The Sahara (24 page)

Inspired by the LRDG, David Stirling of the Scots Guards formed and commanded the Special Air Service, or SAS, which was the attacking counterpart to the LRDG’s intelligence gathering. The importance of SAS activity in the Sahara was twofold: first, raids carried out behind enemy lines had an enormous impact on morale among the Allies; and second, the attacks were a tremendous nuisance to Axis forces. In the course of one raid, in January 1943, Stirling was captured by the Germans and after four escape attempts was sent to the infamous Colditz Castle.

An entry in General Rommel’s diary clearly shows his delight at Stirling’s capture, as he wrote: “Insufficiently guarded, he managed to escape and made his way to some Arabs, to whom he offered a reward if they would get him back to the British lines. But his bid must have been too small, for the Arabs, with their usual eye for business, offered him to us for eleven pounds of tea - a bargain which we soon clinched. Thus the British lost the very able and adaptable commander of the desert group which had caused us more damage than any other British unit of equal strength.”

Another early member of the SAS was the some-time diplomat, Fitzroy Maclean. A close friend of Stirling, he was once rendered unconscious after a car-crash caused by Stirling’s reckless driving. After recovering he joked that “Stirling’s driving was the most dangerous thing in World War Two!” The many dramas in Maclean’s early life, as recounted in his memoir
Eastern Approaches
, may give the impression that one is reading fiction, but while his adventures were real enough, there has been speculation that he was the inspiration for James Bond. Such a connection is not wholly unlikely as Ian Fleming and Maclean were friends, and after his exploits in North Africa, Maclean was sent to Persia and Yugoslavia on a number of secret missions.

If short on philosophical depth, Maclean’s account is big on excitement. He recalls, for instance, a raid on an Italian fort in the desert behind enemy lines, after which German aircraft were harrying his force. Maclean explains the situation coolly: “We were separated from our base by eight hundred miles of waterless desert, dotted with enemy outposts and patrols, now all on the lookout for us. We had lost several of our trucks, some of our food and a good deal of our ammunition. The enemy knew, within a few hundred yards, where we were... It was a nasty drive.”

The war in the desert also inspired a slew of fictional accounts, including the Boys’ Own adventures in
Biggles Sweeps the Desert
. Captain John’s hero, who featured in nearly a hundred titles from 1932 until the author’s death, began his career during the First World War but is apparently young enough to return to “do his bit” in the Second.

Written in a breathless style suited to its largely adolescent readership, Biggles sets the scene:

‘‘All right, you fellows,” he said at last. “Let’s get down to business. No doubt you are all wondering why the dickens we have come to a sun-baked, out-of-the-way spot like this, and I congratulate you on your restraint for not asking questions while we were on our way. My orders were definite. I was not allowed to tell anyone our destination until we were installed at Salima Oasis, which, for your information, is the name of this particular dump of long-necked cabbages that in this part of the world pass for trees. Even now all I can tell you about our position is that it is somewhere near the junction of the Sudan, Libya, and French Equatorial Africa.” Biggles broke off to sip his coffee.

In slightly more measured tones, Ondaatje’s fictional account of pre-war “desert Europeans” tells much of its story in flashbacks recalled by Almasy, the English patient of the title, as he is being nursed after a plane crash in the desert. Of Bagnold the fictional Almasy says, “We forgave Bagnold everything for the way he wrote about dunes. ‘The grooves and the corrugated sand resemble the hollow of the roof of a dog’s mouth.’ That was Bagnold, a man who would put his inquiring hand into the jaws of a dog.”

