For the past forty years, tens of thousands of Moroccan soldiers have manned a wall of sand that curls for one and a half thousand miles through the howling Sahara. The vast plain around it is empty and flat, interrupted only by occasional horseshoe dunes that traverse it. But the Berm, as the wall is known, is no natural phenomenon. It was built by the Kingdom of Morocco, in the nineteen-eighties, and it’s the longest defensive fortification in use today—and the second-longest ever, after China’s Great Wall. The crude barrier, surrounded by land mines, electric fences, and barbed wire, partitions a wind-blasted chunk of desert the size of Colorado known as the Western Sahara. Formerly a Spanish colony, the territory was annexed by its northern neighbor, Morocco, in 1975. An indigenous Sahrawi rebel group, called the Polisario Front, waged a guerrilla war for independence. In 1991, after sixteen years of conflict, the two sides agreed to a ceasefire. The wall keeping the foes apart stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the mountains of Morocco, roughly the distance from New York City to Dallas.

Late last year, I visited the Berm from the Polisario side, to the east, accompanying a handful of supporters of the group from around the world. Until we were about a hundred feet away, I didn’t sense that I was anywhere in particular in the expanse of the desert. My Polisario guide pointed out painted rocks indicating a minefield ahead. A few feet away, an unexploded mortar shell lay in the sand. We walked into a United Nations-controlled buffer zone and the Berm appeared in front of us, rising about six and a half feet behind a barbed-wire fence. I glanced left and right. The wall seemed to stretch endlessly, almost into the blue sky.

As we approached one of the tent-topped fortifications that dot the length of the Berm, a handful of Moroccan soldiers began to scurry around inside. “Will they shoot?” I asked one the Polisario guides. We could see the peaks of the soldier’s flat caps. “No, no,” he replied, laughing. He said that Sahrawis often demonstrate in front of the wall, demanding that Morocco leave the territory. “They’re used to this.” Two women began to shout abuse at the soldiers about Morocco’s King Mohammed VI. “Mohammed, you asshole,” they screamed. “The Sahara is not yours.”

Today, Morocco controls the western eighty per cent of the disputed territory, and the Polisario (which stands for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro) occupies the rest. The Polisario movement initially began as an armed rebellion against Spanish occupiers. Today, the Polisario calls Western Sahara “Africa’s Last Colony,” asserts that Morocco has replaced Spain as colonizer, and accuses the kingdom of exploiting the territory’s resources. Negotiations have repeatedly stalled, making Western Sahara the site of one of the world’s oldest frozen conflicts. The Polisario’s self-declared Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic is recognized by the African Union and Algeria, which has given the group military support for decades and currently hosts more than a hundred and seventy thousand Sahrawi refugees in squalid camps.

Morocco has poured money into its side of the Berm, expanding cities and developing tourism. But the Polisario accuses the kingdom of filling the territory it controls with secret police and soldiers, and of violently suppressing free speech and pro-independence protests. Videos abound online of police roughing up Sahrawi protesters. Omar Hilale, the Moroccan Ambassador to the U.N., denied the accusations of human-rights abuses in the territory and blamed incidents of violence on unlawful protests. “You want to protest, you have to register—everywhere, even here in the United States,” he told me. Hilale pointed the finger at Algeria, which he said had sent trained rabble-rousers into Western Sahara. Morocco’s largest foreign backer is France, the country’s former colonial overlord, and the French and Moroccan leadership retain strong political, economic, and personal ties. French companies frequently use Moroccan firms to invest in Africa, where they are often unpopular due to their colonial and postcolonial history. Many French politicians keep lavish holiday homes in Morocco.

On December 5th, for the first time in six years, negotiations were held in an effort to initiate a resolution to the conflict. To the surprise of longtime observers, the talks proceeded civilly and the parties agreed to meet again in several months. Officials present told me that President Trump’s new national-security adviser, John Bolton, played an important role in getting the groups to the table. “John Bolton and the enormous engagement the Americans are now putting in helped a lot,” a senior official close to the talks told me. Some diplomats involved in the negotiations call the changes “the Bolton effect.”

At an event in Washington in mid-December, where the Trump Administration’s new Africa strategy was unveiled, Bolton told me that he was eager to end the conflict. “You have to think of the people of the Western Sahara, think of the Sahrawis, many of whom are still in refugee camps near Tindouf, in the Sahara desert, and we need to allow these people and their children to get back and have normal lives,” he said.

