 1987 after more than 2,200 kilometers had been built. The berm is made up of six walls … : 1st wall (Aug 1980–June 1982): 500 kilometers 2nd wall (Dec 1983–Jan 1984): 300 kilometers 3rd wall (Apr 1984–May 1984): 320 kilometers 4th wall (Dec 1984–Jan 1985): 380 kilometers 5th wall (May–Sep 1985): 670 kilometers 6th wall (Feb–Apr 1987): 550 kilometers The berm is supported at regular intervals by … radar and electronic sensors systems to detect adversary vehicles. Reserve forces have been positioned behind the wall, ready to retaliate if Figure 1. Map of Western Sahara’s walls. Note: Creative Commons license from Wikimedia Commons. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Western_sahara_walls_moroccan_map-en.svg. JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 27 entry points, and it does so through microsnapshots of everyday activity and mobility. Local and global economies are concretized by following the steps of female workers living in various Moroccan towns near the border while traveling each day to work on the other side of the gate in Ceuta, and of others working in the transnational zone of European markets in Tangiers. Structured around three filmic units called “Border Logs”, the ethnographic recordings depict specific border stations, crossing times and activities: “Border Log I” positions the viewer at Ceuta’s checkpoint in the early hours of the morning, while those known as porteadoras cross to buy clothes in warehouses on Spanish territory and bring them back to Morocco. “Border Log II”, also stationed at Ceuta’s border, inscribes the daily commute of the Moroccan domésticas moving between two time zones.24 Finally, “Border Log III” takes us to the highly surveyed transnational zone of the Ibero-Maghribian and trans-Gibraltar corridor, to the northern Moroccan port city of Tangiers, where subcontracting companies – such as Europlex – rely on a mainly female work force for cheap and efficient labor in the free trade area (Figure 2). Describing the film’s techniques in Europlex, Amy Charlesworth observes that “taking the Strait of Gibraltar as the passage between two continents, the work is bracketed by a prologue and epilogue, split into segments that move between direct, onsite recordings … and computer-generated images and green silhouettes of nighttime recordings or textual data rendered as images and animation” (2013). Indeed, abstract data, recordings of ground movements and a repertoire of visual surveillance, geographic information-systems technologies and satellite images, are the stock vocabulary of Biemann’s video productions. Both Europlex and Sahara Chronicle enhance their impact by granting visibility to the subjects in transit, and their interconnectedness, across the often-blurred borders of nation-states. As the voiceover conveys in Europlex, the European Union as an economic entity has expanded its de facto borders into North Africa, using human and material resources there in order to generate and transfer production into its markets. The low-wage/highproductivity workforce here – as in many other border zones – provides lucrative Figure 2. Still from Europlex (opening scene). JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 29 Figure 3. Still from Sahara Chronicle (opening scene). connecting lines between the nodes at which migratory intensity is bundled” (2008). They move from the truck terminal for migrant desert crossing in Agadez, a trans-Saharan crossing point on an established Tuareg caravan route,25 to various sites in the Sahara where a concentration of migrants coexists with vast deposits of natural resources. Such is the case with the uranium mines at Arlit, in the Agadez region of northern-central Niger (video fragment 4); the iron ore train routes traversing Mauritania, from Zouérat in the north to the Atlantic port of Nouadhibou in the south (video fragment 7); and the important fisheries in the exclusive economic zone at Nouadhibou, the coastal cities of Saint-Louis and Ndar (in the northwest of Senegal), and Mbour (just south of Dakar and opposite the coasts of Cape Verde) (video fragments 9, 10 and 11). Fisheries and mines are obligatory stopping points in this itinerary, for mobility is not simply the manifestation of migration and exodus; it also responds to the extractive politics buoyed by local natural resources. New EU cooperation agreements have delegated responsibility for trans-Saharan migration management to a number of Maghribi states, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania and (prior to the 2011 war) Libya. Outsourcing border control to third-party countries, in which the free flow of people must be contained, is a practice neither new nor exclusive to this particular region, and is a common topos of migration studies today. Sovereign responsibilities are mobilized extraterritorially by setting up checkpoints and detention