Morocco’s deadly wall across Western Sahara: why the 2,700km Berm was built and the damage it does

Western Sahara has been carved in two since the 1980s by a wall that Morocco built to hold on to territory it occupied in 1975 .

Fifty years on, the conflict remains unresolved and the wall – known as the Berm – remains one of the world’s most militarised borders.

The region is the focus of a project at the University of Porto exploring prospects for biodiversity restoration.

Joana Castro Pereira , a professor of politics and international relations, and postgraduate researcher Simón Pardo de Donlebún Versaci explain the history of the wall and its political and ecological risks.

What is the history of the Berm? Built between 1980 and 1987 , the Berm separates the part of Western Sahara controlled by Morocco from the strip held by the Polisario Front .

The Polisario Front is a movement supported by Algeria that represents the Sahrawi people and has fought for Western Sahara’s independence since the early 1970s.

It currently controls about 20% of the territory.

The Western Sahara-Morocco dispute The Berm runs for about 2,700 kilometres .

It’s the longest continuous barrier after the Great Wall of China .

Alongside it runs a belt of landmines – more than 10 million – often called the world’s longest continuous minefield.

The wall was built in stages, pushing south as Morocco fought the Polisario Front for control of Western Sahara.

The disputed territory is a former Spanish colony that Madrid handed over in the 1970s without ever holding the independence referendum international law required.

The Berm let Morocco do what battlefield victories hadn’t: keep the most valuable parts of the territory – coastline, phosphate mines and towns – while pushing Polisario fighters and hundreds of thousands of Sahrawi civilians into refugee camps in Algeria.

The UN calls this the world’s second-longest-running refugee crisis .