“Sailing the Sahara”

Be swept away by the sands of history, havens and haute culture in exotic Morocco.

published in the August 2009 issue of Lifestyle Asia Travel magazine
words by FELICITY TAN

Morocco is a kingdom that sits on the confluence of three world cultures, caught in the grips of a grandiose history and an uncertain future. Its former capital Marrakech is a sprawling city drizzled in pink dust, with its imposing buildings that remind of its bygone grandeur reaching out to the gray desert sky.

It is the perfect place to begin your Moroccan adventure through deserts, mountains, seas and time. It seems as if the sun embraces the whole earth in Marrakech; it’ a wonder anything flourishes here. Stroll through the olive groves of Menara Basin, the old stomping grounds of Moroccan royalty, where in the distance loom the snowy peaks of the Atlas. A visual thirst-quencher would be Les Jardins Marjorelles, a floral oasis in this desert town, designed by the late Yves Saint Laurent.

Before the sun sets, cross over into Old Marrakech within the medina walls, largely unchanged since the 11th century. Along its winding streets and peachcolored alleys is a wonderland of shops that sell golden trinkets, plush carpets and exotic spices. This is Djemaa el-Fna, the largest souk in North Africa. It is a haze of pottery, jewelry and fresh fruit, and every now and then, goats’ heads dangling from a stall. A fire breathes life to the market square as soon as the sun sets behind the towering minaret of Koutoubia Mosque. By the time the stars are out, Marrakech has burst alive with acrobats, snake charmers, jugglers and storytellers huddled around a fire.

Marrakech market stalls at night

leading out from the maze to the square

While it is advisable to sample local fare at the souk, the luxurious La Maison Arabe nestled unassumingly within the walls of the Medina offers a sumptuous Moroccan feast for kings. Wash the day away at its five-star hammam, or Turkish bath, and indulge in unrivalled pampering with spa products made in-house from local herbs and minerals. Rejuvenate in its plush interiors designed for courtiers. You are sure to wake up fresh and, after another round at the souk, ready for your trek across the breathtaking desert mountains.

Arrive at Aït Benhaddou and explore this ancient kasbah crested on a desert hill. The site of numerous Hollywood films like Lawrence of Arabia and The Gladiator, Benhaddou is a majestic ruin with no electricity or running water yet is still home to some Berber families. Climb to the vestiges of an old granary atop the hill and marvel at the vastness of the desert beyond. You might meet an old man named Abdou, who has never left Benhaddou, speaks five languages, and can race you to the top. He will tell you that Benhaddou is the most beautiful place in the world. As the sun sinks into the horizon, and the pink desert turns gold, you just might agree.

A breakfast of honeyed mint tea, served in that precise manner like waterfalls into a cup, and a platter of fresh Moroccan oranges will energize you for the daylong drive deeper into the Sahara along the Road of A Thousand Kasbahs. A brief stop at the Kasbahs of Taorirt and Tifoulout, crumbling ancient palaces, will lend insight to the lavish lifestyles of Morocco’s great dynasties. Savor the rich flavors of tagine, a local meat stew, at the foot of the Todra Gorges, an arresting colossus of desert rock split apart by a jewel-colored pool.

road of 1000 kasbahs

a pool at the foot of the Todra Gorges

Finally, arrive in the small desert town of Erfoud from where commences a camel trek towards Morocco’s edge, your caravan sailing like desert ships beneath the starry night. Evenings in the Sahara are so clear you will see not only every constellation in heavens, but also the very curvature of the earth. Tucked away from the outside world, a cluster of deluxe Berber tents awaits, draped in traditional fabrics. The night is filled with song and dance; a fire and the silver moon your only source of light.