Like Bagnold, in real life Almasy’s intimate knowledge of the desert led him to work for the war effort. As a Hungarian this meant working for Germans, although not apparently unwillingly. At the start of the war Germany had limited intelligence about the Sahara, but as the conflict progressed, and their forces pushed east, German high command needed more intelligence about British intentions. Almasy was given the task of taking German spies across the Sahara to the Nile, from where they travelled to Cairo, relaying information back to Rommel in the desert. Codenamed Operation Salaam, the story is retold in Ken Follett’s novel
The Key to Rebecca
. For successfully carrying out his mission, Almasy was awarded the Iron Cross and promoted to the rank of a Luftwaffe major. On his death in 1951, Almasy’s obituary in the
Geographical Journal
, written by George Murray, concludes, “On his desert record and on his war record , the judgement can be safely passed: ‘A Nazi but a sportsman’.”

After the Axis retreat across the Mediterranean, combat actions in the Sahara ceased. Although the war resulted in untold loss of life on all sides, including local civilians caught up in the terrible drama, once hostilities concluded life in the Sahara returned more or less to the pre-war status quo, with France and Britain still the region’s major powers. Only Italian Libya moved quickly towards independence, which it attained in 1951 at the behest of the recently founded United Nations. For the other Saharan nations, foreign rule remained, for now, the norm.

Heaven and Hell - Independence and Since

As one of the world’s best-known franchises, it should come as no surprise that there is a branch of al-Qaeda active in the Sahara. The actual size of al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, or AQIM, is unknown but it is clear that certain criminal groups with no connection to al-Qaeda happily claim to operate in their name; the region’s governments are likewise delighted to proclaim that local disturbances are actually the work of an international terror network, especially when this is untrue. Al-Qaeda is not the first terrorist organization to find the isolation of the Sahara ideal for setting up and running training camps - Colonel Gaddafi once welcomed the Irish Republican Army and other such groups to Libya.

Against the backdrop of what is customarily known as the War on Terror, al-Qaeda also operates in the Saharan political environment about which the West is broadly ignorant. Certain Saharan regimes are able to capitalize on this disconnect to secure funding that allows them to crack down not only on al-Qaeda but also on innocent domestic groups that have genuine grievances about abundant levels of corruption, or the lack of representation and absence of investment in desert communities. The seeds for such problems were sowed when independence came to the Sahara.

Despite the fact that the strongest, or at least longest, resistance to the European invasions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came from the desert inhabitants, nationalist movements only really flourished in the region’s cities. The drive towards independence was hence not so acute in the desert, where people always lived somewhat independent of the outside world. When, in the decades after the Second World War, those European nations that in one form or another controlled Saharan territory decided to leave, they tended to do so without any consultation with their Saharan subjects. Since independence the political experience of the region has been a mixed lot, with border disputes, coups and wars marking long periods of turmoil. At the same time, although certain regional tensions persist hostilities forecast by the jeremiads have usually failed to break out.

As mentioned in the last chapter, the last Saharan nation to be colonized, Libya, was the first to gain independence. This was followed by independence for Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and self-government for Egypt, in 1956; Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger in 1960; Algeria in 1962; and almost for Western Sahara in 1975 when Spain unilaterally declared it was giving up all claims to the region and leaving with almost immediate effect.

Libya’s destiny was made clear through a 1949 declaration by the nascent United Nations, which stated that the country must be fully independent within three years. Just 25 months later - in spite of an attempt on the part of the Soviet Union to secure a mandate over the country - on 24 December 1951 Libya declared its independence as a constitutional and hereditary monarchy with Idris as king, becoming in the process the first country to gain independence through the United Nations. Maintaining the ancient administrative division of the country into the provinces of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan allowed for greater provincial autonomy, which suited the Saharan Fezzanis perfectly.

Under King Idris, amicable relations between Libya and the West were the norm, with first Britain and then the United States signing agreements allowing them to have military bases there, as well as using certain demarcated zones in the Sahara as firing ranges. In return, Libya received economic and military aid from the UK and the USA. Later, after the discovery of significant oil deposits in the Libyan Sahara, the balance of power changed somewhat, with Libya now viewing itself as less of a third-world nation and more on a par with the economically developed western powers. Yet in spite of its becoming rich, alienation among the people was widespread, especially for those living in the desert where the oil - and later gas - was being extracted, while the locals saw even fewer benefits than most people living in the towns and cities of the Mediterranean littoral.

