Bir Tawil Is Not Empty. The People Who Use It Were Left Out of the Story.
Wendover Productions gets the geographical puzzle right. Its conclusion is considerably less convincing.
The video explains how competing Egyptian and Sudanese interpretations of colonial-era boundaries leave Bir Tawil outside both countries' territorial claims. But it then turns that unusual arrangement into something much bigger: an empty desert, without people, resources or government, where an enterprising outsider might establish a new country.
The narrator calls it a place with a “whopping zero people” and describes it as “800 square miles of nothing.”
That description leaves out the people who have actually used the land, extracted its resources and developed an interest in what happens there. More importantly, it overlooks the legal distinction between territory claimed by no government and territory belonging to nobody.
The border was designed around people. The story subsequently forgets them.
The video says Britain redrew the boundary in 1902 because the original 1899 border divided tribal communities and separated settlements from their traditional grazing grounds.
The basic explanation is correct, but the historical details deserve greater precision.
A 1962 U.S. Department of State boundary study establishes that the 1902 administrative boundary was created through an order dated July 25 and a decree dated November 4, both issued by Egypt's Minister of the Interior.
Its purpose was to facilitate the administration of nomadic tribes and preserve the continuity of their traditional territories. The orders also identified particular tribes and water wells to be administered on either side.
This was not simply Britain drawing a second international border. It was an administrative arrangement within the Anglo-Egyptian colonial system.
The distinction matters because the two countries subsequently disagreed about the legal significance of those arrangements.
In its June 1993 communication to the United Nations Security Council, Sudan acknowledged Egypt's position that the 1902 and 1907 modifications were administrative adjustments that did not alter Egyptian sovereignty under the 1899 agreement. Sudan rejected the idea that the 1899 agreement was the only authoritative instrument for determining the boundary.
This is not a minor disagreement over cartography. It is a dispute about which historical instruments establish territorial sovereignty.
Sudan (SU) & Egypt (EG) 1962+1
There is another interesting qualification.
The UK's 2026 Permanent Committee on Geographical Names factfile instructs government mapmakers to depict Bir Tawil as claimed by neither Egypt nor Sudan, while shading it as pertaining to Egypt.
That is a cartographic and administrative distinction, not a determination of Egyptian sovereignty. Nevertheless, it makes the video's description of territory simply ruled by nobody unnecessarily absolute.
The Ababda people and the gold beneath the desert
The most consequential omission concerns the Ababda.
In 2020, Dean Karalekas published a field study titled Navigating Terra Nullius: The Ababda and the Case for Indigenous Land Rights in Bir Tawil.
Karalekas describes joining an expedition into the territory and speaking with local informants. His investigation found that members of the Ababda community had a longstanding presence in the area, with historical connections extending back at least to the Roman period.
More importantly, he documented an existing gold-extraction operation run by members of the Ashabab branch of the Ababda.
One local informant, identified as Shady, told the researcher that new gold veins had been discovered approximately fifteen years earlier. Local Ababda miners subsequently began extracting the gold.
These were not imaginary inhabitants of a geographical curiosity. They were people earning livelihoods from the territory.
The paper also describes their concerns about a foreign mining company's activities immediately across the border in Sudan.
That company was Canada's Orca Gold, which held an interest in the Block 14 gold concession. Crucially, Block 14 was in Sudan, not inside Bir Tawil. Its commercial mineral estimates cannot simply be attributed to Bir Tawil itself.
The distinction does not rescue the video's claim that Bir Tawil has no natural resources. The field study documents artisanal gold extraction within the territory, although it does not establish commercially viable reserves or a mining economy capable of sustaining an independent country.
UCLan - University of Central Lancashire+2
There is an important qualification: evidence of nomadic activity and temporary mining operations does not establish a permanent resident population.
The video may be right that Bir Tawil has no permanent settlement. But that is not the same as having no people, no economic activity or no established relationship between communities and the land.
Calling the territory empty erases precisely the people whose relationship with it deserves investigation.
International law does not equate nomadism with having no rights
The distinction between unclaimed territory and land without human rights or historical ownership is not merely philosophical.
In its 1975 advisory opinion on Western Sahara, the International Court of Justice considered whether a sparsely populated desert inhabited by nomadic tribes could be classified as terra nullius.
The Court concluded that territories inhabited by tribes or peoples with social and political organization were not automatically regarded as terra nullius under the relevant historical international practice.
Its examination included nomadic migration routes, grazing grounds, water wells, burial grounds and customary arrangements governing their use.
The case concerned Western Sahara, not Bir Tawil. It did not establish Ababda sovereignty over Bir Tawil. But it provides an important legal principle: the absence of permanent buildings or conventional settlements does not automatically mean that land has no legally relevant human relationships or claims.
