Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (34 page)

I had to wonder, though, if I was being fooled by cosmetic relaxation that didn’t go very far. It happens. My thoughts kept returning to Cuba, not only because the Castro regime backs the Polisario but also because I had recently been in Cuba myself and know all too well how many people visit on holiday and think everything’s fine when it’s not. It’s at least theoretically possible that repression in Western Sahara is simply less obvious than it used to be—as in Cuba—and therefore more insidious.

The lack of men with guns on the streets does not by itself mean it isn’t oppressive. I didn’t see men with guns in Havana, but Cuba has the worst human-rights record by far in the western hemisphere. I was sitting across the table from a man who had been elected to the local community council in a multiparty election, though, so how bad could it be?

“When I came back,” he said, “I found that I still had all my social, political and economic rights. And I got elected to the council. So, no, I’m not being oppressed. No one here is oppressed. But there are young people who know nothing about the camps and who demonstrate against Morocco because the Sahara is not independent. They are like me when I was 14 and Che Guevara was my hero. I didn’t listen to anybody back then.”

Morocco’s government isn’t like Cuba’s. It holds free and fair elections with a range of parties to choose from across the political spectrum. The Polisario runs an asteroid belt of actual police states in the camps across the border inside Algeria, which itself is smothered by a Soviet-style regime.
That’s
where you’ll find the Cuban analogue in North Africa, which makes perfect sense because the Polisario is partly a creature of Castro.

“Conditions in the camps are miserable,” Amar said. “People are living in tents and mud buildings built by Moroccan slave labor. Food is only available depending on what kind of relations people have with the leadership. There are constant epidemics. And they’re out in the middle of nowhere.”

Try to imagine living like that in the hottest place in the world. The climate in Dakhla is near perfect, thanks to the cool winds off the Atlantic, but go just a few miles inland and you’ll feel like you’ve stuck your face in front of an open oven on broil.

“What do people
do
all day in the camps?” I said.

“The Polisario gave us a schedule to occupy our time and our minds,” he said. “Men get military training. Woman are organized into committees for education, distribution of humanitarian aid and social relations.” The disgraceful use of child soldiers in sub-Saharan Africa is well documented, but they’re up north, too, out in the desert. “Children begin military training at age 10. They are taught how to take apart an AK-47 and put it back together blindfolded.”

Morocco’s human-rights record is far from perfect. Freedom House ranks the country as “partly free” rather than “free.” But the Polisario’s patron states stomp on human faces with boots as a matter of course. It’s fine and good to be skeptical of the Moroccan government, its reforms and its claims, but that goes double for Cuba, Algeria and the Polisario.

“We want American guarantees to Morocco so we can fix this,” Amar said. “People here have suffered a great deal since the mid-1970s. We want peace and security and to have our families together again. What purpose has been served all these years by keeping our families hostage in those camps?”

North Africa is so close to Europe. The two continents can see each other across the Strait of Gibraltar. Yet they are politically, socially and economically thousands of miles apart.

The entire Sahara-Sahel region is unstable. Egypt is ruled again by a military dictatorship. Libya is on the verge of total disintegration, à la Somalia. Algeria is mired in a Soviet time warp. Northern Mali was taken over by Taliban-style terrorists so vicious they prompted the French to invade. At the time of this writing, U.S. troops are hunting Nigeria’s al-Qaeda-linked Boko Haram across the border in Chad.

Tunisia is doing okay, but it’s small. Aside from Morocco, the entire northern half of Africa is a disaster. Most of the continent, really, is still a disaster, but North Africa matters more to the West because it’s the southern half of the Mediterranean. The region isn’t Las Vegas: what happens there doesn’t stay there and never has.

The region’s potential is obvious to everyone who has seen it at its best. Marrakech in Morocco, Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia, Ghadamis in Libya: these are some of the world’s most beautiful places, and they’re inhabited by the some of the friendliest and most delightful people I’ve ever met.

