Matthew Porges

In Sükhbaatar Square, in the centre of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, there is a gigantic colonnade monument to Genghis Khan, seated and facing south. Along the sides of the square, the Government Palace, an old Soviet-style post office and a neoclassical opera house all date to Mongolia’s socialist period. The monument to Genghis Khan, though, was put up in 2006, and an even more colossal statue of the Khan astride a horse, fifty kilometres east of the city, was completed in 2008. There is an odd tension in this – the static nomad, the monument to mobility – and a banner in Sukhbaatar Square, directly in the sightline of the seated Khan, proclaims Ulaanbaatar the ‘City of Nomads’, another faint contradiction.

Parviz (not his real name) is an Iranian man in his early thirties, born in Tehran and now living in Ljubljana. He fled Iran after taking part in anti-government protests, which made him a target for the secret police. Like many Middle Eastern migrants bound for Europe, he spent time in temporary camps in Bosnia, waiting for an opportunity to cross into Croatia and then Slovenia. The first six times he tried to cross along the ‘Western Balkan route’, he was illegally pushed back by Croatian police, denied the right to apply for asylum, and dumped in a freezing Bosnian forest. The seventh time, he made it across the border, and was taken to a Slovenian police station along with around twenty other migrants.

Last month, after 29 years of diplomatic stalemate, Western Sahara returned to war. The territory is a former Spanish colony; Morocco and Mauritania invaded as Spain withdrew in 1975. The Polisario Front, an independence movement made up of the territory’s indigenous Sahrawi people, took up arms. A messy and inconclusive guerrilla war dragged on until a 1991 ceasefire, by which point Mauritania had relinquished its claims on the territory, and Morocco had built a sand berm – at 1700 miles, arguably the longest military barrier in the world – to separate the roughly three-quarters of the territory that it occupied from the remaining quarter or so controlled by Polisario, which governs in exile from a series of refugee camps in Algeria’s Tindouf Province.

In a pandemic, some common-sense policies can closely resemble authoritarianism. Banning large public gatherings, for instance, is both a classic authoritarian move and a reasonable strategy to control the spread of the virus. This tension opens up an opportunity for would-be authoritarians to exploit the situation, using the pandemic as cover for implementing policies that would otherwise result in a lot more pushback, domestically and internationally. While the population is staying home and the media are distracted, there is time and space for political shifts that would otherwise be impossible.

Ghazouani travelled by presidential jet to Bir Moghrein’s airstrip, outside town; most of the time you wouldn’t know it was there, if it weren’t for a set of aircraft steps standing alone in the desert. Bir Moghrein is ‘only Mauritanian depending on the mood of the guard that day’, a European photojournalist who has worked there told me. Most of the cars in town have licence plates from the neighbouring Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. At the moment, though, conversation there is as much about the election as it is about the WhatsApp group for finding lost camels.

Daha Bulahi, sixtyish, is a Sahrawi, born into a nomadic family in the northwestern Sahara. One of his eyes is fake, the eyelid mangled, and he’s missing a couple of fingers. None of this prevents him from brewing tea, which he did throughout our interview in the Sahrawi way, aerating the tea by pouring it from glass to glass and accumulating bubbles on the surface. He worked in landmine clearance for several years, and Yago, a Spanish demining technician who was working with him, told me the story of Daha’s mutilation. Lacking sophisticated equipment, he would dig underneath each mine and pick it up from below with his bare hands, avoiding the pressure-plate triggering mechanism on the top. Then he would throw it over his shoulder, letting it explode, and move onto the next one. This is about as safe as it sounds. He had cleared a vast number of mines successfully, but one day a mine exploded as he threw it, spraying him with shrapnel. Daha’s survival strained the bounds of credulity, but there he was, brewing tea with what was left of his hand.

On 27 February, the European Court of Justice ruled that the EU-Morocco Fisheries Partnership Agreement cannot apply to the territory of Western Sahara. Morocco alleges that the former Spanish colony, on the Atlantic coast between Morocco and Mauritania, is part of its integral territory. The view is not officially shared by any UN member state, and the UN considers Western Sahara a Non-Self-Governing Territory.

I recently spent some time living with a refugee family in the Smara refugee camp, Tindouf Province, Algeria. The family were Sahrawis, exiles from the Western Sahara Conflict, and though they had lived a mostly stationary life in Smara for perhaps forty years, they were still culturally nomads. One day, when I had been living there for a few weeks, a relative of the family turned up in a white pick-up truck with a live camel tied to the flatbed. The camel was enormous, and gave no sign of discomfort as curious children swarmed around it.