First light in the Sahara

We are looking for a place for breakfast. It is first light in the Sahara, and there is not a sound, except for the flapping of discarded plastic bags in the breeze. (Later in his office in Laayoune, the Moroccan wali will throw up his hands at the price of progress, exclaiming: "He has brought catastrophe upon us, the man who invented the plastic bag!")

So we find a better place for our campfire and watch our nomad host make tea. It is a lengthy ritual, involving much pouring from silver pot to glass and back again. Mohammed produces the cheese. Not made from the whey of soured camel's milk, but foil-wrapped in small triangles from a round box marked La Vache Qui Rit.

Then the silhouette of a camel appears on the nearest ridge. The Sahrawi experience is complete. Any Western traveller's dream.

Except that here, in the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, we are just a few days' drive from Tindouf, where 175,000 Sahrawi refugees have lived in tent cities in the parched desert for 27 years. They fled on the orders of the Polisario Front when the Spanish left, 350,000 Moroccans marched in and the war for Africa's last colony broke out.

Children born in the camps are told that when the independence struggle is won, they will return to their own land.

But life in the towns has long since moved on. Laayoune, once a dusty settlement in the Spanish Sahara, is a city with a new airport and a football stadium. On the traffic-choked Avenue de Mecca, young Moroccan men, many drawn to the region by tax advantages, throng the cafe terraces at night watching premiership football beamed in from Barcelona or Old Trafford.

Out on the busy highway, the service station restaurant could be a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the Nevada desert. There are neon signs and you order your fast food at the counter, except that here it is camel tagine and Coca-Cola to go.

Not a shot has been fired in anger in 10 years. But it is a strange sort of normality. The four-wheel-drives of UN peacekeepers clog the parking lots of Laayoune's hotels and Moroccan soldiers jog along the roads. And the scars of the conflict are still raw.

In the grubby backstreets of Laayoune, I arrange to meet a Sahrawi rights campaigner. But word has gone around, and dozens arrive to give their accounts.

"Habla Espanol?" whispers a gaunt man in a flowing blue robe with piercing eyes. Somebody whispers his name. I am in the presence of a Polisario legend. Sidi Mohammed Dadesh's release last November brought cheering crowds onto the streets of Laayoune. Twenty-two years in Moroccan jails has strengthened his resolve. "This is a liberation struggle," he says calmly.

Nouna Ben Yahdih, 23, wears a flame-coloured veil. She reels off the hour and date of her brother Elhafed's disappearance as if giving testimony. He vanished at dawn one morning, she says, when nine plainclothes Moroccan policemen smashed the sleeping family's door down. "There are hundreds like me," she says.

Seventy countries recognise the exiled government of the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic. None so far has recognised Morocco's claim to sovereignty. But after a shameful 10 years in which the UN has failed to organise a free and fair referendum, Sahrawi hopes of independence look more fragile than ever. America and Britain, anxious to encourage the friendship of a liberal-minded Morocco at a time of turbulence in the Middle East, want to recognise the fact of its presence.

But if the Sahrawis are the wronged in this conflict, there are other victims. Like the tens of thousands of nomads from northern regions trucked into Laayoune by Morocco in 1991 to help Morocco win the promised referendum. They still wait in huge squalid camps around Laayoune, subsisting on government food rations.

The Polisario, too, stands accused, and not just of incarcerating 1,300 Moroccan soldiers in stinking jails in the desert in breach of the Geneva Conventions.

Fatimatou Mansour, 29, is one of many who has fled the Polisario camps. At six she was taken from her home in Dakhla. The Polisario would say it helped her family to escape. She says they were "kidnapped". "We had our camels and our home. Why would we leave?" she asks.

At 10, she was sent to Cuba on a Russian ship for schooling, for work in the sugar cane fields and "political" training. "The Polisario is your mother now," the Cubans said.

Fatimatou was 22 before she saw her family again. Now she has a job, a car and a new baby on the way. "Here at least we can have a future," she says.

Those who defect from Tindouf are dismissed as traitors and Moroccan stooges by the independence movement. But after 27 years, who can blame people for not wanting to rot in the desert?

Morocco's strategy now is to argue that these desert-weary people have everything to gain if they accept the new king's offer of autonomy within Moroccan sovereignty.

"We know the wounds are deep," says Hamid Chabar, the Moroccan governor who liaises with the UN. "But we can offer them something better than tents in the desert."

Even Polisario fighters will be welcome to share power in an autonomous "southern province", he promises, as Morocco inches towards democracy. "We are family, after all. It is not independence, but it is surely better than a micro-state controlled by Algeria."

On a windswept stretch of land a short drive from Mr Chabar's office, miles of freshly-painted new homes with glass windows and views stretching out into the desert have already been built. They are for the shanty dwellers of Laayoune. And one day, Mr Chabar predicts, the exiled Sahrawis of Tindouf may join them. They may never get to vote on it. But the new ghost town has already been given a name. It is called "Homecoming".