Only a few years back it took several days to drive to the capital, Nouakhott, driving along the beaches. Illicit petrol comes in by sea. Cocaine is trafficked through the airport. In the market Guineans and Ghanaians, Ivorians and Malians rub shoulders with black Mauritanian fishermen and traders from the south of the country, and with the majority Arab population. Many of the Africans are awaiting their turn to make the perilous and illegal sea trip to the Canary Islands, outpost of an unwelcoming Europe.

A smattering of Asians and Europeans are to be seen. A Vietnamese man, complete with high straw hat, strolls the market. Shipping agents and traders meet in a Spanish club. A Russian tries to make a go of a bar. Two Chinese restaurants compete for the ex-pat population.

A community ignored

But the largest population in transit is invisible. In this town of perhaps 100,000 – nobody knows quite how many – live perhaps 15,000 Sahrawis, a community largely ignored by the outside world. What little attention is paid to the Western Sahara conflict focuses on the refugee camps in Algeria and, to a lesser extent, Moroccan repression of the population inside the occupied territories.

When Moroccan and Mauritanian troops moved into Western Sahara after Franco’s death in 1975 and the subsequent Spanish withdrawal from its African colony, more than half of the Sahrawis fled. Most went east to camps set up in the forbidding environment of the Algerian hamada. But some of the refugees moved south into northern Mauritania because it was nearer or because they had kin there.

There are probably 20,000-30,000 Sahrawis in Mauritania as a whole. The numbers have increased over the years, not just through births but because people have come from the refugee camps to seek work. They toil in the great iron ore mines deep in the desert, mines linked to the sea terminal at Nouadhibou by the longest train in the world. Two kilometres long, it bursts through a red cloud of sand to the end of its ten-hour journey through the dust and heat, its massive wagons ridden by travellers too poor to ride in the one or two coaches.

Others still herd camels. In Nouadhibou itself, Sahrawis work in the fishing harbour – $4 a day is the going rate – or in petty commerce, from internet cafes to second-hand clothing to spare parts stripped from old cars. In an echo of their days as nomads, many are here for just part of the year, visiting from the camps, meeting up with family from the occupied territories lucky enough to secure passports, easing bronchial conditions with a few weeks or months of sea breeze. All are in transit, even those born and bred here. All are waiting to go home.

Prison thoughts

Abdelsalam holds out for inspection what appear to be two grey school exercise books. Opening them, the paper is rough and brittle. The text, too, reminds one of the careful work of somebody learning to handle a pen. One book is written in Arabic and one in Spanish. Both have delicate illustrations. But they are not exercise books and were not written by a child with an unfamiliar pen. The paper was salvaged from sacks of cement and the backing from plasterboard. The ink was made from crushed charcoal and water and the pen an improvised quill.

In 12 years in Moroccan prisons where detainees died weekly, Abdelsalam had plenty of time to write his thoughts – eight thin volumes, smuggled out page by page.

He was released in 1991 after a ceasefire was implemented between the Sahrawi guerrillas of the Polisario front and the Moroccan army. That was supposed to lead to a referendum on self-determination. The Sahrawis are still waiting.

In another house we drink tea with Bet’a Haymid. She meets her mother here for a few months a year; then they part, Bet’a and her children returning to the camps and her mother going back to Laayoune, the main town in the Western Sahara. The family was divided in 1975, Bet’a fleeing to the camps and marrying a fighter who was killed in the battle of Smara in 1983, her parents remaining.

For 13 years she had no idea if her father and mother had survived ‘the years of lead’. She only discovered they were still alive in 1998 when tribal elders working with the UN were allowed to visit the occupied territories to compile an electoral roll for the referendum that never happened.

Deep kindred

Outwardly, Arab Mauritanian and Sahrawi are indistinguishable. The women wear the same bright cloth strips, worn like saris, and the men revert to the traditional blue or white daraa robe. They speak the same hassaniya dialect of Arabic. Colonial borders divided tribes that ranged across the Western Sahara, Mauritania, southern Algeria, southern Morocco and beyond, so there is a kinship between many northern Mauritanians and many Sahrawis that runs deeper than nationality. That link has made it possible for Sahrawis to live ostensibly normal lives in Mauritania. But it has also left them in a permanently delicate situation.

Every coup, every change of government, every reshuffle is watched to see if the balance of power in Nouakchott has tilted power towards those sympathetic to the Sahrawi cause or those inclined to ally with the menacing Moroccan presence to the north.

Since her husband died Fatimatou has continued the traditional family role within the community of teaching the Koran to children. Her family fled to Mauritania from Dakhla on the coast of the Western Sahara when Moroccan troops invaded. They had not calculated that the Mauritanian junta would seize part of the territory two weeks later. Sahrawis suspected of independence sympathies were persecuted. She was beaten in a Mauritanian prison. The family lived in the desert for three years before moving to Nouadhibou – then little more than a village around the former French port and border emplacements. There they lived in an animal shed.

