Sheep magazine archive 1: issues 3-9

30
is a libertarian one, offering freedom not from the
iniquities of capitalism but from the government
interference that inhibits it. Just as we did, he wants
to take advantage of a quirk in the system to defy it.
When I spoke to Heaton, he told me with genuine
enthusiasm that his country (not yet recognised by
any other state or international body) would offer
the world’s great innovators a place to develop their
products unencumbered by taxes and regulation,
a place where private enterprise faces no socially
prescribed borders of its own. Big companies, he
assured me, were scrambling to join his vision.
“You would be surprised at the outreach that has
occurred from the corporate level to me directly,”
Heaton insisted during our conversation. “It’s not been
an issue of me having to go out and sell myself on this
idea. A lot of these large corporations, they see market
opportunities in what I’m doing.” He painted a picture
of Bir Tawil one day playing host to daring scientific
research, ground-breaking food-production facilities
and alternative banking systems that work for the
benefit of customers rather than CEOs. I asked him if
he understood why some people found his plans, and
the assumptions they rested on, highly dubious.
“There’s that saying: if you were king for a day, what
would you do differently?” he replied. “Think about
that question yourself and apply it to your own country.
That’s what I’m doing, but on a much bigger scale.
This is not colonialism; I’m an individual, not a country,
I haven’t taken land that belongs to any other country,
and I’m not extracting resources other than sunshine
and sand. I am just one human being, trying to
improve the condition of other human beings. I have
the purest intentions in the world to make this planet a
better place, and to try and criticise that just because
I’m a white person sitting on land in the middle of the
Nubian desert …” He trailed off, and was silent for a
moment. “Well,” he concluded, “it’s really juvenile.”
But if, by some miracle, Heaton ever did gain global
recognition as the legitimate leader of an independent
Bir Tawili state, would his pitch to corporations –
base yourself here to avoid paying taxes and escape
the manacles of democratic oversight – actually do
anything to “improve the condition of other human
beings”? Part of the allure of unclaimed spaces is
their radical potential to offer a blank canvas – but as
Omar and I belatedly realised, nothing, and nowhere,
starts from scratch. Any utopia founded on the basis of
a concept – terra nullius – that has wreaked immense
historical destruction, is built on rotten foundations.
In truth, no place is a “dead zone”, stopped in time
and ripe for private capture – least of all Bir Tawil,
which translates as “long well” in Arabic and was
clearly the site of considerable human activity in the
past. Although it lacks any permanent dwellings today,
this section of desert is still used by members of the
Ababda and Bisharin tribes who carry goods, graze
crops and make camp within the sands. (Not the least
of our failures was that we did not manage to speak to
any of the peoples who had passed through Bir Tawil
before we arrived.) Their ties to the area may be based
on traditional rather than written claims – but Bir Tawil
is not any more a “no man’s land” than the territory
once known as British East Africa, where terra nullius
was repeatedly invoked in the early 20th century by
both chartered companies and the British government
that supported them to justify the appropriation of
territory from indigenous people. “I cannot admit
that wandering tribes have a right to keep other and
superior races out of large tracts,” exclaimed the British
commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, at the time, “merely
because they have acquired the habit of straggling
over far more land than they can utilise.”
Bir Tawil is no terra nullius. But “no man’s lands”
– or at least ambiguous spaces, where boundaries
take odd turns and sovereignty gets scrambled – are
real and exist among us every day. Some endure at
airports, and inside immigration detention centres, and
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 9