Made a ‘nation’ from disparate pieces thrown together and kept together – barely – by the design and interests of outsiders, the Central African Republic’s colonial heritage of violence, much like its colonial master, keeps coming back in cycles… or perhaps it never left in the first place? by Azad Essa
The real working class, though they hate war and are immune to jingoism, are never really pacifists, because their life teaches them something different. To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience of it.
George Orwell, 1941.
On 7 February, 2014, a man fleeing the Central African Republic fell off the back of a packed truck carrying hundreds of civilians out of the capital, Bangui. As he fell to the ground, he also fell into the hands of a mob who hacked him to death. His body was dragged through the streets, dismembered and torched. The photo of his disheveled, humiliated body was widely circulated across the Internet: it was a spectacle shared on social media as another example of crass brutality on the streets of the Central African Republic.
We are told the nameless man was a Muslim, just one of the tens of thousands trying to flee for their lives, as the country descends into a bottomless pit of lawlessness.
After initiating a coup in March 2013, the Muslim-led Séléka rebel coalition went on a vicious rampage of human rights violations on ordinary civilians. After six months of rule, a loose band of vigilante and rebel groups with a number of Christian militias at the forefront, supported by the deposed president, and known as the anti-machete or anti- balaka, formed to take on the new government, and the Séléka rebels who were still on a murderous rampage.
The violence since September has been spectacular in its brutality. Reports of mass graves, mutilations, public lynchings and cannibalism have surfaced with a regularity that news bulletins have not been able to easily digest.
According to the UN, around a quarter of the country is currently on the move, displaced from their homes, as the terror spreads. Schools are closed; electricity and medical service are dysfunctional. Neighbouring countries Chad and Cameroon have had to bear the brunt of the conflict. Since the coup, almost 80,000 refugees arrived in Chad, while an estimated 98,000 made the way to Cameroon. To the east, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where some 2.4 million people are internally displaced due to repeated instability in that country, almost 60,000 people have had to brave the Oubangi River and make their way to Batanga.
The families fleeing to the DRC are now staying with the very families they hosted in 2009, when Equateur province was in tatters.
Red Cross officials, human rights groups and Doctors Without Borders personnel speak of a terror that has gripped the land. Neighbours have turned on each other and sanctuaries like mosques and churches have lost their status as places of safety. The streets are now ruled by a motley crew of machetes, child-soldiers, and assortment of artillery. We know why the man who fell off the truck was fleeing; we even know where he was going. We can also speculate on the reasons he was killed. Explaining the intensity of brutality however is a little harder.
The Central African Republic (CAR) is a cluster of rolling hills, waterfalls and game parks. Amid the stories of human depravation, strife and loss, there is an astounding beauty. For those bent on affirming that strange fetish that juxtaposes the continent’s beauty with its troubles, this country fulfils the stereotype of a failed African state: It is contemptuously landlocked by warring nations, considered typically remote, rich in mineral resources, largely undiscovered for everyone (except those who live in it) and is a haven for thrill seekers looking for mythical, forgotten species. The country’s poor infrastructure, underdeveloped tourism industry and largely untapped mineral wealth is the perfect foil for mercenaries, be it of the business or warring kind. This is the type of country where dollars buy you a hunting trip with pygmies in the jungle.
The Central African Republic (CAR) is a cluster of rolling hills, waterfalls and game parks. Amid the stories of human depravation, strife and loss, there is an astounding beauty. For those bent on affirming that strange fetish that juxtaposes the continent’s beauty with its troubles, this country fulfils the stereotype of a failed African state
It’s little wonder, then, that Human Rights Watch researcher Peter Bouckaert recently remarked on Twitter that he’d encountered a pair of American hunters who had travelled to the country to hunt rare game – for some the breakdown of the country translates into opportunities.
But today’s manifestation is nothing but part of a chequered history in brutality that began more than a century back. Like many states in Central and West Africa, the fate of this country is tangled in the material and self-seeking ambitions of the French state.