Polisario’s long distance raids deep into Mauritania forced withdrawal and renunciation of territorial claims and since then life for Sahrawis has improved. Polisario works among the community, tolerated but clandestine. A young professional, born and bred in Nouadhibou, speaks of the glass ceiling that will restrict his career. Sahrawis do not discuss politics in public. Getting permission to host a music troupe from the refugee camps was a major achievement for the community, brandishing their flag during the concert an act of bravery.

Sand-filled Lagouira

Are there tears in Soudi’s eyes as we survey Lagouira? If so, are they tears of nostalgia or tears for what it has become? The sand has filled the main street so we stand almost at first floor level of some of the buildings. The beehive shaped barracks of the tropas nomadas, the Sahrawi troops recruited by Spain – many of whom then defected to Polisario after it was formed in 1973 – are to our left. Soudi remembers the family who lived in the house on our right. He looks north. A few kilometres distant is the western extension of the Wall, a berm 1,500 kilometres long, mined and garrisoned to keep Polisario fighters out of their homeland and to keep Sahrawi families divided.

‘From here,’ he says, ‘I began my walk to Aoussert to join up with Polisario when the news came of the Moroccan invasion.’ He walked 100 kilometres, travelling at night. On his arrival he was dispatched to help evacuate civilians hiding in the desert at Umm Dreiga. On the first day the Moroccan Mirages arrived. They strafed and bombed the refugees and when they were out of ammunition they returned to base for more. He became a fighter.
Lagouira stands for all the absurdity and pathos of the colonial legacy in a region spattered with the remnants of empire. It is on the same narrow spit as Nouadhibou, perhaps five kilometres away but on the side exposed to the Atlantic. The Spanish developed it as a trading and fishing port with a military base. Even now, sand filled, roofs and windows blown out, inhabited by a few black fishing families and a detachment of Mauritanian troops, it has a charm. Soudi remembers it fondly. A notional border runs through the scrub and desert of the spit. Once it divided French-held Mauritania from the Spanish Sahara. The ruin of an absurd border post remains although the road running past it has long disappeared.

Mauritania seized Lagouira with some brutality. The Spanish residents had long gone but the Sahrawis were expelled. The town was abandoned except for the army. But when Mauritania abandoned its territorial pretensions it did not withdraw from the town. Holding on to this tiny sliver of the Western Sahara gave it control over the whole spit. To relinquish that would give the Moroccan military the ability to seize Nouadhibou in a moment. And as Morocco for many years claimed sovereignty over Mauritania as well as the Western Sahara, the fear was not ill-founded.

The Sahrawis have not been allowed to return. Soudi and some other older men slip back to spend a few hours fishing up the coast. Ba has never been here before although he has lived in Mauritania all his life. He sees not just the ruins of the past but the foundations of a future town in an independent state.

Renouncing a referendum

With the backing of France and, increasingly, of the US in the UN security council, Morocco has been able to snub international law. It renounced the referendum plan when it became clear during voter registration that it would lose and the Sahrawis would opt for independence. It then rejected a proposal that would give the territory autonomy for a period and then a vote in which even Moroccan settlers would participate. Now there are direct UN-sponsored talks at which Morocco is pushing for an autonomy plan that would be grafted on to the system of repression and intimidation, patronage and appointment it has established in the territory.

Polisario has rejected anything short of self-determination as a betrayal of its people. Is this just rhetoric, the words of leaders anxious to preserve their status while the people languish? Not from the comments we hear in Sahrawi homes in Nouadhibou. People from the occupied territories and the camps and those who are born in Mauritania all say the same, that they will not renounce their right to decide their own fate.

A few years back the Paris-Dakar rally was scheduled to go through the Western Sahara. The organisers sought Moroccan permission, ignoring Polisario. The issue became a diplomatic crisis. Polisario called for mobilisation. In Mauritania, Sahrawis in their hundreds packed their bags to set off for the camps and prepare for war. Conflict was averted but the point was made that, even after years of fruitless ceasefire and military demobilisation, the Sahrawis would take up arms.

Women and men, young and old, the message was the same in Nouadhibou: if the UN-sponsored talks fail and no political solution is found, the ceasefire will be pointless. The trucks will be loaded up and the refugee camps will swell with returning veterans and inexperienced volunteers and the Sons of the Clouds will prepare for war.

Toby Shelley is the author of Endgame in the Western Sahara – What Future for Africa’s Last Colony, Zed Books, 2004

A $1 trillion market lies just over the horizon. Not a previously undiscovered continent whose resources can be pillaged and inhabitants trained to labour and consume, nor a nearby planet where the little green men will trade in platinum for bottle tops – here we are talking about nanotechnology.

