Is there desert in the Sahara?
A question that anyone uninformed about toponymy or geography can ask, and it may seem naive to an Arabic speaker who is not aware of the political, geographical and linguistic dimension that similar terms can entail
Once, in Andalusia, a French guide who spoke perfect Spanish accompanied us on a visit and showed us a bridge saying: “this bridge dates back to Arab times and is called El puente de Alcántara”.
This phrase caused slight smiles among the tourists, who were almost all from Morocco, and one of us commented to him saying that the word Alcantara in Arabic means bridge, the guide thanked him for the information.
And back to our first question.
The person who asked this question did not know that the word Sahara in Arabic means desert. A simple unintentional pleonasm. This is what happens when many refer to the territorial issue of the Moroccan Sahara, unfortunately, as an area only with a political meaning and not as an indication with a geographical territorial meaning.
This geographical area in the south of Morocco, officially called the Southern Provinces of Morocco, has belonged administratively and territorially to Morocco for centuries, before being occupied by Spain and recovered by Morocco after the epic peaceful Green March in 1975.
A march carried out after the Hague Tribunal confirmed in a ruling (in 1975) that there had always existed a relationship of self-sacrifice, belonging and dependence between the tribes of the Sahara (Southern Provinces) and the Throne (Sultans) of Morocco.
The same happened when Morocco was negotiating independence with France (in 1955), when the tribes and inhabitants of the eastern Sahara (desert) (west of the current Algeria, which at that time was called French province, where Tindouf is located, where the Polisario is located), did not want to remain under French sovereignty and declared they wanted to return - underlining the word return - to their original homeland (existing document in the French archive of the referendum held by France in this area).
Morocco, in this case King Mohamed V, did not want to negotiate this issue with the French because he also defended the independence of his brothers in Algeria (Independent in 1962) to whom he subsequently provided financial, military and political support in the UN.
This is what is currently called Eastern Sahara, which historically and geographically was Moroccan, including the areas where the Polisario (Tindouf) currently survives, because it does not live.
Geography hides truths that history often reveals and the names of the places, for their part, confirm it. The Desert exists in the Sahara, in the real Sahara, in the south of Morocco, with real place names and not the names emphasized in the puppet Republic of Tindouf, with its mirage names.
In the Moroccan Sahara there is desert and in the desert there are Dunes, and more than Dunes, there is also an Atlantic ocean.
Abdelali Barouki. Moroccan MP and academic