What these gaps reflect back at us is our own desires, especially the wish to step outside, if only for a short time, the claustrophobic grid of nations. We probably already suspect that it’s an illusion. Shuffling forward in a queue and making it past the passport officer does not mean you are, at that exact moment, leaving or entering a country. Such points of control exist to verify that you are allowed to enter or leave. Their proximity to the borderline is a legal irrelevance. Yet this legal interpretation fails to grasp either the symbolic importance of the border point or the pent-up urge to enter ungoverned territory. The fact that Paso Canoas is split by the Panama–Costa Rica border rather than actually being between borders doesn’t stop people from describing it as an “escaped zone.” Similarly, the steep valley up the Sani Pass is nearly all in South Africa, and the road down from Senegal into Guinea is always in one nation or another, but that isn’t how travelers experience it or even what they want.
The attraction of these in-between spaces has a lot to do with the fact that they are on land. Going through passport control at an airport provides no comparable thrill, even though international airspace is far more like a genuine no man’s land than any number of dusty miles on the ground. It seems that escaping the nation-state isn’t all that is going on here. There is a primal attraction to entering somewhere real, a place that can be walked on, gotten lost in, even built on, and that appears to be utterly unclaimed.
Some of the overland tourist trips that occasionally rumble along the Senegal–Guinea highway offer camping in the no man’s land as part of the package. Like other examples, it’s a zone that provokes people to muse on allegiance and belonging. In his essay “Life Between Two Nations,” the American travel writer Matt Brown describes encounters with villagers along the Senegal–Guinea road that provoke speculation on the nature of national identity:
I stopped my bike to chat with the woman pounding leaves. I asked in French (my Pular only goes so far), “Is this Guinea?”
“Yes,” she answered.
Surprised that she even understood French, I posed a follow-up question. “Is this Senegal?” I asked.
“Yes,” came the reply.
A little later Brown sits on “a nationless rock” and imagines these villagers as freed from the “archaic, nonsensical national borders drawn up by greedy European leaders at the Conference of Berlin over 100 years ago.” Stretching out border posts does seem to break the seal on the national unit. The resultant gap may not be of much legal import, but for travelers on the ground it creates a sense of openness and possibility.
Yet while travelers may relish this expansiveness, the consequences for those who have to live and work in such places can be less positive, such as heightened insecurity and a sense of abandonment. This is one of the reasons why African states have been trying to close the gap in such anomalous spaces. The African Development Fund, which supports economic infrastructure projects across the continent, has made “establishing juxtaposed checkpoints at the borders” of its member states a priority, including at the Guinea–Senegal border. What most concerns the fund’s members is the impact that these distant border posts have on the flow of trade. Along the Guinea–Senegal route there are nightmare tales of vehicles being sent back and forth by officials who keep asking for new documentation or demanding new bribes. In-between land can easily turn into a place of bureaucratic limbo where both travelers and locals are uniquely vulnerable to tiresome and corrupt officialdom. Patches of ground “between” nations are places that can be thought of as free, but they are also places where we are reminded why people willingly give up freedoms for the order and security of being behind a border.
Bir Tawil
21° 52′ N, 33° 41′ E
It seems incredible that anywhere could be so ill thought of that no one wants it. Bir Tawil, a 795-square-mile trapezoid of rocky desert between Sudan and Egypt, is such a place. It is not just a no man’s land; it is actively spurned. It also appears to be the only place on the planet that is both habitable and unclaimed.
The Bir Tawil anomaly opens up a new perspective on world history. It is the history of the struggle not to occupy territory, and sounds like history written back to front. Asserting ownership over place is at the root of many of the world’s enmities and identities. It’s no surprise that we tend to assume nations want to continually grow; that the border, much like the fence put up by an inconsiderate neighbor, is always being pushed to the maximum extent. But Bir Tawil reminds us that nations are defined by their limits: that land is not always wanted, and that for every claim on a piece of ground there must be many acts of denial and avoidance.
For Sudan and Egypt the point of not wanting this landlocked region is that it bolsters a claim to an even bigger and more useful parcel, the 8,000 square miles of the Hala’ib Triangle, which faces the Red Sea. Their dispute arises from the existence of two different versions of the border that separates Egypt and what used to be called Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Both were drawn by the area’s British administrators. The first is from 1899 and is a 770-mile-long straight line across the desert, and is the border Egypt is keen to keep. It gives Bir Tawil to Sudan but holds the valuable Hala’ib Triangle on its side. The Sudanese don’t accept this border and point to another, drawn in 1902, which is mostly straight but toward the coast begins to change course, giving a tongue of land along the Nile to Sudan (called the Wadi Halfa Salient) but also the Hala’ib Triangle. The 1902 map gave both places to Sudan because they were considered by the British to be ethnically and geographically linked to the south. The makers of the 1902 map applied the same logic to scoop the border southward and place Bir Tawil in Egypt. They considered Bir Tawil to belong ethnically in the north because it was used for grazing by the Ababda, a nomadic tribe that lives in southern Egypt.
