Western Sahara: The Refugee Nation
The narrator’s first impression of Western Sahara comes from early-1980s TV news watched as a child. A report on war in a former Spanish territory—starkly unlike the green, rain-soaked valleys of northern Iberia—left a strong visual mark: guerrilla fighters in yellowish turbans, raising Kalashnikovs and riding defiantly to the front in old open Land Rovers, some improvised into assault vehicles with machine guns mounted on top. In the narrator’s memory the scenes are pale and blurred, as if washed out by desert sirocco and the grain of a black-and-white television.