There is nothing remotely romantic about their part of the desert, writes Mary Raftery. One of the hottest places on the planet, known as "the oven of the earth", it is hard to imagine how anyone could survive there.
It is an area of the Sahara around the town of Tindouf, just inside Algeria's south-western border. It has been home to almost 200,000 of the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara for over a quarter of a century. In 1975 they were forced to flee the invasion of their country by their northern neighbour, Morocco, and have been condemned ever since to this savage exile. It is one of the world's most unjust and one-sided conflicts, in which Morocco's entirely illegal occupation of their country has been tolerated by the international community.
Tom Kitt, our Minister of State for Development Co-operation and Human Rights, visited them this week - an opportunity, one might have thought, to highlight this gross injustice suffered by an entire people. After all, Tom Kitt's responsibilities do include the portfolio of human rights.
But no. Tom Kitt chose instead to cast himself as the saviour of Moroccans (rather than Sahrawis). One hundred Moroccan prisoners of war were released on Tuesday by the Polisario, the Sahrawi organisation which fought a liberation struggle against the Moroccan army for 16 years. The releases were all down to Tom Kitt, he would have us believe. No mention of the fact that the Polisario has been releasing Moroccan prisoners for years, or that initially Morocco refused to accept them back.
Morocco attempted to deny their very existence, according to the Polisario, claiming that the Sahrawis did not have the military capability to take prisoners in the first place. In 1997, for instance, Morocco refused to accept a group of almost 100 released POWs, who were left in limbo, abandoned by their own side, for over three years.
I met several of the Polisario leaders while filming in the Tindouf refugee camps for an RTÉ documentary on the United Nations in 1995. They told us that we were the first TV crew to gain access to the camps, and the locals were delighted that pictures of how they lived would at last be seen by the outside world. While the fate of the Moroccan POWs was certainly an issue - and they should indeed all be released - it paled into insignificance beside the overwhelming evidence all around of the appalling injustice done to the Sahrawi people.
They lived huddled in tents in conditions of disgraceful deprivation, lost in the middle of a vicious lunar landscape, in a climate which mercilessly roasted you during the day and froze you at night, marooned thousands of miles from their home and abandoned by the world. Their settlements are deluged by flash floods from time to time, destroying their few meagre possessions and leaving death and disease in their wake.
This is the living hell in which the Sahrawi people have been forced to live for decades by the illegal aggression of their Moroccan masters. This is the gross abuse of human rights to which Tom Kitt might have attempted to draw the world's attention.
Morocco has of course long had powerful friends, most notably the US and France, which together with Britain were falling over themselves during the 1990s to sell it weapons. Armaments included thousands of landmines which the Moroccans planted around many of the country's critical oases, rendering them lethal for decades to come.
The echoes of other conflicts are everywhere. Morocco's claim to Western Sahara is almost identical to that used by Saddam Hussein to illegally invade Kuwait - namely that 1,000 years ago the two countries were one. Morocco has built a vast, 2,000-kilometre long wall dividing Western Sahara, designed to keep the Sahrawi people out - a tactic more recently adopted by Israel in Palestine.
We in Ireland should have immediate recognition of the Moroccan strategy of "planting" Western Sahara with hundreds of thousands of its own settlers. This latter-day plantation has been highly effective in hindering a settlement of the conflict, with Morocco claiming that its settlers should have full voting rights in any referendum on the territory's future. At this stage, the settlers outnumber the original Sahrawi inhabitants, who are thus almost disenfranchised in their own country.
Several UN envoys have resigned in despair at Morocco's refusal to accept proposals for the resolution of the conflict. The latest casualty is former US Secretary of State James Baker who earlier this year proposed a compromise settlement which was accepted by the Polisario but rejected out of hand by Morocco.
Meanwhile, according to Amnesty International, Morocco continues to arrest and torture many Sahrawis and their supporters. While noting some improvement in Morocco's human rights record in this area, Amnesty has recently expressed alarm at an increase in detentions and allegations of torture over the past two years. Tom Kitt might have focused on any of the above abuses of human rights. But no. It's easier to pose as the liberator of POWs. You get better headlines that way.