The claims and projections for this emerging basket of processes and products suggest its impact could be as major as finding a new land mass or trading with planetary neighbours. And nanotechnology is going to affect our lives, bringing benefits but also broken promises and serious dangers.

Nanotechnology is the systematic exploitation of the properties materials display at the scarcely conceivable scale of billionths of a metre, far smaller than most contemporary commercial chemical processes operate. At this scale many materials act very differently from how they behave at a larger scale. Basic sciences teaches us that diamonds and charcoal have different qualities but are both made of carbon. Similar disparities are exploited by nanotechnology. For example, materials that may not conduct electricity at a larger scale may be highly efficient at the nanoscale, or the colour or transparency they display may be different, or they may be massively stronger. They may gain or lose toxicity.

The manipulation of these properties has applications in just about every area of life – from the very mundane (and already commercially available), such as translucent sun lotion and self-cleaning windows, to the highly targeted delivery of drugs specifically to infected cells, massive increases in the efficiency of solar power and fuel cells, and advances in computing that could both extend the limited lifetime of the current chip-based paradigm and take us way beyond it into the realms of DNA and quantum switch computing.

The spin is that nanotechnology will feed the hungry, power the energy-poor, and conquer disease. Its applications do indeed have the potential to bring great benefits. Tiny and highly efficient diagnostic kits capable of instantaneous scanning for hundreds of conditions and illnesses could be made from nanoscale components called quantum dots, housed in a latex bead and exposed to a light source. Solar panelling that can be rolled out like roofing felt could power the most remote communities while water is efficiently filtered to eradicate a range of diseases. The most appalling pollution of land and water might be reversed using nanoparticles of iron.

We have been here before. Biotechnology was going to feed the world but what it has done is to tie millions of farmers to the products supplied by a handful of powerful corporations, speeded up the plunder of seed varieties from the developing world, and raised health and environmental concerns that have seen Europe refuse US foodstuff that Washington has then attempted to dump on African countries.

While some developing countries do have niche nanotechnology research programmes of their own, the spend on R&D is inevitably concentrated in the institutions and corporations of the rich world. Indeed, there is fierce competition between corporations and states to dominate nanotechnology. In 2000-2003, worldwide government spending on nanotechnology research was some $3 billion, more than three times that of the previous three years. The US federal spend for last year was estimated at nearly $890 million, and that excludes direct military spend and state level expenditure. Committees and hearings regularly assess the dangers of being outpaced by others.

At the same time, there is scarcely a major manufacturer in the world that does not have a nanotechnology strategy. For some it is a matter of wanting to exploit new materials and processes ahead of competitors. For others it is a matter of understanding emerging technology that might render their current processes and products obsolete. Some invest in in-house research, others farm it out to universities, or buy in to small specialist companies, or purchase patents or licences from players too small to exploit their discoveries.

With US government agencies touting a market value for nanotechnology of $1 trillion by 2015 (a more cautious €220 billion by 2010 is used by one German bank), there is little wonder at the excitement among corporate strategists. For the car industry, just the probable savings on rare metals used for catalytic converters is forecast to bring early savings of $1 billion a year and more accurate engineering another $2.5 billion. High-tech sensors at the nanoscale will have applications for medicine, transport ergonomics and security with a potential 2012 value of $17 billion, according to some estimates. And so it goes on for industry after industry, perhaps the most impressive being the semiconductor industry, where the value of nanotechnology could be $300 billion before 2020.

And what of curing malaria or lighting and heating fuel-poor communities? If there have been any studies of the market potential, we can be sure they are considerably less attractive than putting investment into treatment for obesity in American teenagers or supplying light-sensitive, power generating glazing for European office blocks.

Inevitably the military is deeply implicated in nanotechnology, particularly the US military. The quadrennial defence reviews that are the road maps of US strategy highlighted the importance of nanotechnology in 2001. Ambitions include the development of ‘smart dust’, minute sensors deployed by the billion to monitor battlefields or entire regions. Missouri University has an army contract to marry nanoparticles and microchip technology into miniaturised warheads.

Meanwhile, the flip side of the promises held out for medical treatment using nanoparticles and understanding and manipulation of their properties is the threat of hitherto unimagined varieties of chemical and biological warfare, a concern already identified by the British MoD. The US military talks of ‘bionanobots’ that might identify enemy combatants by DNA analysis and then self-destruct in the brain, and of nanobots that could destroy hardware by eroding metals or rubber.

We have become accustomed to the disparity in armour and firepower between the Palestinian stone thrower and the Israeli soldier, between ‘Rolling Thunder’ and the culvert bomb in Falluja. At MIT, the Institute for Soldier Technologies, partnered by Raytheon and DuPont amongst others, is using nanotechnology as part of the Future Force Warrior project ‘to create a lightweight, overwhelmingly lethal, full-integrated individual combat system, including weapon, head-to-toe individual protection, netted communications, soldier-worn power sources, and enhanced human performance’.