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The Ababda case deserves independent legal examination.
Article 26 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognizes indigenous peoples' rights concerning lands and resources they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used.
However, this must not be presented as an automatic grant of sovereignty.
There are also limitations to the legal argument advanced in Karalekas's paper. It invokes the International Labour Organization's Convention 169, but neither Egypt nor Sudan has ratified that convention. The UN declaration is also not a ratified treaty.
Egypt has, however, ratified the older ILO Convention 107, whose Article 11 recognizes collective or individual ownership rights over lands traditionally occupied by covered populations. Whether that convention applies to the Ababda in Bir Tawil is a separate question involving territorial jurisdiction and the community's legal status.
None of these instruments establishes an already adjudicated Ababda claim to sovereignty. They do establish that dismissing traditional land use as irrelevant would be legally careless.
Mandate Registry+4
A democratic government does not automatically create a country
The video eventually proposes that somebody could establish a democratic government and permanent population in Bir Tawil and potentially secure recognition as a new country.
That possibility is not entirely fanciful. But the explanation is incomplete.
The familiar statehood criteria in the 1933 Montevideo Convention include:
- A permanent population.
- A defined territory.
- A government.
- The capacity to enter into relations with other states.
Article 3 also states that a state's political existence is independent of recognition by other states.
The convention is a regional treaty, not a universal guarantee of statehood. Nevertheless, it demonstrates why the video's assertion that recognition is what matters is too simplistic.
More importantly, none of these criteria grants an outsider an automatic right to acquire territory simply because neighbouring governments do not claim it.
The Ababda's historical presence, traditional land use and existing economic activities would have to be considered in any serious examination of a proposed new state.
A democratic government established by an outsider cannot simply assume that the existing population has no interests worth protecting.
The video identifies infrastructure and international recognition as the principal obstacles to founding a country. It never seriously investigates the prior question of who already has rights in the territory.
That is a substantial omission.
The verdict: Unclaimed by governments does not mean available to outsiders
Bir Tawil really is an unusual territorial anomaly. Egypt and Sudan have competing interpretations of their historical boundaries, and neither claims the territory under its stated position.
Wendover explains that geographical arrangement effectively.
But the video makes an unjustified leap from the absence of competing national claims to the idea that the territory is an empty political canvas.
There are Ababda communities with historical connections to the region. There is documented artisanal gold extraction. There are serious questions about customary land use and the legal recognition of traditional rights.
None of this proves that the Ababda possess sovereign title to Bir Tawil. Equally, the absence of an Egyptian or Sudanese claim does not prove that an outsider can legitimately establish sovereignty there.
Bir Tawil may be a place without a country. It is not necessarily a place without people, history, resources or rights.
The next person who arrives with a flag should have to answer a more important question than whether they can declare a kingdom:
Who gave them the right to claim land that other people already use?
References
1. Wendover Productions — TWL #2: Bir Tawil — The Land Without a Country. Original video; establishes the claims and arguments being examined.
2. U.S. Department of State — International Boundary Study No. 18: Egypt–Sudan Boundary, July 27, 1962. Documents the Egyptian Interior Ministry's 1902 administrative orders and their purpose of accommodating nomadic tribes and traditional water access.
3. United Nations Security Council — Document S/25978, June 21, 1993. Records Sudan's position on the competing interpretations of the 1899 agreement and subsequent administrative boundary modifications.
4. Permanent Committee on Geographical Names — Egypt Toponymic Factfile, 2026. Provides current British government mapping guidance distinguishing Bir Tawil's unclaimed status from its administrative and cartographic classification.
5. Dean Karalekas — Navigating Terra Nullius: The Ababda and the Case for Indigenous Land Rights in Bir Tawil, Global Journal of Economics and Finance, Volume 4, Issue 2, September 2020, pp. 41–49. Documents field observations, Ababda presence, artisanal gold extraction and the argument for traditional land and mineral rights. Its findings are not a judicial determination of sovereignty.
6. International Court of Justice — Western Sahara Advisory Opinion, October 16, 1975. Establishes the legal significance of tribal social and political organization and customary land use when assessing the historical concept of terra nullius; it does not decide Bir Tawil's status.
7. United Nations General Assembly — Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, A/RES/61/295, September 13, 2007. Article 26 recognizes traditional indigenous relationships with land and resources, providing relevant human-rights context rather than automatic sovereign title.
8. International Labour Organization — NORMLEX: Egypt's ratifications, Egypt's unratified conventions, and Sudan's unratified conventions. Establishes the different treaty positions of Egypt and Sudan concerning indigenous and tribal land rights.
9. U.S. Department of State — Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, December 26, 1933. Provides the classic four statehood qualifications and distinguishes political existence from diplomatic recognition.