Well into the 21st century, though, there is still more darkness than light, even in the blazing Sahara. Military dictators, Islamist mass murderers, human traffickers, gunrunners, thuggish communist proxy militias and kidnappers run roughshod and wild. The city of Dakhla has managed to keep it all at some distance, but it’s fragile. On most maps, Western Sahara is nothing but a geographic abstraction.

That can’t possibly last.

Maybe, perhaps even during my lifetime, North Africa will realize its potential and flourish with the freedom and prosperity that exists on the other side of the Mediterranean, but that time is not yet. Not even Morocco—the most stable and civilized state in the region by far—has managed to permanently secure its backyard yet.

“What would happen,” I said to Amar, “if the Sahara became independent and the Polisario, one way or another, became the government?”

“An instant civil war,” he said, “and an instant failed state.”

Keep reading for a special preview of Michael J. Totten’s

Where the West Ends: Stories from the Middle East, the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus

“The forced collectivization of agriculture decreed by the Soviet master and his party likely cost the lives of more people than perished in all countries as a result of the First World War.” – Michael Marrus

“They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.” – Malcolm Muggeridge

I bought a map of Eastern Europe in an old Oregon bookstore that’s as big as a couch when unfolded. The most heavily trafficked roads appear as fat red lines on the paper. Almost all of them lead directly to Moscow. Even as late as the year 2012, the nerve center of the former Soviet Empire looks on my map like a world-devouring octopus capturing less important capitals in its tentacles.

On a cold night in late October I pointed at a thin red line on that map leading across the former Soviet frontier into Ukraine from a remote corner of Poland.

“Hardly anyone will be on this road,” I said to my old friend Sean LaFreniere. He had just met up with me in Romania so we could hit the road again. “We shouldn’t have to wait long at the border.”

That logic seemed sound at the time, but I’m here to tell you: never, ever, choose less-traveled roads in countries that used to be part of Russia. Driving from even the most backward country in the European Union into the remote provinces of Ukraine is like falling off the edge of civilization into a land that was all but destroyed.

Sean and I hadn’t learned that yet, though, and we wanted a scenic route. European road trips aren’t like road trips in the American West where we live. Outside our major metropolitan areas, huge empty spaces and wide open roads are the norm. Most of Europe is crowded and neither of us wanted to sit in the car for hours in line at the border.

We had no idea what we were in for, but a Polish border guard warned us after stamping our passports.

“It is very strange over there,” he said. “And nobody speaks English.”

Screwing up in the strange parts of the world is never fun and is often miserable, but you learn things by doing it. You see things that governments and ministries of tourism wished you would not. Ukraine is so strange that you can even see these things in the dark. We actually saw more of Ukraine’s strangeness because we showed up in the dark.

I don’t remember what time we crossed the frontier. Eight o’clock in the evening? Anyway, it was dark. When I say it was dark, I mean it was dark. The back roads of Western Ukraine are as black at night as the most remote parts of the American West where no humans live in any direction.

Yet Western Ukraine is not empty.

And the roads. Oh God, the roads. I don’t care where you’ve been. You almost certainly have never seen anything like them.

The second worst road I’ve ever driven on was in Central America in the mid-1990s. It’s only ten percent as bad as the road Sean and I took into Ukraine. This one would have been no worse off had it been deliberately shredded to ribbons by air strikes. The damage was so thorough that the surface could not possibly have been repaved or repaired even once since the Stalinist era.

I white-knuckled it behind the wheel while Sean cringed in the passenger seat. I did not dare drive faster than five miles an hour. Even at that speed I had to weave all over the place to avoid the worst of the gaping holes, some of which were as wide as mattresses and deep enough to swallow TV sets.

I saw no cars, no street lights, not even a light from one single house. Ukraine looked depopulated. My maps said there were villages all over the place, but where were they? Did we just drive into an episode of Life After People?