Since the 1969 military coup by a group including a young Captain Muammar al-Gaddafi, the lot of Saharan Libyans has not seen great improvement. This lack of progress contrasts with Gaddafi’s somewhat theatrical insistence on hosting meetings in a tent, which is meant to remind his guests - as if they would ever be allowed to forget - that he was born of humble Arab-Berber stock in a tent in the desert outside Sirte.

One of the threats to his power that Gaddafi most feared was that from the desert-rooted Sanussi, of which King Idris was once the head, and which had previously fought against both Italian and British rule in the Libyan and Egyptian Sahara until after the First World War. Seeing the Sanussi as a potential unifying force against his authority, especially in their Fezzan heartland, Gaddafi not only tried to write out of history the vital role they played in the struggle for independence but also destroyed the shrine and tomb of the movement’s founder in the otherwise unimportant Berber oasis of] Jaghbub, near the border with Egypt.

Although Egypt became an independent kingdom in 1922 in a declaration made by British rather than Egyptian authorities, it was really only after the “Free Officers” movement overthrew King Farouk in 1952 and declared a republic the next year that it became, more or less, the master of its domain, with Britain holding onto the Canal Zone until after the Suez Crisis of 1956. Throughout this period the Egyptian Sahara was spared the convulsions that affected the cities, and the urban elites responsible for pushing independence had little or no interest in the country’s desert dwellers: from the other side, the feeling was mutual. For both Egypt and the Sudan the Nile will always be the main artery of power and influence, and the further one travels west, away from its banks, the easier it is for politicians in the capitals to ignore the Saharans, as long as they remain nominally obedient.

Independence was granted to Sudan on 1 January 1956 under the terms of a joint British Egyptian treaty. The year before, a civil war broke out between the Arab-orientated Muslim north and the African-looking, Animist and Christian south of the country, a fault line which has remained absolute since independence. Recognizing this division, a bold attempt to bring a halt to the seemingly never-ending civil war meant holding a referendum, in January 2011, which, depending on the results, allows the country to be divided in two. While a majority of southerners are certain to vote for secession, a peaceful division of the country is a far less likely outcome. Saharan portions of the Sudan have not been spared in this conflict.

The Islamist government in Sudan’s capital has long attempted to enforce a vision of national unity across the country. However, Sudan, at the time of writing Africa’s largest country, is also one of the continent’s least homogeneous nations. Often employing proxy militias to carry out its mission, the government has presided over unrestricted violence, most infamously by the Janjaweed in Darfur, which has resulted in the mass rape, murder and dislocation of its own generally unarmed and innocent citizenry. Since 2003, when the then American Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to the Darfur conflict as a genocide, an estimated 400,000 have been killed in the region, with another two and a half million displaced. Many of these have fled into neighbouring Chad, which has resulted in increased tension between its capital N’Djamena and Khartoum. Those Saharan regions of Chad into which the Sudanese have flooded were barely able to support the existing population, let alone the influx of foreign refugees.

Two months after Sudanese independence, following negotiations between French authorities and Sultan Mohammed V, Morocco too became fully sovereign, with the vast majority of Spanish-controlled territory likewise being handed back in April of the same year. Morocco had become a French protectorate in 1912, after the Treaty of Fez, which also granted Spain control over the country’s northern Rif and southern Saharan regions. The French and Spanish were most interested in the Atlantic and Mediterranean coastal regions, however, the remoter corners of the Sahara remaining a largely autonomous Berber-controlled zone. Since independence Moroccan troops have pushed into the Sahara beyond their borders - as the international community recognizes them - on two important occasions. The first of these wars lasted a matter of months; the second conflict rumbles on more than 35 years later.