Rise before the sun to race up a seemingly summitless sand dune. Bask in the freshness of the dawn, toes dug into the cool tangerine sand, as the sun peeks from Algerian- Moroccan border in the horizon. A caravan back to town before midday offers a pleasant breeze and a remarkable vantage of the endless Sahara. And after spending the afternoon winding through the crisp mountain air of the Middle Atlas, the sprawling maze of Fes will beckon you closer to the heart of Morocco.

early morning caravan from Algerian border

Just outside the old city walls sits the royal palace, its intricately hand-carved golden gate gleaming in splendor. Venture through the Blue Gate and you enter Fes, the oldest living medieval city in the Arab world. Fes is a feast for the senses, from the solemnity of the spectacularly tiled 14th-C Madrasa Bou Anania, to the mayhem of the pungent tanneries, as well as the magasins d’antiquités and ateliers in between.

Tucked away within the mess of Fes is the Riad Jaouhara. Push open its unremarkable wooden doors behind a plain gray wall and you are whisked into a sanctuary, birds twittering in this palatial oasis, a cushioned dining hall with vaulted ceilings opening out to the courtyard. Formerly the home of royal viziers, the Riad Jaouhara is Moroccan living at its most exquisite. Its suites are large apartments furnished in the finest antiques and cater only to the discriminating in taste, intricate woodcarvings trimming the walls. A stay in its most modest room will allow you to rise to the subtle morning sun trickling through a glass mosaic skylight.

the Casablanca coast

After a pampered morning at the riad, head out to famed Casablanca by the sea. Morocco’s commercial capital, Casablanca is home to Morocco’s elite. Catch sunset at the Hassan Mosque, an architectural wonder where the world’s tallest minaret grazes the sky. And before you fly away from this magical world, cap your journey with a cocktail from Rick’s Café, which opened sixty years after the movie, and be lulled by the crashing of the Atlantic waves from the blue, blue beyond. ###

Tour arranged by the wonderful folks at Experience It! Tours

*photos copyright Felicity Tan*

“Sailing the Sahara” by Felicity Tan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

produced, edited and shot by FELICITY TAN with Alexandria Walker
Boston, May 2009

produced, edited and shot by FELICITY TAN
reporter: Cassidy Quinn
Boston, February 2009

produced and reported by FELICITY TAN
London, November 2008

written and reported by FELICITY TAN
London, October 2008

shot, produced and edited by FELICITY TAN
reporter: Ashlie-Lynn Chandler
Boston, March 2008

words by FELICITY TAN

On January 2, 2002, Sgt. Nathan Ross Chapman, the first U.S. casualty in the war on terror, was killed in an ambush by a 14-year-old Afghan boy. This boy is not alone; an estimated 300,000 children are active combatants in wars currently being waged around the world, and another half-million serve in armed forces presently at peace.

But the use of children as combatants is hardly a new concept. Whether one considers their presence an aberration or not unusual in warfare, child soldiers have played active combatant roles throughout history, including during the American Revolution and Civil War, as well as in the first and second world wars. It is in the last 20 years, however, that their numbers have surged to ten percent of all combatants worldwide, up from near-zero just a few decades ago.

This change in the face of warfare to that of a child’s is most likely caused by a change in its very nature. Karl von Clausewitz wrote: “Politics is the womb in which war develops.” This held true for most of history, but the collapse of colonialism in the second half of the 20th century ushered in a crisis of failed states where political ideology has become irrelevant. And despite evidence of preexisting cultures of youth violence, it is the amoral vacuum created by the breakdown in post-colonial states that has generated a fertile breeding ground for the child soldier phenomenon.

Sierra Leone is generally accepted as the epicenter of the child soldier phenomenon. The poorest country in Africa, it was embroiled in civil war from 1991-2001 and is barely recovering today. The actual number of child soldiers who served in the ten-year war is disputed; estimates range between 5,000 and 10,000 underage combatants fighting on both the government side and the rebel faction, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). But most studies concur that about 80 percent of those who fought in Sierra Leone were between the ages 7 and 14, the age range for about half of the RUF’s manpower base.