Bolton knows the conflict well. He worked on the U.N. peacekeeping mandate for the region in 1991, and, starting in the late nineties, he was part of a U.N. negotiation team, led by James Baker III, the former Secretary of State, which came close to brokering an agreement to hold an independence referendum in the Western Sahara. (The Polisario agreed to the proposal, but Morocco did not.) The conflict, Baker told me in an interview in Houston, “has not been handled well, and that’s why it continues to persist.”

Since Bolton’s appointment, in March, there has been a flurry of activity regarding the Western Sahara conflict at the U.N. and in the State Department. “There are two Americans who really focus a lot on the Western Sahara: one’s Jim Baker, the other’s me,” Bolton told me. “I think there should be intense pressure on everybody involved to see if they can’t work it out.” This spring, at the insistence of the U.S. and to the chagrin of Moroccan and French diplomats, the U.N. peacekeeping mandate for the Western Sahara was extended by only six months rather than a year. (Bolton has long contended that the U.N. peacekeeping mission there has prolonged the conflict by detracting from efforts to resolve the underlying issues.) In October, the mandate was renewed for another six months. “After twenty-seven years, I don’t get impatient on a daily basis,” Bolton told me. “I just get impatient when I think about it.”

Bolton has repeatedly accused Morocco of engaging in delaying tactics to stymie negotiations. He wrote, in 2007, “Morocco is in possession of almost all of the Western Sahara, happy to keep it that way, and expecting that de facto control will morph into de jure control over time.”

Many Moroccan observers believe that Bolton is sympathetic to the Polisario. “John Bolton has distinguished himself by taking positions that are openly close to those of the separatists,” Tarik Qattab wrote in a story, this spring, for the Moroccan news outlet Le 360, which reflects the views of the government. Moroccan officials have also mounted a concerted effort to curry favor with Trump and Bolton. In May, Morocco cut off diplomatic relations with Iran, one of Trump’s most bitter enemies. Then, in September, the Moroccan foreign minister claimed in an interview with the conservative Web site Breitbart that the Polisario was being provided military training and weapons by Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy. (Morocco gave no proof of these claims, and analysts told me that such a connection was highly unlikely.)

Polisario officials, for their part, have welcomed the renewed U.S. engagement. Trump and other world leaders, they say, would create good will in the Arab world if they broker a peace settlement. European governments have also demonstrated interest in resolving the dispute; last year, Horst Köhler, a former German President, was appointed U.N. Special Envoy for the region. Köhler has long advocated solving internal problems in Africa in order to slow the flow of migrants northward. So far, he has been a forceful presence in the talks.

Initially, Morocco refused to meet with the Polisario, and the parties even fought over the shape of the bargaining table. But Köhler managed to hash out a format seen as a concession to all sides. Eventually, the participants—which included Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, and the Polisario Front—met, in Geneva, on December 5th and 6th. Hilale, the Moroccan Ambassador to the U.N., was present. The talks, he told me, “took place in very respectful atmosphere and ambience.”

After the first day of the meeting, the delegates had a Swiss fondue dinner together. “The Europeans had to explain to the parties how that worked, and that worked to bring them together,” the official close to the talks told me, jokingly referring to the meal as “fondue diplomacy.” By the end, the Algerian foreign minister began to address the Moroccan foreign minister by his first name. However, when the Polisario suggested confidence-building measures, such as removing the mines along the Berm and releasing political prisoners, during the formal talks, they were rebuffed.

By the afternoon of the 6th, a communiqué was agreed upon that called for more talks in the coming months. “From our discussions, it is clear to me that nobody wins from maintaining the status quo,” Köhler said. The Polisario praised the renewed U.S. involvement in the talks and called for “a process of self-determination in Western Sahara.” But the Moroccan foreign minister rejected the idea of a plebiscite. “Self-determination, in Morocco’s view, is done by negotiation,” he said. “A referendum is not on the agenda.” A week later, at the event in Washington, Bolton appeared to back a referendum. “You know, being an American, I favor voting,” he said. “All we want to do is hold a referendum for seventy thousand voters. It’s twenty-seven years later—the status of the territory is still unresolved.”

