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In the vast, disputed expanse of Western Sahara, a poem can be as dangerous as a rifle and a camera as threatening as a weapon of war. While international diplomats debate the region’s future in the corridors of the United Nations, a parallel conflict unfolds in the cultural sphere. For the Sahrawi people, art has moved far beyond personal expression. It has become a vital “second front”, a tool of diplomatic soft power abroad and an act of defiance at home. Songs, films, poetry, and performance now function as instruments through which a stateless people assert existence in the face of erasure.

A Conflict Frozen in Time
To understand why a song or a flag can lead to imprisonment, one must understand the history of the conflict’s frozen violence. Western Sahara has been contested since 1975, when Spain withdrew from its former colony and Morocco annexed the territory, triggering a sixteen-year war with the pro-independence Polisario Front.

A United Nations–brokered ceasefire in 1991 promised a referendum on self-determination, but the vote never took place. Today, the territory remains divided by a 2,700-kilometer sand wall known as the Berm. To the west lies Moroccan-controlled land rich in phosphates and fisheries; to the east and across the Algerian border lie the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf, where nearly half the population has lived in exile for close to fifty years. When hostilities reignited in November 2020, the low-intensity war deepened an already severe crackdown on Sahrawi civil society. In this landscape of stalled diplomacy and militarized control, culture has emerged as one of the few remaining battlegrounds.

Culture as Diplomacy in Exile
In the refugee camps, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), the state-in-exile proclaimed by the Polisario Front, has turned culture into a strategic diplomatic weapon. Lacking economic or military leverage on the world stage, Sahrawis have invested in soft power to prevent their struggle from disappearing into silence. Nowhere is this clearer than in FiSahara, the Sahara International Film Festival, founded in 2003. Often described as the world’s only film festival held in a refugee camp, FiSahara brings not only cinema but also global attention to the desert. Western actors, directors, and activists—among them Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz—have travelled to the camps, forcing international media to confront a crisis it often ignores.

The success of FiSahara led to the creation of the Abidin Kaid Saleh Audiovisual School, which trains young Sahrawis in filmmaking and journalism. This marked a critical shift from being filmed by outsiders to filming themselves for international audiences. Figures such as Brahim Chagaf, now a filmmaker and instructor, embody this transformation toward self-representation. Through these projects, cinema has become a means of state-building without a state, a way to document reality, preserve memory, and project national identity across borders.

The Poets of the “Friendship Generation”
One of the most sophisticated tools of Sahrawi cultural resistance is the Generación de la Amistad, or Friendship Generation, a collective of poets founded in 2005. In an unexpected postcolonial move, these writers did not reject the language of the former colonizer. Instead, poets such as Bahia Mahmud Awah, Limam Boicha, and Salka Embarek embraced Spanish as a “Trojan horse” to enter the cultural bloodstream of Spain itself. Their work bypasses political filters and speaks directly to a public that once regarded Western Sahara as its “provincia.”

Their poetry reframes the Sahrawi struggle not as a distant African conflict but as a shared historical responsibility within the Hispanic world. Salka Embarek’s poem “I Am Sahara,” which personifies the land as a woman who cannot be conquered, stands as both a feminist and national anthem of resistance. Through Spanish verse, these poets have turned the cultural legacy of colonialism into a weapon for anti-colonial memory.

Art as a Security Threat in the Occupied Territories
Cross the Berm into Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, and the story darkens dramatically. Here, cultural expression that affirms a distinct Sahrawi identity is treated not as folklore but as a national security threat. Traditional Hassaniya oral poetry, known as Badi, is viewed by authorities as a vessel for subversive history and political resistance. The experience of the poet Hadjatu Aliat Swelm illustrates the cost of such expression. In the early 2000s, she attempted to publish her poetry online under a pseudonym. When her identity was uncovered, she was subjected to intense police surveillance and harassment and ultimately forced to flee her home, choosing exile over silence or imprisonment. The oral nature of Badi makes it impossible to censor completely, yet even the possession of recorded “resistance poetry” at checkpoints can lead to interrogation. In the occupied territories, identity itself becomes criminalized when it is sung, recited, or remembered aloud.

Gdeim Izik and the Criminalization of Cultural Voice
The collision between culture and open resistance reached a turning point in November 2010 with the Gdeim Izik protest camp. Thousands of Sahrawis erected traditional tents outside Laayoune to protest discrimination and marginalization. When Moroccan security forces dismantled the camp, violence erupted, and leading activists were arrested in what became known as the Gdeim Izik trial. Among them was Bachir Khadda, a journalist and writer sentenced to twenty years in prison. Since his arrest in December 2010, he has been systematically denied access to writing materials. His hunger strikes to protest the confiscation of his manuscripts underscore how the act of writing is treated as a danger to the state.

