First Steps in Laayoune, by Nick Jubber

    It’s hard in Laayoune to ignore the military presence. Every corner produces another military kiosk, and every time you cross the road you have to watch out for another artillery-loaded truck roaring round the corner. Wandering under schoolyard murals of the Moroccan army or portraits of King Mohammed, you can feel the weight of a city living under the heavy cloak of oppression. But in many ways, it’s the most innocuous details that are most telling: the empty teahouses, the lack of young men loitering about, the uncracked roads, the huge public squares with their squat palm trees and bougainvillea, gaudily sprayed about like an uninvited guest’s faltering attempt at charm. And occasionally, more specific signs of the political situation seep through – from the heavily gated compounds of the rich Moroccans who’ve made their fortunes off Western Sahara’s resources to the pink Lux minivans, their back windows taped with signs for the UNHCR “Saharawi Family Visits Programme” – underlining the population displacement caused by the Moroccan invasion of 1975.

A house in Laayoune, Nick Jubber

  On a hot street of orangey-pink hardware stores and tailors’ workshops, where the bench outside the local eatery was full of men in workmen’s overalls and the air pulsed to the beat of jackhammering, I met a group of Saharawi activists.


   ‘You chose the right day,’ said one of them, called Ahmed. ‘There’s a demonstration this afternoon.’ He looked at his friends, before adding with a dark grin: ‘but it would be the same if we met you tomorrow. Most days, there’s a demonstration.’

School murals in Laayoune showing the Green March
and the Moroccan invasion, Nick Jubber

   This one took place on Avenue Smara, one of the longest roads in the city. Wearing a white djellaba, Ahmed sat beside me in the back of a car. Beside him was Salaam, a young woman in a midnight blue milfha, who carefully folded a pair of gloves over her hands and tightened her head covering so she wouldn’t be easy to identify.

   ‘Wrap your turban tighter,’ she told me – I’d been given a black one to hide my face and told to keep my giveaway white hands under the window.

A schoolyard in Laayoune with the Moroccan flag, Nick Jubber

  A dozen dark blue police trucks lined the road. Helmeted officers stood outside them, holding plastic shields and gripping their batons in their fists. The white vans of the auxiliary forces were parked in the side alleys. As we drove down the road, you could see the crowd gathering – jaws were stiffening, lips were being bitten, brows were being creased. Secret policemen swarmed between them - ‘You see the men on the motorbikes,’ said Ahmed, ‘that’s them – watch out. If they find out about you they’re gonna give you hell.’

Into the Deep, by Nick Jubber

It felt like the world was dying. After the lush green hills of North Morocco and the palmeraie of the south, now I was surrounded by nothing except for vast dunes of powdery dust.

The desert of Laayoune, Nick Jubber

  I had boarded an overnight bus at Inezgane, one of Morocco’s chief transport hubs. Sitting around me were a group of teenage boys who were all returning from a camping trip. It had been organised by the Justice and Development Party – currently the largest party in the Moroccan parliament.

  ‘Oh yes, we are all Saharawis,’ one of them, Ibrahim, told me. No, he admitted, his parents hadn’t actually been born there, ‘but there is a lot of work to be done because Western Sahara is in need of development.’ One of his friends, Mehdi, was more forthright. ‘You need to understand something,’ he said. ‘Maybe you will meet people and they will say they are the only true Saharawis. But they want us to do all the work for them. My father and his father,’ he continued, wagging a finger at Ibrahim, ‘they are the people who are making this land something more.’ This issue – the settlers and their children versus the indigenous Saharawis – has become one of the core issues in Western Sahara, especially in regard to the proposed UN referendum to decide the fate of the region.

Camels in Laayoune, Nick Jubber

  Blinking into the glare, as the sun floated over the roof of the bus, we looked across the rocky desert towards Laayoune. We passed a wind turbine, a dairy farm and a cement works. Farmsteads built from the abundant local stone skulked beside acacia groves. Most noticeable of all, though, was the checkpoint: a small pink kiosk where a soldier in grey sat behind his ledger and a tea tray buzzing with flies. Black and white mug-shots of ‘miscreants’ (many of them simply Saharawi activists against the occupation) were tacked to the wall above him. He asked me why I was visiting Laayoune and suggested I move on to Dakhla.

  ‘You can windsurf there,’ he explained.

  Red flags with green five point stars – trumpeting Moroccan sovereignty – fought against the breeze and an archway hooped over us, patterned with seashells in the spandrels. Beyond the Oued Sakiya, military trucks loaded with artillery and Sûreté Nationale vans trundled around us, soldiers in olive-green uniforms picking their way between the early-morning strawberry cart pushers and women in brightly coloured milfhas or men in loose blue dira’a robes. I found myself a room in a downtown hotel above a café frequented by football enthusiasts. I was itching to explore – and to find out for myself what’s really going on in Laayoune.