Until now, the United States has largely backed Morocco in the conflict. During the Cold War, the Polisario was seen as pro-Soviet and received support from Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, as well as Algeria and Cuba. The U.S., under both Republican and Democratic Administrations, sold hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to the Moroccan armed forces. Baker remembers the conflict being portrayed in stark Cold War terms when he visited Morocco. “When I was Treasury Secretary, the Moroccans came to us and they wanted help in their war against Polisario,” Baker told me. “I gave them overhead intelligence.” The intelligence, and direct U.S. military support, were instrumental to the Moroccans as they built the Berm.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Moroccans tried to once again portray the Polisario as the enemy, arguing that an independent Western Sahara would become a haven for terrorists. Baker, in his capacity as the U.N. envoy, put forward two plans for the region. The first offered the Moroccans control over the Western Sahara but allowed the Sahrawis autonomy. The Polisario rejected the proposal, and it was never presented formally to the U.N. Security Council. Baker’s second plan called for an independence referendum by Sahrawis and Moroccans living in the territory after a period of autonomy under a Sahrawi government. In 2003, Baker’s second proposal was unanimously endorsed by the Security Council, but the Moroccans worried that they might lose the referendum. King Mohammed wrote to George W. Bush to scupper Baker’s plan, raising the threat of the “redeployment of terrorist groups in the region.” Elliott Abrams, then a key adviser to the National Security Council, argued that the Polisario was no friend to the United States. “I didn’t see any reason to think that it would turn into a democracy, or that it would be pro-Western,” Abrams told me, in an interview. Baker’s proposals were abandoned.

Today, the territory is caught in diplomatic limbo: the Polisario insists on a referendum, and Morocco insists that the region should be given a more limited autonomy, under the kingdom’s sovereignty. (Bolton has dismissed Morocco’s proposal in the past.) Baker told me he was still perturbed by the breakdown in negotiations. “I came up with a pretty damn good plan, I thought,” he said. The problem, he said, was that the international community and the U.N. Security Council didn’t support him. “You know, the U.N. can only be as effective as its member states,” he said. “The member states don’t want to solve this. They’re not willing to use political chips to solve it, so it ain’t going to get solved.”

The best-known among the Sahrawi protestors demonstrating against Moroccan rule in the Western Sahara is Aminatou Haidar, a slight, birdlike woman in her early fifties. She was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize and has been called the “Sahrawi Gandhi.” A practitioner of nonviolent resistance, Haidar has been beaten, tortured, imprisoned, detained, and interrogated by the Moroccan security services for her protests against the kingdom’s rule in the Western Sahara. In 2009, after travelling abroad, she was barred from returning to the territory, and she went on a hunger strike that left her bones brittle and the vertebrae in her back warped.

I met Haidar last year, in the Canary Islands, in the lobby of a nondescript hotel. She wore a yellow-and-gray mulafa, a traditional veil worn in Northwest Africa, which drew the occasional glance from European holidaymakers walking nearby. She squinted at me through thick-framed glasses. Her eyesight was damaged, she said, when guards blindfolded her for long periods in a Moroccan jail. “I’ve lived the suffering in my own flesh,” she told me. On the day I met her, Sahrawi demonstrators in Laayoune, the capital of Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, had been attacked by the police. “During the last six months, we have registered, I think, eighty-six demonstrations that were stopped or repressed,” she said.

In 1987, when she was twenty, Haidar organized a demonstration in advance of an official U.N. visit to the Western Sahara. Moroccan police came to her house the night before the U.N. team arrived. “I was arrested. They put me in a car, and they started to quickly drive around the street,” she said. The car circled the streets of Laayoune in order to give the impression that they had travelled farther than they actually had. She was worried that she had been taken to a secret jail inside Morocco, as some of her relatives had been, and that she would never return. In fact, she had been taken to a police barracks near her home.

For the next four years, she was imprisoned in various jails, and her family was not told of her whereabouts. For the first year, she lived in solitary confinement. “I contracted rheumatism, because I was thrown into a corridor where it was really cold. And in the summer it was boiling,” she told me. In the second year, Haidar was placed in a cell with other detainees. She said that some of her fellow-prisoners told her that they were bitten by dogs set on them by policemen.

Haidar was released in 1991, as the Moroccans and the Polisario signed a ceasefire. The two parties agreed that the U.N. would broker a vote on national self-determination. Disagreements over who would be allowed to vote delayed the referendum, which has still not taken place. Moroccan officials barred journalists and human-rights organizations from entering the territory and investigating police abuse. “We were totally isolated from the outside world,” Haidar said. Moroccan officials confiscated her passport in 1987 and declined to issue her a new one for nearly two decades.

Last year, I tried to visit Laayoune and make sense of two contradictory narratives that have emerged from Western Sahara. Haider and other independence supporters have told horror stories, yet tourists post enthusiastic reviews of the area’s resorts and beaches. I asked my brother, who is a photographer, to join me. Before leaving, I contacted local supporters of independence, including Haidar, and set up interviews with them in the city.

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