This article is a preview from the Spring 2014 issue of New Humanist magazine. You can subscribe here.
On Christmas Day last year, Catherine Teya called her cousin to wish her merry Christmas. Her cousin, who lives in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR), answered, but not for festive greetings. She whispered that she was hiding under the table because militia were going from door to door in the neighbourhood, looting houses. Terrified, she asked Teya to call back the next day.
“This year has been very stressful for everyone from CAR, even if we are not there,” says Teya, who was born in Bangui but now lives in London, where she works as a paralegal. “Most of my family members have run away and taken refuge in other countries – Cameroon, Congo or Benin. I am watching the news every day.”
The CAR, a former French colony about the size of Texas, is no stranger to unrest. But the sheer scale of the latest wave of violence, which broke out after a coup in March 2013, has stunned the country’s 4.5 million residents, and international observers. In December, France sent 1,600 troops to try and calm the situation, on top of 4,000 African Union soldiers. But as Teya’s Christmas phone call shows, order has not yet returned. The United Nations has said that if it were to commit forces, at least 10,000 would be required to secure the situation.
The crisis began in March last year, when a rebel group known as Seleka stormed the capital and ousted the president, Francois Bozize – who himself came to power in a coup in 2003. Huge swathes of this underdeveloped nation are completely without any state presence, including the north-east, where Seleka originated. The movement was largely made up of the country’s Muslim minority, but as it swept down the country it soon came to include a broad coalition of malcontents: diamond traders, angry about government exploitation; disenfranchised Muslim politicians; youths along for the ride; professional revolutionaries from over the border in Chad or Sudan who saw an opportunity for looting.
When Seleka reached the capital – having pillaged and attacked villages along the way – Bozize fled. The leader of Seleka, Michel Djotodia, suspended the constitution and was sworn in as president in August, becoming the CAR’s first Muslim head.
His presidency was to be short-lived. Furious at the atrocities carried out by Seleka, people were fighting back. These rival militias, mainly but not entirely made up of Christians, became known as the Anti-Balaka (meaning “anti-machete” in the local language). Some were former soldiers loyal to Bozize, others were simply vigilantes seeking revenge, others opportunists.
The vicious cycle of vengeance – broadly along religious lines – has developed to the point where the UN is warning that the country is on the brink of genocide. By the end of 2013, more than 1 million people (a fifth of the population) had been displaced, and thousands killed. Over the course of just a few days in December, more than 1,000 died in Bangui alone.
In December, unable to reel in the rogue elements of Seleka – never a centralised movement to begin with – Djotodia stood down. The mayor of Bangui, Catherine Samba-Panza, was appointed interim president, and the process of reconciliation is slowly beginning. But the situation is far from normal. Violence has been reduced but not halted, with reports of Anti-Balaka rebels targeting Muslim communities. Mercenaries continue to loot and pillage.
Hippolyte Donossio, Radio France Internationale’s correspondent in Bangui, has seen at first hand the abuses carried out by both sides. He was forced to flee his home on 6 January, after facing violent threats from both Seleka and Anti-Balaka over his reporting of the human rights situation. “Armed men came to my house and I have received death threats,” he tells me over the phone from his temporary residence in Togo. “My colleagues have been attacked and beaten in their homes, and my house has been looted twice. It’s not safe for me to go back.”
Donossio views the conflict as mainly inter-religious. “The previous government marginalised the Muslims,” he says. “Then the Seleka started their rebellion and they pillaged churches. The Anti-Balaka retaliated. There is a climate of hatred on both sides.” This reading of the conflict is shared by many others. But is it accurate to describe this crisis as a war between Christians and Muslims?
Of the CAR’s 4.5 million people, around 20 per cent are Muslim and 50 per cent Christian, with the remainder following traditional animist religions. Christianity came to the CAR with French colonisers in the 1880s, and much of the population converted. Islam in the CAR long predated this, coming with slave traders and merchants from Sudan and Chad who settled in the country. These communities of settlers continued to practise Islam, and although some locals also converted, their descendants make up much of today’s Muslim community.
The country has seen at least six coups since gaining independence from France in 1958. Historically, each leader that grabs power has promoted his own ethnic group in politics and the army. Someone from a marginalised group then seizes control, and the cycle continues. For decades, the different religious communities have co-existed peacefully – with this ethnic tension taking precedence. “We never fought about religion before,” says Teya.
Muslims have traditionally been shut out of the political high command. But although Seleka’s leaders may have been frustrated by this, it would be misleading to view the conflict as a coherent battle between two discrete and organised parties, religious or otherwise.
“The CAR has seen poor governance for decades,” says Thibaud Leseur, Central Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group. “The loose coalition of Seleka is mainly from the north-east – areas historically marginalised by power, where the state was completely absent.” This poor governance has left most of the population desperately poor, despite rich natural resources of gold and diamonds.
Understanding the gaping power vacuum that makes up most of the CAR requires some knowledge of its history. Before the arrival of French colonisers, it consisted mainly of lightly populated, widely dispersed groups – and that is still the case outside the cities.