Anthropologist David M. Rosen thinks the numbers, though shocking, are not indicative of an unprecedented crisis. In Armies of the Young, Rosen asserts that warfare is an extension of the pre-war status quo in Sierra Leone where children were already integrated into an exploitive and violent system. In other words, he suggests that the presence of children in Sierra Leone’s battlefields is an inevitable result of the country’s culture and history, and that children are themselves to blame. One will see, however, that Rosen’s proposition is sorely lacking.

Rosen’s thesis is rooted in what he calls the global politics of age, which begins with a dispute over the very definition of the term child soldier. According to the Cape Town Principles, a child soldier is “any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity.” This definition follows the Straight 18 Proposition, a commonly held view that sets the legal age of maturity at 18 in terms of warfare.

But Rosen rightly points out that there is no single, fixed age at which “young people enter into…the rituals of war.” Various groups hold different ideas of childhood, and those notions should not be confused with childhood in cultures more familiar to us. The Straight 18 Proposition, then, extends the concept of childhood beyond the empirical age limits of growing up. In most cultures, the end of childhood begins with adolescence, when young people become “rational human actors‚” with a mature understanding of their surroundings. That is, at some point well before the age 18, young people become moral agents with the capacity to exercise power as effectual members of society who can make active and independent decisions -including participation in violence. As one primary-school student and child soldier elucidates, “We killed them, put tires over them and burned them. We were shouting, we were happy, we were clapping.”

Rosen attributes the gravitation of Sierra Leonean youths toward violence to a spillover from a preexisting culture of youth thuggery. Traditionally, Sierra Leoneans depended on cultural “big men” for protection, while young men provided big men with muscle. The practice is evident in urban street gangs that attract disenfranchised children — the very risk group that comprises most of the child soldier population. Rosen compares the social dynamic in those gangs to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, where “big brothers” provide “little brothers” with food, money and protection in exchange for criminal favors.

The relationship between child soldiers and their adult leaders is similarly patterned. Rosen’s main argument, thus, is that the ten-year war in Sierra Leone was “an extension of peacetime violence.” This seems to be true in part. He does not, however, elaborate on why the war broke out when it did, if it was after all precipitated by a longstanding culture and history.

Rosen points to the struggle over Sierra Leone’s rich diamond fields as the catalyst for all-out war, the RUF creating a “zone of terror” to shield its criminal actions. But although the war did in fact begin with the rebel invasion of the diamond fields in Kono District, warlord politics is hardly a satisfying answer, when disputes over control of Sierra Leone’s single major resource began as early as the 1950s.

The crisis of post-colonial states

The crisis of failed states is endemic to post-colonial states such as Burma, Colombia, the Middle East and Africa — all regions where the child soldier phenomenon abounds. Rosen, however, thinks there is no justification in drawing a “bright line between old wars and new wars” at the end of colonialism; he argues that child soldiers have always been present on the battlefield. But the impact of colonialism on the child soldier phenomenon does not merely rest on considering whether child soldiers were present in pre- and post-colonial wars; what is telling is the effects of post-colonialism on the state, its economy and its children.

After gaining independence from Britain in 1961, Sierra Leone struggled for ten years to become a republic. Still it failed to create even a façade of a working democracy, and coups and government executions plagued the next few decades. Militant groups slowly filled the void left by a failing government. The country’s troubles were further augmented by the final collapse of colonialism at the end of the Cold War. Ironically, with the disarming of Germany as mandated by the Peace Dividend came a small arms boom in the black market, making such weapons not only accessible but also cheap enough for armed factions to sufficiently arm themselves.

Rosen disputes the significance of the proliferation of small arms to the rise of the child soldier phenomenon. He argues that the AK-47, the child soldier’s weapon of choice, has been around since 1949 and are heavier than the weapons used in the Civil War. However, he fails to consider the weapon’s ease of use and its newfound affordability (they cost as little as $5 in Africa and can be bartered for food). He also fails to consider all the other “new toys for tots”: grenades, light machine guns and land mines — “man-portable” weapons that are also “child-portable,” meaning that armed forces could now provide small arms for small hands.