For many decades the 1902 borders were not seriously disputed. In the early 1990s, however, Sudan granted oil exploration permits for the Hala’ib Triangle. Egypt responded by occupying the area and claiming its right to defend the 1899 border. In response, the Sudanese have offered gestures of defiance. In 2010 a government official tried to get into Hala’ib, with the apparent idea of getting the locals to vote in Sudanese elections. If the plan had worked, it might have backed up Sudan’s claim, but the official wasn’t allowed in, and for now the Egyptians seem to have succeeded in claiming the Hala’ib Triangle and disclaiming Bir Tawil.
In the meantime, Bir Tawil has become ever more unwanted. Although the name means “tall well,” a prolonged drought has removed what little agricultural value Bir Tawil ever had. Satellite images appear to show that across its barren miles there is not a single building. Even its desert tracks are now disused, disappearing reminders that this was once Ababda territory. The Ababda took little notice of the region’s national borders and had their own distinctive ethnic heritage. A 1923 issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain has photographs of Ababda men with thick, tightly braided hair alongside local myths about them, for they were seen as mysterious and ancient even by other desert tribes. It was said that “when followed up into the desert” an Ababda “vanishes from sight after going 200 or 300 yards.” Moreover that their glance is very dangerous to others and “they can bring moving objects to a standstill, when at a considerable distance from them.”
The Ababda have moved away, but an important part of their story remains rooted in this place. Thus, to say that Bir Tawil is unoccupied is not to say that it has no history or that it’s anyone’s to take. It is a point worth making since the unclaimed space of Bir Tawil has become a favorite fantasy item among the Internet’s would-be nation builders. Indeed, these days real information about the place is obscured by myriad websites and online disputes between fictional kings, emirs, and presidents of Bir Tawil.
These playful claims misjudge Bir Tawil’s somber reality, but it is hard to be too disapproving. Bir Tawil excites the geographical imagination because it disorients our expectations
of the modern world, and more specifically our expectations of what nations and borders are trying to achieve.
It seems natural to define the world around what is sought after, but geopolitics can also be considered in terms of what is not wanted. There are a number of ways this happens. First, as we have seen with Bir Tawil, there are “anti-claims” designed to bolster positive claims. Such cases are not uncommon, although usually there is a keen recipient for such apparently unloved places. The borders of China have a number of them. A recent summary of the situation showed that China has given ground in 17 out of 23 of its ongoing border disputes, giving up 1.3 million square miles of land. In the long-running dispute between Greece and Turkey, whose peoples were once intermingled but, over the course of the last century, became isolated into separate, ethnically discrete states, a lot of attention has been given to defining where is not “historically” Greek or not “historically” Turkish. Greek and Turkish irredentism is shot through with as many denials as affirmations. In the quid pro quo of territorial disputes, declaring a lack of interest in a region often turns out to be the key claim.
Bir Tawil is easily overlooked on the world map as an oddity, an area of minor confusion where geopolitical certainty has broken down into a series of dashed lines. Yet its story is of universal importance. For Bir Tawil is one of the few places on earth where one of the key paradoxes of border-making is being explicitly played out. Borders are about claims to land, but as soon as you draw one you limit yourself. Every border is also an act of denial, an acknowledgment of another’s rights. By contrast, the claim to want no borders, much prized by corporate executives and anticapitalist activists alike, is a claim to the whole world. Borders have a far more ambivalent and complex relationship to territory; they combine both arrogance and modesty, both demand and denial.
Nahuaterique
14° 03′ 05″ N, 88° 08′ 57″ W
When borders change, some unlucky communities end up on the wrong side of the wire and wake up to find they are foreigners in their own country. This has been the experience of the people of the remote mountain region of Nahuaterique, which was handed over by El Salvador to Honduras in 1992. The story of Nahuaterique also shows how places once thought to be so important that they were worth fighting for are often forgotten once the battle is over.
Honduras and El Salvador have been bad neighbors for a hundred and fifty years. They have been fighting over their shared border for much of this time. The most recent conflict was a four-day war in 1969. It’s often referred to as the Soccer War since it was preceded by clashes between fans of the two national sides during the games they played in the second North American qualifying round for the World Cup. The war, however, wasn’t actually caused by a soccer brawl. Its true cause was demographic pressure. For years there had been a steady influx of landless people from the small and crowded country of El Salvador into Honduras, which is four times as big. They were looking for work and land to farm and moving across an ill-defined and disputed border. In retrospect it looks as if they were migrating from one country to another, but that isn’t how many of them understood it at the time. As far as they were concerned, they were just moving east, going up into the relatively empty lands of the mountains.
The Soccer War has another, more fitting name: the War of the Disposed. However innocent these settlers’ intent, they were treated as illegal immigrants and as land snatchers. Thousands of Salvadorans were thrown out and new laws were introduced that took land away from Salvadorans in Honduras and gave it to native Hondurans. It was this bitter intervention that started the war. It lasted only four days because the Salvadoran army quickly made deep inroads into Honduras until, under considerable international pressure, it was forced to fall back.