“Colonial rule was extremely exploitative in the CAR,” says Philip Burnham, professor of Anthropology at University College London. “When independence came, there were virtually no educated elites, and the state contracted down on Bangui with very little state presence elsewhere in the country.”
Without the financial or human resources to implement authority, successive governments in Bangui have been incapable of keeping order. Djotodia fell foul of this when he found himself unable to quell the violence he had set in motion. The violence that so many in the CAR know so well will continue: Teya fled Bangui for Belgium when she was 10, displaced by conflict like many others before and since.
Against this context, the current crisis could be seen as just another outbreak of unrest that happens, this time, to fall along religious lines. “It’s very much a political struggle,” says Louisa Waugh, a British writer who spent six months in CAR during the crisis. “These men and boys have been brought up on a diet of violence and low intensity conflict, and they suddenly had the chance to be ‘men’ and to count for something. Trust within communities was shattered by the violence, and so it was very easy to identify ‘the other’ as being either Christians or Muslims. That is what happens when space closes around people – they huddle together.”
There have been striking examples of interfaith unity: in early January, in the small town of Boali, 100 kilometres north of Bangui, 800 Muslims took shelter in the local church after Anti-Balaka rebels attacked their homes. On a visit to London the same month, the Archbishop of Bangui, Dieudonne Nzapalainga, and Imam Oumar Kobine Layama, president of the Islamic Central African community, were keen to present a united front. “This is not a religious crisis; it’s a military-political crisis,” said Layama. But it would be naïve to deny that there has been a religious element, from the Seleka pillaging churches to the Anti-Balaka targeting Muslim neighbourhoods.
“There is clearly a religious divide among the public. But that is not the whole story,” says Leseur. “The Seleka did not attack Bangui to Islamise the country. You belong to one of the camps, and these communities are defined as Muslim or Christian. But neither the Seleka nor the Anti-Balaka are fighting in the name of God. They just found themselves in one of the groups, which happen to be articulated around the religious divide.”
With poor communication networks, misinformation abounds. One Central African I spoke to for this piece suggested that the Anti-Balaka were not really Christians but people trying to give them a bad name; another said that the Anti-Balaka are “everyone – they are your neighbours, your friends”; another still mentioned rumours that the Seleka wanted to turn CAR into a Muslim country. But while it is largely drawn from Muslim communities, Seleka is not an Islamist movement. “If people interpret this conflict using the same framework by which they understand some of the Middle Eastern or North African contexts, then they badly misunderstand what’s going on,” says Burnham. “Islam in the CAR is not ‘jihadist’. This is not an extension of what is happening in Mali or with Boko Haram in Nigeria.”
The CAR borders the Democratic Republic of Congo in the south, Sudan and South Sudan to the east, and Chad and Cameroon to the west. Sandwiched between these conflict-ridden nations, it is perhaps inevitable that weapons proliferate in the CAR. The complete absence of state authority makes the large expanses of its countryside an ideal home for rebel groups; even Joseph Kony’s notorious Lord’s Resistance Army has a base in the country’s north-east, near the Sudan border. Foreign intervention – from nearby Chad, or from European powers – has also hindered successive governments.
The same factors that allowed the violence to reach such a crescendo – the weakness or absence of state institutions, poverty, disenfranchisement – will make the task of reconciliation difficult. On 23 January, Catherine Samba-Panza was sworn in as president, pledging to “safeguard the peace, strengthen national unity, ensure the well-being of the Central African people, and conscientiously fulfil my work without any ethnic, regional or religious considerations.” In a country marked by ethnic, religious and political divisions, she is known for her neutrality, and her appointment has been welcomed. But the task ahead remains huge. Killings continue unabated in parts of the country, as the disputes roll on. The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières reported that, in the same week Samba-Panza was sworn in, they treated 200 victims of violence in the CAR, 90 of whom suffered life-threatening injuries: lynching, machete wounds, gunshots.
And while those who have been displaced may have escaped with their lives, their situations are desperate. Struggling financially and with his visa about to expire, Donossio says he will have to return to the CAR though he thinks he is in personal danger. “I don’t have any choice if I cannot find financial support to stay in Togo,” he says. “The hope now is the new president – but every man has a score to settle. There are no police, no authorities. The president has to deal with the arms problem, and it can’t be done without the help of the international community.”
The deployment of European troops is a start, but the numbers are small – just 600 EU soldiers, on top of France’s 1,600 – and the mandate short, at 12 months. The past has lessons, too: back in 2008, a disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration deal was agreed, with the aim of securing lasting peace and rehabilitating former combatants. Promises were not kept, and the plan was never implemented. In the meantime, stories abound of false disarmament programmes by the Seleka or Anti-Balaka, simply to trick the other side into laying down their arms before attacking.
“Now that most of my family and friends have left, I feel relieved knowing that they are now in a safe place,” says Teya. “But they had to leave everything behind – their houses, their possessions.
“They don’t know if they will ever be able to come back and what they will find.”