The weakening of the state, the rise of small-arms trade, and the increasing power of rebel factions coupled with Rosen’s theory of youth violence seem to create the perfect storm for the breakout of a civil war in Sierra Leone mostly in the hands of the young. But in the end, as military advisor P.W. Singer suggests in Children at War, it is the economic strife borne out of the crisis of post-colonial states that pushed Sierra Leone’s children over the edge.

A playground of lost children

Widespread poverty ensued from the collapse of the Sierra Leonean government, creating a mass of hungry, unemployed and unemployable youth. Faced with few real prospects, Sierra Leone’s children became open to “anything…that offered a hint of economic opportunity.” The government began to mobilize them, and when it failed to satisfy the children’s needs, the RUF began to proselytize, not only promising to protect their young recruits from a government that had abandoned them, but also depicting the RUF as an escape from poverty. A 12-year-old child soldier echoed the rationale of numerous other child soldiers: “I heard the gunmen at least were eating, so I joined them.”

An impetus even more hard-hitting than poverty and famine was the spread of disease and AIDS in particular. With almost three-quarters of the world’s AIDS victims in Sub-Saharan Africa, the disease created a massive pool of orphans, which constitutes much of the identified risk groups targeted by recruiters. Singer posits that, together with other street urchins, AIDS orphans searched for “a sense of control over their chaotic and unpredictable situations,” and did so by joining the armed factions on either side of the growing conflict. This is much the same concept as disaffected youths in the United States joining street gangs, participating in street and drug wars instead of military wars absent in their immediate environment.

By 1992, Sierra Leone was so in shambles that the only way to earn a living was to join the army. Having seen their parents die and forced to fend for themselves, AIDS orphans and others like them seemed to have nothing to lose by entering the war, thus creating a “roving orphanage of blood and war.” Together with other factors, the AIDS epidemic swept away much of Sierra Leone’s adult population. Only 28 percent of the United States population is 19 or younger, whereas the same age group comprises almost 60 percent of Sierra Leone’s population. The brunt of the country’s socioeconomic problems, therefore, fall on the young. It is no wonder the majority of Sierra Leone’s soldiers are children.

Or else mama dies

Both Rosen and Singer agree that Sierra Leone’s “social bomb” sucked children into warfare. Rosen, however, argues that children took up arms as a voluntary response to their predicament, while Singer contends they were forced to exchange their innocence for guns because they had no other choice. Child soldiers, Rosen argues, are not vulnerable individuals exploited by adults because they are cheap, expendable and malleable “weapons of war” but instead have made the conscious choice to join armed forces. Some join to defend their homes or exact revenge, while others feel safer as armed fighters rather than as defenseless civilians. As one military theorist puts it, “the least dangerous place to be in war today is the military.” Whatever their reason, underage combatants tend to defend their choices proudly as militia activity offers them the chance to make their mark in the world.

Rosen also cites claims that children were not forcibly abducted, but were among the first to join armed forces and should therefore not be viewed as victims. Singer opposes this assertion. He defines abduction as “an act of violence that rips terrified children from the security of their families and homes.” Indeed, children who resisted recruitment were often beaten or killed, or were forced to watch their loved ones die. One child soldier recounts:

They killed my parents in front of me, my uncle’s hands were cut off and my sister was raped in front of us by the commander. After all this happened, they told us…to join them. If not, they were going to kill us. They had something which I did not: a gun. We had no parents any longer, and my sister was in pain…and my own toe was cut off.

Recruiters justify their actions by pointing out that their recruits could not legally prove they were underage and so they took who was available for the war effort. This mirrors Rosen’s almost depthless thesis. Recruiters’ motives run deeper than mere fulfillment of numbers drawn from a young population; instead, children are deliberately chosen precisely for their youth.

Children are considered children because they are incapable of understanding the consequences of their actions and are indeed plunged into a world where they are unprepared for such consequences. To young people, Singer argues, death is a meaningless concept; children have not yet developed a sense of mortality nor have they an understanding for the value of life. As such, the youngest child soldiers were by far the most feared.