One of the reasons that biotech food reached the shelves before environmental and health questions had been addressed was because regulatory agencies were not up to the task of assessing new products. The expertise was concentrated in the higher-paying corporate sector. Additionally, where a new technology brings a paradigm shift, regulation is not geared up to ask the right questions.

This is the case with nanotechnology, and it means that we, as workers and consumers and inhabitants of our environment, are unshielded from the potential dangers of nanoproducts and processes. Materials manipulated at the nanoscale may well be familiar to regulatory authorities and have been passed as safe without those authorities having any proper understanding of the different properties – and potential hazards – of these materials at the nanoscale.

As late as 2005, there was no coordinated surveillance of new products anywhere because of their use of nanoparticles. Staggeringly, the US Food and Drugs Administration declared, ‘Particle size is not the issue.’ Even after the scandals and rows over GM foods, campaigners at the Canadian-based ETC Group found no regulation anywhere in the world governing the entry of nanoscale particles into food products. Treatments so small they can pass through the blood-brain barrier are a Holy Grail for researchers into Alzheimers, but what are the dangers of particles so small they can worm into every cell in our bodies? For a century communities have fought the blight of asbestosis. We do not know whether the rush to profit will unleash a hazard far more pervasive.

I have not touched on some of the more distant ambitions for and fears arising from nanotechnology – self-replicating products, factories in a shoe box, grey-goo consuming the planet. But if nanotechnology is to be anything like as transformative as governments and business believe, there are compelling reasons for civil society rapidly to involve itself. We need to be sure that profits are not put ahead of potentially catastrophic environmental and health risks, and that we are not at the starting line of a new arms race. More positively, we must demand that the benefits of an exciting new dimension in scientific research accrue not to those who need them least but to those who need them most.

Toby Shelley is the author of Nanotechnology: New Promises, New Dangers, Published by Zed Books this year at £9.99

Nanotech: A consumer Guide

From skin creams promising to peel off the years to top of the range, insulating insoles for your walking boots, nano particles have already made their way into a product near you. Most popular, according to the web directory NanoVip.Com, are Bionova’s nano skin care products against skin ageing. They work by replicating bio-nutrients, which exist in young, healthy bodies and re-establish cellular communication so that the body’s self-healing process is improved.

But do we really want to develop substances that can permeate our cells with such ease? The potential to heal many medical conditions is no doubt exciting, but we need to have proper regulation. Nanomaterials, sunscreens and cosmetics: small ingredients, big risks, a recent report from Friends of the Earth, estimates that there are ‘at least several hundred cosmetics, sunscreens and personal care products which contain nanomaterials’, most of which are untested. Manufacturers include L’Oreal, Estee Lauder, Proctor and Gamble, Chanel and Revlon. Potentially, we may be inhaling, ingesting and absorbing toxic materials on a daily basis.

Although the personal care industry is taking the lead in bringing nanomaterials to the unwitting consumer, it is not alone. Nanotechnology is also transforming the sporting world – for those who can afford it – with the introduction of bend-resistant golf clubs, extra sticky ski wax, super strong, lightweight bikes, stiffer tennis rackets and enhanced hockey sticks. A dream for some, a joke for many: where does this leave the concept of a fair game?

The Food Standards Agency states that it ‘is not aware of any examples of manufactured nanoparticles or other nanomaterials being used in food currently sold in the UK’. But according to the ETC Group, nano-scale ‘carotenoids’ – a food additive used in lemonades, fruit juices and margarines – are already in use. What is beyond dispute is that ‘nanofood’ research is big business, with estimates suggesting that the market in such products will be worth $10 billion globally by 2010. ‘Biofortified’ foods (with extra vitamins and minerals) are currently being developed. Unilever, meanwhile, is using nanotechnology to develop low fat ice creams.

And finally, a self-cleaning glass surface has been developed and patented by a number of companies, including the Taiwan-based Sino Technology Corporation. To those of us who worry about the ability of an engineered material to actually ‘break down’ organic matter, this is an alarming development. Sino’s slogan to ‘Beautify Our World With Nano Technology’ implies the most arrogant of assumptions: that we know better than nature. Do we?

Suzanne Fane-Saunders

ETC Group (Erosion, Technology and Concentration) – Activist website with reports on nanotechnology and corporate power, patents, and the potential implications of nanotechnology upon agriculture in the global South

Friends of the Earth Australia Nanotechnology Project – Activist resource site on nanotechnology, including a downloadable report on Nanotech, sunscreens and cosmetics and clear introductions for non-geeks

Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties
Royal Society report commissioned by the UK Government