centers in transit states, and demanding the cooperation of these states in managing movements through their space. While it is often assumed that migrants and transit subjects unequivocally travel towards countries with more promising economic conditions, migration patterns are not so straightforwardly unidirectional: 30 B. SAMPEDRO VIZCAYA Figure 4. Map of Western Sahara. Note: Creative Commons license. Available at: http://www.vidiani.com/large-detailed-road-map-of-western-sahara-withall-cities-and-airports/. it is often the case that countries just as much in need as those from which the migrants depart must bear the burden of supporting refugees and en-route collectives, and are entrusted with patrolling others’ borders from their own territory. It is through the observation of such practices that Sahara Chronicle encourages us to reflect historically on the fact that the former Spanish colonial prison of Laayoune (in video fragment 12) has now been repurposed as an overcrowded deportation center for in-transit migrants from West and Central Africa. The Cárcel Negra, as it is locally known, was part of the colonial carceral system during the Spanish administration of Western Sahara, and the site of human rights JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 35 22. The symbolic date of the NAFTA implementation in 1994 has also given way to a wallreinforcement effort, paired with new security protocols, along the Mexico/US border and, subsequently, the Mexico/Guatemala border. 23. As Biemann herself defined them: My video essays are not committed to a belief in the representability of truth. Rather, my intention is to engage in a reflection about the world and the social order. This is accomplished by arranging the material into a particular field of connections. In other words, the video essay is concerned, not with documenting realities, but with organizing complexities. (2007, 130) 24. As Amy Charlesworth puts it: The clocks register the two-hour time difference. This simple technique acknowledges how the women’s social lives are rendered out-of-sync with their families, friends, local economies. Instead, their bodies are determined by the axis of the European economy. Here the administration, the numerical plotting of these bodies is made acutely visible. (2013) 25. Agadez continues to flourish today as a market town and as a center for the transportation of uranium from the mining areas. 26. On the militarized control exercised over the Spanish Sahara, particularly after the 1950s, Pablo San Martín states that, although repression of the colonized population never reached the levels of neighboring territories, “The Spanish Sahara was in some respects a huge garrison in which almost the whole weight of the colonial administration rested upon the shoulders of the reactionary African army forged by Franco” (2011, 44). 27. The proximity between the Mauritanian coastline and the Canary Islands, together with Spain’s long-term interests in the fishing industry in the region, fostered a set of diplomatic and economic exchanges and bilateral agreements between the two countries from 1960 onwards. The Maghribian migratory influx in the fall of 2005, which led to the reinforcement of border control at Ceuta and Melilla, saw, in turn, a displacement of the migratory pressure to the Canary Islands, with migrants departing from Mauritania and Senegal. Consequently, in the spring of 2006, Spain and Mauritania signed a number of bilateral “security” agreements aimed at regional migratory control; those included the repurposing of the school at Nouadhibou into a detention center. For a historical overview of Spanish-Mauritanian relations, see Larramendi and Planet (2007). Acknowledgements I am grateful to Rosi H. Song for her invitation to organize a joint Bryn Mawr College–Hofstra University workshop on some of the themes permeating this essay; this workshop took place at Hofstra under the title “Media and Migration from Africa to Spain: The Politics of Containment”, and afforded me the opportunity to reflect on, and engage with, the work of Ursula Biemann. I am also grateful to Domingo Sánchez Mesa and colleagues at Barnard College for their invitation to present an earlier version of this essay, for their feedback and the conversations that ensued. Portions of this essay were also part of my lecture at a symposium at Princeton University on “In(ter)dependence Days? A Conversation on Democracy, (Post)Nationalism and the Spanish State”, organized by Germán Labrador on the occasion of Ángel Loureiro’s retirement, and I thank them and the audience for the stimulating discussions. I am deeply indebted to Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo, Rocío Velasco de Castro and Eric Calderwood for their careful reading of this essay and their thoughtful suggestions. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.