And the war goes merrily around

And so child soldiers wreaked havoc, spreading “unspeakable fear throughout Sierra Leone.” They raped thousands of women, further spreading the disease that landed most of them in the battlefield in the first place. They created a vicious cycle of retribution, where, suffering from survivor’s guilt, children sought vengeance for the massacre of their families:

I was persuaded…to be part of the army and kill those people who were responsible for killing my parents. [But] I was also creating a circle of revenge where I killed somebody else’s parents, [and] he’s going to be persuaded by a different group…saying, “Okay, join the army and kill this person who killed your parents.”

And to revenge, according to another child soldier, “is only to have a gun.” Child soldiers publicly killed family, friends and neighbors, in effect alienating them from their communities, making reintegration next to impossible. They are reviled by their former communities and are left to their own devices. Hungry and alone, they are the potential ingredients for a new war.

Singer calls this endless cycle a “culture of impunity” where soldiering takes away a child’s very childhood, paving the way for future strife. Half of all ongoing conflicts are fought by a second generation of fighters; thus, children are growing up surrounded by violence and see it as a permanent way of life. War, then, becomes the “framework through which they understand society and life itself,” and children find it difficult to imagine what peace is like and how they should function in it. And because they are taken so young, most have no other viable skill other than killing; they do not know life without a gun. Robbed of hope and wanting skill, they become a potential pool and catalyst for the next spate of violence.

More dangerously, Rosen rightly points out that international law immunizes children from prosecution for war crimes. They can get away with the worst atrocities, and will not know any better. They will become the new generation of warmongers, devoid of morals, devoid of ideology, stealing their lost childhoods from the next generation of youths living in the amoral vacuum they had no hand in creating, just as the generation before them had none.

A new military revolution?

The civil war in Sierra Leone speaks out to a chilling new turn in total war. Old wars were struggles over power as afforded by territorial control, sovereignty, and most importantly, ideology. But with the political and socioeconomic collapse brought about by the end of colonialism, warfare in Sierra Leone centered around “profit-seeking enterprises” at the expense of the innocent. Singer asserts: “Resource and population exploitation rather than mass production drive the new economy of war.”

Sierra Leone’s war was aimless, formless, and had no real purpose other than its own continuity. A post-war survey shows that nobody knew what the rebels wanted; in fact, RUF leader Foday Sanokh began his reign of terror by murdering his group’s theorists. Indeed, the war needed no ideology. Fueled by child soldiers, ideology became irrelevant because children are too young to understand such things. And so they redefined the idea of senseless murder 100 thousand times in Sierra Leone. With no limits and no consideration other than survival, the children of Sierra Leone have unwittingly created a new kind of military revolution, one that self-perpetuates and where an entire generation is self-destructing as adults egg them on. ###

“Young Blood: Child Soldiers in Contemporary Warfare” by Felicity Tan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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Bibliography

• Aloisi, Silvia. “Sierra Leone War Crimes Court will Hunt Guilty Everywhere.” Global Policy Forum (2003). 26 November 2007.
• Doughty, Robert A., and Ira D. Gruber. Warfare in the Western World: Volume II: Military Operations since 1871. Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 2001.
• Rosen, David M. Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press: 2005.
• Singer, P.W. Children At War. Los Angeles: University of California Press: 2006.
• UNICEF, Symposium on the Prevention of Recruitment of Children into the Armed Forces and on Demobilization and Social Reintegration of Child Soldiers in Africa.
• Cape Town Principles and Best Practices. Cape Town: 1997.
• Vital Statistics. 2007. Until There’s a Cure Foundation. 25 November 2007.

shot, produced and edited by FELICITY TAN
Boston, November 2007

shot, produced and edited by FELICITY TAN
Boston, October 2007

produced and edited by FELICITY TAN
shot by: Lori Schmonn
Boston, April 2007