(Photo by Parsa Alirezaei)
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It is a global climate crisis, felt by Sahrawis as much as by the Sami in the Arctic Circle. At the center of this story is a people whose land is rich in a valuable mineral: phosphate.
Unfortunately for Sahrawis, it is the stuff that makes food grow in an agribusiness-obsessed world with little care for the land and people of the not-so-former colonies.
I traveled to the Ausserd governorate, where I visited a Sahrawi refugee camp, one of six camps located east of Tindouf, Algeria. These camps are named after villages and towns in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, which lies hundreds of miles away across the Algerian border. The eighteenth edition of the FiSahara International Film Festival took place there, with climate change as a crucial and urgent topic in the discussions.
The film festival had a clear message from the get-go: to resist is to win. The inspiring slogan of this year’s FiSahara is rooted in the struggle for national liberation. It refers to the title of the Timorese liberation fighter and leader Xanana Gusmao’s autobiography, and the festival organizers highlighted a profound global connection: the Timorese struggle against Indonesia for national liberation mirrors the Sahrawi struggle against Morocco.
The Sahrawis — a nomadic people — face growing difficulties due to shrinking grazing land and changing ecosystems in their once vast Sahara homeland. Some difficulties can be attributed to the ongoing conflict between the Polisario Front and the Moroccan occupation in Western Sahara; yet, the majority of the changes Sahrawis face can be traced back to recent history, including colonial competition for land, unjust boundary drawing by colonial powers, and some post-colonial irredentism by emerging states in the region.
Many Sahrawis have lived their entire lives in exile, but their experience does little to tear their connection to their land. In the following interview with Mohamed Sleiman Labat — a Sahrawi multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer & translator — I learned of the sensitive nature of ecosystems and the adaptive nature of Sahrawis.
How do your film (DESERT PHOSfate) and your activism highlight the struggles of the Sahrawi past and future solutions in a changing climate and ecosystem?
My film DESERT PHOSfate does not actually provide answers. Instead, it [invites] viewers on a journey of narrations, visuals, and metaphors. [The film encourages them to connect with] the story of the Sahrawi people [and to develop] their own answers and positions regarding ethical questions, injustice, and the multilayered social, political, and ecological violence that we are all going through. This story is not an exception, and it is not far from anyone’s life. The film’s chapters weave through narratives of the Sahrawi’s past nomadic [lifestyle] into their current situation in the refugee camps. It blends [the community’s] past and present [to illustrate] how our people lived in the past, how we ended up in a refugee camp, and what caused such displacement.
Different foreign colonial extractivist powers such as Spain, Morocco, and the multinational corporations involved in the extraction of natural resources in Western Sahara caused the Sahrawi people to lose their homeland. It is a typical colonial story and the displacement of Indigenous people because our land is rich in resources. But, not many people actually know about this story [even though] that many people are connected to it. The phosphate that is extracted from our land is probably used as a fertilizer to grow the food they eat on the other side of the planet, and it is causing the displacement of the Sahrawi people and prolonging the occupation of our homeland of Western Sahara.
The global connections [indirectly] hint to tell people, again, that this can also happen to you. This [hint] is not some far-distant thing — we are all connected, and what happens in one particular place may impact a distant community or an ecosystem. So, it is not only the story of the Sahrawi. It is the story of humanity and our destination as a species. [This kind of wisdom must come] out in the film, but I love how the people who speak in my film do not express it directly. They use their own ways of narrating and telling. I know that the elderly in our community have the wisdom that can reorient our hearts and minds to live and live with others on this earth.
In the roundtable, you briefly spoke about the delicate nature of intra-ecosystemic and inter-ecosystemic relations — specifically about the impact of Sahrawi phosphates in the Baltic Sea. Could you elaborate on this? How is Sahrawi phosphate — extracted and sold by the occupying Moroccan authorities — impacting the Baltic ecosystem?
I am very interested in highlighting the connection between local processes and global connections. We do not often pay attention to it, but what happens locally somewhere [indeed] impacts other places around the world, especially because of human intervention.
The phosphate extracted from Western Sahara is used in agricultural fertilization in many parts of the world, including Australia, New Zealand, North America, and the Baltic Sea area. Introducing phosphate from Western Sahara to these ecosystems does not often work well in the long run. The processed phosphorus, for example, in the case of the Baltic Sea, actually leaks into the waterways and creates eutrophication. Algae feed on the excess phosphorus, rapidly growing and causing oxygen and nitrogen depletion in the sea. This impacts marine life badly [as many] sea creatures [forcibly] leave for other areas. Also, scientists are talking about dead zones at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, which are becoming deserts.
So. when we extract some minerals from a local area and bring them to another [location], we upset the balance of these ecosystems because we introduce something new to the local ecosystem. It is like chemistry on a big scale — of course, the ecosystem would react. The problem is that we are often not ready for those reactions. It seems companies are only capable of causing these catastrophes.
How can art engage with political and social questions of climate change in a way that a scientific paper or article cannot? Specifically, why is film the appropriate medium for your message?
I try to avoid a binary approach of either/or. I feel like there is a need for artistic and scientific [methods] to come together. I engage with such processes —informed by scientific input — but equipped with and guided by the input from my community and my creative practice. The scientific input is about facts. You can present facts to the people, and they can understand them, but that does not seem to be enough. What I think is missing is the story. A story that engages people [differently] than facts, numbers, and statistics. A story that can somehow allow them to connect, feel, and be related to other people, places, and ways of living. It is a different way of relating to the world. And I think films, stories, and the arts have that possibility. We live in a world flooded with information, facts, numbers, and algorithms.
What we need is a different way to relate to the world. More than the language of numbers and facts, as a species, what we really need is a story! Something to guide our confused minds and stressed hearts. Something that can somehow show us that things happen in circles. The violence that some of us go through can cause pain and loss to others, others being human beings and living things and systems in the non-human world.
To be continued in Part 2
Edited by Bethlehem Samson