“This is exactly like Russia,” Sean said. “Exactly.”

He had visited Russia two years earlier and will never forget the vast darkness at night on the train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. “We’re in Russia!” he said

Then the ghost figures appeared.

They walked on the side of the road in wine-darkness. They did not carry flashlights. They seemed, like us, to be out in the middle of nowhere. It was then that I realized we had entered a town. In the periphery of my headlight beams I could faintly make out a few unlit houses shrouded in shadow away from the road, which was as broken and crumbling as ever. I still hadn’t seen any other cars on the road, nor did I see any parked on the side. I don’t know if the roads were so bad because nobody drove or if nobody drove because the roads were so bad.

“They should put up a sign on the border,” Sean said, “saying That was Europe. You like that? Now prepare for something completely different.”

*  *  *

We were on our way to Chernobyl, or at least we thought we were headed there. City Journal assigned me to go there and write about the spooky ghost city of Pripyat that, along with the surrounding area in the so-called Exclusion Zone, was struck by a local apocalypse in 1986. The Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four exploded and showered Pripyat, where 50,000 people lived, and the countryside around it with a storm of deadly radiation. Only 31 people were dead in the immediate aftermath, but the World Health Organization thinks the long-term effects of radiation poisoning will eventually kill another 4,000. More than 350,000 people in Ukraine and nearby Belarus have been permanently displaced. The fire still burns today beneath the crumbling concrete sarcophagus that caps the reactor.

No one should wander around there alone. The Ukrainian military won’t let you in anyway if you don’t have a guide and a permit. Some of Pripyat’s buildings are still lethally radioactive, and there’s no way to tell them apart from the relatively “safe” ones without sophisticated instruments. The scrap yard, where fire-fighting equipment was abandoned long ago, is spectacularly dangerous. Even mutant animals are supposedly running around.

Sean and I didn’t yet know it, but the Chernobyl administration was about to cancel our permit and refuse to allow anyone entry. They didn’t say why, but I assume it was because the zone suddenly became more dangerous than usual. We would not get to go, but going there was our plan and we didn’t yet know we would be re-routed. For a while there, we weren’t sure we’d get anywhere in Ukraine, let alone hundreds of miles away to Chernobyl.

First we had to get to Lviv, the “capital” of Western Ukraine and the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. That first stop alone was almost a hundred miles away. The road was so shattered I was barely able to drive any faster than I could walk. And we were lost. We couldn’t even figure out how to get to Sambir, a small town that was hardly even inside Ukraine at all.

Sambir was spelled Самбір in Ukrainian and only one sign pointed the way. The Cyrillic letters in that particular name resembled the Latin letters well enough that I could figure it out. Then we came to a four-way junction. Road signs pointed to various towns in every direction, but none said Самбір. And none of the towns the signs did point toward appeared on my map—or, if they were on my map, I didn’t know how to transliterate their names into Cyrillic. Which way we were supposed to be going?

“Let’s go back,” Sean said, “and ask one of those people on the side of the road.”

I drove back the way we came until I saw two ghostly figures shambling along in the headlights. I pulled over and rolled down the window.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you speak English?” I doubted they did, but this was a way of preparing them for the fact that they weren’t going to hear any Ukrainian or Russian from me.

The two stopped walking and stared. A young man, perhaps 20 years old, held his young girlfriend’s hand. He stared at me with wide eyes and slowly stepped between me and his girl as if I were a threat.

“We’re trying to get to Sambir,” I said and paused. “Sambir,” I said again in case he understood nothing else but might at least know I needed directions and that he could point. He looked at me and didn’t say anything.

“Sean,” I said. “Hand me that map.”

Sean handed over the map. I pointed at it. “Sambir.” I said. “Which way to Sambir?”

The young man took several of cautious steps back. His girlfriend, terrified, moved behind him and peaked over his shoulder. They backed up another five feet or so, then walked away without saying anything.