A long series of border negotiations began, eventually ending up at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and it wasn’t until 1992 that a new and definite border was announced. Most people seemed content with the outcome. Roberto Hidalgo Castrillo, the Salvadoran ambassador to the Netherlands, announced that “we can celebrate with great joy.” El Salvador lost Nahuaterique, but this was just one of six disputed areas. The fact that a few small communities would soon find themselves on the other side of the border was seen as a price well worth paying. Twelve thousand Salvadorans found themselves in Honduras, while three thousand Hondurans were informed they were living in El Salvador.
The Salvadorans argue that the people of the twenty-one villages that are scattered across Nahuaterique have since been neglected by their feckless new owner. In fact, the Honduran government is not unsympathetic to the region’s plight. Honduras is understandably concerned about having a lawless no man’s land on its border, but its expressions of concern have been low-key. The people of Nahuaterique rarely vote in Honduran elections and have few real friends in its capital city, Tegucigalpa.
Writing for the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Grafica in April 2013, Siegfried Ramirez recalls how the villagers woke to find themselves abandoned. “When the people first heard the rumor that the land where they lived was not part of El Salvador but in Honduras,” Ramirez writes, “many believed it was just a bad joke.” Honduran officials soon arrived in the area demanding that its residents register their land as Honduran, but the registration process was never completed. As a consequence, only a minority of land in the area is legally owned. It has also taken decades for citizenship cards to be distributed, preventing residents from having any access to basic state services or getting a driver’s license.
The villagers feel forsaken: no longer in El Salvador but disowned by Honduras. The public and legal services available in Nahuaterique remain nonexistent or unpopular. Although schools have been built, until recently many children preferred to walk three hours across the border to go to school in El Salvador. The 1992 border also put an end to the area’s main trade, which was supplying timber to El Salvador. Overnight it turned from a legitimate business into illegal trafficking. The status of a uniformed state presence in the area is even more uncertain. The only sign of Honduran authority is a military post at Palo Blanco, and the soldiers there report that their only task is to secure the border from lumber smuggling. Locals complain that schoolchildren have been robbed by thieves right in front of the Palo Blanco post. When asked why they didn’t intervene, the soldiers claimed that “school safety” was not their concern and, in any case, they didn’t have the power to make arrests.
So at the moment one man, a wiry farmer called Marcos Argueta, is the law. La Prensa Grafica reports that as “he walks down the center of town, people look at him with respect.” Argueta’s authority is based entirely on a local and unofficial election, but it has thrust him into the limelight as the voice of the people. “Many people here didn’t want to be Honduran,” he explains, “but they couldn’t leave as they didn’t have land elsewhere.” Since the transfer, Argueta says, “there have been serious issues with security. Anyone can come in—drug traffickers, criminals.” It’s a situation that he struggles to manage. Drunks and bandits are dealt with by Argueta through a combination of rough justice and wishful thinking. Along “with other reliable men” his technique for dealing with bad behavior is to knock the offending party to the ground and bind his hands and feet till he promises to behave or, ideally, leave.
Such is the despair in Nahuaterique that twelve of its residents started an “indefinite” hunger strike in 2012 outside the National Congress in the Honduran capital. In their press statement they demanded their own regional government as well as “schools, health centers equipped with personnel and medicines, agricultural support and the free movement of people and goods.” It’s a long list, but it does not meet with animosity in Honduras, where the public and political attitude mixes sympathy and neglect. Though the abandonment of Nahuaterique is widely reported in Honduras, there is no sense of urgency. It is pointed out that since 1998 dual citizenship has been granted to people in these once disputed borderlands and that they have the privi
lege of going freely between the two countries. The deputy minister of the interior and population, Salome Castellanos, has warned the villagers to stop complaining. What they need to do, he says, is to learn to live as Hondurans.
While the Honduran newspapers report on the plight of the people of Nahuaterique, they spin it into a good-news story of steady progress. Thus recent headlines in Hondudiario and El Heraldo have announced how thankful the people of the area are to the Honduran human rights ombudsman for sticking up for them and how much they are looking forward to working hard to make what one resident quoted in the papers apparently described as “a new Nahuaterique completely and actively integrated with the social, economic and political life of our new homeland, Honduras.” Alongside these happy thoughts we find government promises of a police station to be built “in the coming months” and the appointment of a doctor for the area.
But if and when Nahuaterique does become “completely and actively integrated” into its new homeland, questions will still remain: Why did it take so long? After having fought so hard and having won back such a sizable chunk of territory, why did Honduras choose to turn its back on the region? It seems that, for Hondurans, the meaning of the place was all in the fight. It also suggests that Nahuaterique just has too many Salvadorans to ever be taken seriously in Honduran politics.
Twayil Abu Jarwal
31° 19′ 2″ N, 34° 48′ 2″ E
A place is not a thing, like a pencil or a watering can, something that can be thoughtlessly disposed of and replaced. The ferocity and ingenuity with which people hang on to the place they care about shows that it is a defining feature of who they are; that to lose one’s place can seem like losing everything.
Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies Page 7