As a colony, the CAR was known as Oubangui-Chari, part of the French Equatorial Africa. The awkwardly phrased Central African Republic, or Centrafrique as it’s known in French, only came at independence in 1960. The new Republic, as it was designed by the colonial powers, bounded together some 80 different ethnic groups and various religions, including Christian, Muslim and indigenous faiths, tied mostly by the Sango language, into a territory of 622,941 square kilometers.
The colonial heritage of forced boundaries also brought with it an imported political system centred on the capital in Bangui, with a mostly imaginary state in the peripheries. Citizens throughout the ‘nation’ were not equally free at independence.
Furthermore, the legacy that France left behind included a culture of impunity that it enjoyed while ruling over the people of CAR, who were subjugated and forced to gather rubber and ivory and labour on plantations, in much the same way that Belgium exploited the neighbouring region which is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Few attempts were made to develop the country, and large swathes of the country were leased to companies to exploit at will.
When France departed, the edifice of power didn’t change. The CAR became a strategic base for its former colonial master during the Cold War.
France also kept its open-ended access to resources in the country, and still pulled the puppet strings as a political mediator. It is no coincidence that democracy in CAR was only established when the Berlin Wall fell, though a mirage of democracy did exist for four years in the 70s. The CAR is the pinnacle of the stranglehold France continues to exert on Françafirque, its former colonies on the African continent. Since independence in 1960, the CAR has endured as many as ten coups and France has played a role in almost all of them. France helped install François Bozizé, the president who was deposed last year by the Séléka rebels, when he took over the country in 2003. And French troops allowed the Séléka rebels to march on the capital in March 2013, and therefore collaborated in his ouster.
Now they are back, as ‘peacekeepers’.
Journalists who have reported from Bangui will admit that the French soldiers have been doing their job, but few will deny that their presence and modus operandi have, in part, created this current disaster. The selective disarming of militia – the Séléka in particular – is but one piece of the puzzle that has necessitated this power imbalance and this threat of ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority.
Moreover, the logic behind sending troops with such obvious interest in the country is flawed; to mediate and to protect the liberties of civilians at once is a double-edge sword. They are in the CAR to direct the story in the manner that suits their ambitions.
The Central African Republic (CAR) is a cluster of rolling hills, waterfalls and game parks. Amid the stories of human depravation, strife and loss, there is an astounding beauty. For those bent on affirming that strange fetish that juxtaposes the continent’s beauty with its troubles, this country fulfils the stereotype of a failed African state
Of course, it would be ludicrous to blame the French alone. The CAR has also had megalomaniacs for leaders that have never allowed the institutions of the judiciary or the state to become bigger than their egos. This is a country run by donors and diamonds, by a machinery of state criminality. The country has also had to withstand the instability of the DRC to the south, Sudan’s Darfur region to the northeast and Chad to the northwest. Then, since 2008, there has been the Lord’s Resistance Army, raiding, and nesting in the CAR as well, with Ugandan forces and later, American forces, in hot pursuit. The spillover has been disastrous, to say the least.
But considering the stakes, neither France, nor any neighbouring country like Chad or Cameroon should be playing a peacekeeping role in the CAR. With its endless mineral deposits, located snugly in the heart of the continent, has rendered this into a state prostituted by all and sundry. As a thoroughfare from east to west; everyone wants a piece, but no one is invested properly in peace.
Though there is no significant history that points to the current Christian-Muslims hostility, the eruption of contempt of one for the other did not come out of nowhere. The fight between the communities today, is only a manifestation of a violence the poor has had to endure over the past 50 years. As the elites battle it out in Bangui, as the politics is conducted by neighbours and outsiders pulling strings, it is the people on the ground that have been forced to find another reason to hate. This is by no means a religious war on either side.
Everyday, questions over the origins of the brutal violence are volleyed across our TV screens.
But, like the French, did the violence ever go away?
