Bir Tawil: The Land Nobody Will Claim

Bir Tawil's longest edge runs 95 kilometers along the 22nd parallel of latitude, a perfectly straight line drawn by British colonial officials in 1899 that separates Egypt to the north from Sudan to the south. The quadrilateral hanging below it — 95 kilometers across the top, 46 along the bottom, 26 down the east side, 49 up the west — adds up to 2,060 square kilometers of rocky semi-desert, a little smaller than Luxembourg. [S1] Neither Egypt nor Sudan claims it. Both refuse to. [S7]

This is the only piece of habitable land left on Earth in that condition, and the reason it stays that way is not forgetfulness. [S7]

On 19 January 1899, Lord Cromer and the Egyptian foreign minister Boutros Ghali Pasha signed an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement defining "Soudan" as the territories south of the 22nd parallel of latitude. [S1] The parallel slices the Red Sea coast in a particular way: it puts Bir Tawil's inland desert inside Sudan, and the coastal strip just north of it — about 20,580 square kilometers of beaches, fisheries and reputed oil and gold prospects called the Hala'ib Triangle — inside Egypt. [S1][S7]

Three years and ten months later, on 4 November 1902, the same colonial administrators drew a second line. This one was billed as merely administrative — an attempt to match the map to the actual lives of the people using the land. The Ababda, a Beja-related pastoral people based around Aswan in Egypt, herded their camels and goats across Bir Tawil, so the desert was placed under Cairo. The inhabitants of the Hala'ib coast were closer, geographically and culturally, to Khartoum, so their land was placed under Sudan. [S1] The 1902 line inverts the 1899 line. Bir Tawil now sat with Egypt; Hala'ib now sat with Sudan. The two lines have never been reconciled. [S1][S7]

That asymmetry is what locks the puzzle. Hala'ib is roughly ten times larger than Bir Tawil — a real coastline with ports, fisheries, and reputed oil and gold prospects. [S1][S7] Bir Tawil is gravel and scrub. If you were a government picking only one, you would pick the coast.

Egypt wants Hala'ib. To get Hala'ib, Egypt has to insist that the 1899 parallel is the true frontier. The 1899 parallel puts Bir Tawil on the Sudanese side. Egypt is delighted by this: it claims the coast and disclaims the desert in a single move. [S7]

Sudan wants Hala'ib too. To get Hala'ib, Sudan has to insist that the 1902 administrative line is the real boundary. The 1902 line puts Bir Tawil on the Egyptian side. Sudan is equally delighted: it claims the coast and disclaims the desert in a single move. [S7]

Each country's own preferred line gives Bir Tawil to the other country. There is no legal configuration in which the two governments' positions on Hala'ib can both stand and leave Bir Tawil with somebody. It is undisputed because unwanted — a hole carved into the world by the negative pressure of an argument over somewhere else. [S7]

This is the part the internet found irresistible.

On 16 June 2014, a man named Jeremiah Heaton flew from Abingdon, Virginia, traversed Egyptian territory with what he said was Egyptian permission, climbed a rocky hill in Bir Tawil and planted a blue flag bearing four stars and a crown. It was his daughter Emily's seventh birthday. She had asked him whether she could be a real princess; he had decided to find her a country. He called it the Kingdom of North Sudan. [S4] Within months Disney had bought the film rights, attached to a project announced as The Princess of North Sudan. [S4] By 2015 Heaton was repackaging the stunt as a climate-change and food-security mission. [S6]

In November 2017 a 24-year-old businessman from Indore named Suyash Dixit declared the Kingdom of Dixit, with a capital he named Suyashpur and his own father appointed as prime minister and army governor. [S5] A day later the Russian DJ Dmitry Zhikharev claimed the same patch of desert as the Kingdom of Middle Earth, naming it after Tolkien, accusing both Heaton and Dixit of fabricating their visits, and producing geotagged photographs he says prove he had been there in late 2014. [S5]

None of these claims has any legal standing. [S5] The reason is a sentence the International Court of Justice wrote on 16 October 1975, in its advisory opinion on Western Sahara: at the time of Spanish colonization in 1884, even though the inhabitants were nomadic, they were "socially and politically organized in tribes and under chiefs competent to represent them," and the territory was therefore not terra nullius. [S2] The Court was unanimous. [S2] The collateral effect of that one paragraph was to retire flag-plant occupation as a route to sovereignty over any inhabited region on Earth. [S3]

Bir Tawil is inhabited in exactly that sense. The Ababda, and the Bishari — a Beja subgroup culturally aligned with Sudan — have grazed camels and goats and prospected for gold across this quadrilateral for generations. [S8] Under the Western Sahara reasoning, a Virginia father, an Indian businessman and a Russian DJ standing on a hill with a flag cannot acquire the land from the people already using it, regardless of whether Cairo and Khartoum claim it. [S3][S8] No government, no continental body and no UN organ has recognized any of the kingdoms. [S5]

Schoolroom world maps are sold as a clean partition of land surface among sovereign states, no gaps between the borders. Bir Tawil is the working counter-example. Every honest atlas should print, in place of a flag or a color, a small footnote explaining that the two countries on either side have spent more than a century arguing about which of them does not have to take it. [S7] The argument will not be resolved, because resolving it in either direction costs the loser a coastline.