Mohamed Tahlil, a human rights defender also sentenced to twenty years, focused much of his work on the cultural rights of victims. His testimony includes reports of torture and sexual violence during detention. In these cases, prison does not merely punish political dissent; it seeks to silence cultural memory itself.

The War on Cameras: Equipe Media
Visual resistance is perhaps the most dangerous form of cultural activism in occupied Western Sahara. Equipe Media, an underground collective of Sahrawi citizen journalists founded in 2009 in Laayoune, operates in secrecy to film demonstrations, police brutality, and daily life under occupation. Their smuggled footage formed the basis of the documentary 3 Stolen Cameras, whose title refers to equipment confiscated by police.

Members of Equipe Media live under constant threat. In 2016, cameraman Mohamed al-Bambari was sentenced to six years in prison, later reduced, in charges widely interpreted as retaliation for his media work. In a territory where international journalists face severe restrictions, the camera has become one of the most feared tools of resistance.

The Body as a Canvas: Sultana Khaya
Since November 2020, the activist Sultana Khaya has transformed her own body and home into a site of performance resistance. Living under de facto house arrest in the coastal city of Boujdour, she waves the Sahrawi flag from her rooftop and sings revolutionary songs in defiance of the authorities. The response has been brutal. On May 12, 2021, Moroccan security agents raided her home. Sultana and her sister reported being sexually assaulted in front of their elderly mother. Chemical substances, including so-called “skunk water,” were thrown into the house to make it uninhabitable. Despite a siege lasting hundreds of days, her resistance continues. What might appear as simple gestures—singing, flag-waving, refusing invisibility—have turned her home into a living symbol of the Sahrawi struggle.

Women, Music, and Cultural Leadership
In Sahrawi society, cultural leadership has long been shaped by women. Poetry and music, traditionally female domains, have been politicized into tools of resistance. One of the most striking examples is the Tebraa, a clandestine form of oral poetry performed exclusively by women. Historically used to express private emotions, Tebraa has evolved into a coded language of political mockery that Moroccan authorities often cannot decipher, allowing it to circulate beneath the radar of repression.

Sahrawi music on the global stage has also become a powerful vehicle of advocacy. The late Mariem Hassan, known as the “Voice of the Desert,” transformed traditional songs into oral histories of exile and dispossession. Today, Aziza Brahim, based in Barcelona, carries that mantle forward. Her music fuses Tabal percussion with blues and rock, and her 2024 album Mawja brings the story of Western Sahara into world music festivals across Europe. She describes her work explicitly as “sonic resistance,” using sound as a bridge between refugee camps and Western youth audiences.

A Culture That Refuses to Die
The Sahrawi experience represents a rare phenomenon in modern conflict: a cultural war in which a state seeks to erase an identity, and a people use that very identity as their primary shield. Through Spanish-language poetry in Madrid, underground videos in Laayoune, and protest songs from rooftops under siege, Sahrawi culture has become the one territory that cannot be occupied. The conflict is waged not only with soldiers and walls, but with verses, rhythms, images, and memories.

Soft Power as a Survival Strategy
For the Sahrawi cause, cultural diplomacy is not simply art for art’s sake. It is a strategic survival project. While the political process at the United Nations repeatedly stalls, Sahrawi cultural networks have built a robust infrastructure that keeps their struggle visible in Europe and Latin America. Festivals such as FiSahara and initiatives like ARTifariti, an international art and human rights encounter held in refugee camps and liberated territories, frame the conflict not only as a territorial dispute but as a question of human rights and cultural survival. By inviting international artists to work in the landscape of war, sometimes even on the separation wall itself, these projects symbolically assert Sahrawi sovereignty over land that is otherwise inaccessible.

This cultural infrastructure has succeeded in building what might be called a moral constituency: a network of artists, activists, and civil society supporters who pressure their own governments not to ignore Western Sahara. In this sense, the Sahrawi represent one of the few examples of a stateless nation that has managed to project soft power without a recognized state.

Perform is ultimately to survive
As armed conflict once again simmers and diplomatic solutions remain frozen, Sahrawi culture ensures that the struggle endures beyond the battlefield. It lives in theatres, bookstores, music festivals, and whispered poems at checkpoints. In a world where political recognition remains elusive, art and culture have become not only forms of resistance, but also proofs of existence. For the Sahrawi, to sing, to film, to write, and to perform is ultimately to survive.

In Western Sahara, culture is more than expression, it is survival, resistance, and diplomacy.

From underground journalism and prison poetry to international film festivals in refugee camps, Sahrawi artists are using creativity as a frontline against erasure.

This article explores how art becomes a shield, a weapon, and a voice when politics fails.

#ArtAsResistance #WesternSahara #HumanRights #CulturalDiplomacy #FreedomOfExpression #SoftPower #Journalism #Poetry #Music #Activism

References

Art and Culture as Resistance, The Sahrawi “Second Front”

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