Global Policy Forum

Vulnerable Central African Republic Being Drawn in to Neighbor's Conflicts

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By Lydia Polgreen

International Herald Tribune
December 10, 2006

The rumble of engines, any engines, is the signal for the villagers here to flee, leaving behind smoldering pots of wild roots and leaves, a meager afternoon meal. Their haste was so great on a recent afternoon that they left something else behind - a little girl in a filthy white shirt. She wailed as she sat, utterly alone, struggling to stand, much less flee, on slender, uncertain legs.

The Central African Republic - so important as a potential bulwark against the chaos and misery of its neighbors in Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan - is being dragged right into the dangerous and ever-expanding conflict that has begun to engulf Central Africa. So porous are its borders and ungoverned are parts of its territory that foreign rebels are using the Central African Republic as a staging ground to mount attacks over the border, spreading what the United Nations has already called the world's gravest humanitarian crisis.

The situation is so bad in some places that 50,000 residents have fled the Central African Republic to find refuge in Chad, of all places, while starvation threatens hundreds of thousands who remain. A visit to Kalandao underscores the point. The residents had fled their country's own army, which has been burning villages to smoke out a homegrown rebel movement bent on overthrowing the government. Once the villagers realized the approaching vehicles were from the UN World Food Program, they trickled back to tell their story. "We are living in the bush like animals," Leontine Makanzi said. "Our children are dying. We are eating nothing. We have no security."

The Central African Republic, one of the poorest places on earth, has suffered through four coups in the last decade and sits almost at the bottom of the UN development index. In few places do people live so short a life span, bury so many of their young children or succumb to more treatable disease. But its vulnerability has only grown in recent months. On its northeast border with Sudan, Chadian rebels supported by the Sudanese government have built a base, according to government officials and diplomats, to bolster their bid to overthrow Chad's president, Idriss Déby.

Now the Central African Republic government says these foreign fighters have teamed up with local rebels to overthrow it as well, making it increasingly hard to separate one conflict in the region from another. "The world must act now to prevent an even graver crisis here," said Jean- Charles Dei, country director for the UN World Food Program, which is feeding 250,000 people in the Central African Republic, one of just a handful of organizations offering any aid at all. "The international community must act to protect these vulnerable people or risk that they will be consumed by the crisis in the region." To stem the tide of destruction in this morass of cross-border enmity, the United Nations is examining the possibility of bringing in international troops to protect the borders of Chad, Sudan and the Central African Republic.

The hope is to avoid a broad, multi- country conflict like the one that swept Congo, formerly Zaire, after the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko. That war, which followed the Rwandan genocide and pulled in fighters from Uganda, Angola and Rwanda, among others, killed 4 million people, mostly from hunger and disease, and its aftermath continues to kill 1,200 people a day. "As long as the problem of Darfur is not solved, you will not have peace in Ndjamena or Bangui," said Lamine Cissé, the top UN official in Central African Republic, referring to the capitals of Chad and Central African Republic. "The conflicts are all linked, and solving one requires solving all."

The Central African Republic is a former French colony of four million people sprinkled in tiny villages across a tangle of jungle about the size of Texas. Across generous swaths of fertile soil, villagers scrape together a living using techniques as old as the Bible  - hoes, water cans, human muscle and bone. The labor required for mere survival is so strenuous that the most common operation performed by doctors at a rural hospital in the northwest is for hernias.

On a continent where cellphone towers and fiber-optic cables are finally snaking their way across the land, much of life here is lived as though the last few centuries never happened - as though the march of history halted at its wild frontiers. "It is as though the whole world has simply forgotten these people," said Sister Désirée, a Burundian nun working at a Roman Catholic mission in Ndim, a small provincial town in northwest Central African Republic. "I always ask myself, why does no one besides us come to help these people? But I find no answer." The four nuns at the mission, along with four nurses, some teachers and a handful of others run a school, clinic and feeding program in Ndim, handing out food donated by the World Food Program. Most of the people in Ndim are not actually displaced, but the isolation the conflict has caused, as well as the general poverty of the area, has left them perpetually malnourished and hungry.

"Outside of a famine situation I have never seen people in such terrible shape," said Jean-Pierre Cebron, the top official for the World Food Program for the Central African region. "In terms of weight, in terms of height, in terms of health, the population is really in rough condition." Hundreds of families lined up at the mission to receive biweekly rations - a few scoops of fortified flour, lentils, salt and sugar. Some were so poor they did not even have bowls - they used ragged pieces of cloth to carry their food home.

In neighboring countries, aid organizations feed, clothe and shelter the impoverished, but here there are comparatively few people to help. Here in the northwest, Doctors Without Borders; Coopi, an Italian aid organization; the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food Program are trying to help the estimated 150,000 displaced, but they are over stretched and hampered in their work by security problems and government constraints. Aid organizations in Paoua, a provincial town at the epicenter of the crisis in the northwest, were instructed by the military in November to suspend activities for security reasons, so more than 45,000 kilograms, or 50 tons, of food for displaced people sat in a warehouse, undistributed.

Just outside of Paoua, the remains of village after village lie in charred heaps. In one such village, behind the destroyed mud huts, deep in the forest, villagers were living beneath plastic tarps a mile away from their homes. "They came last month to give us these shelters, but they don't come again," said Pauline Koibe, who had been living in the open, sleeping under trees, since January. "It is like they have forgotten us."

The problems began even before independence, when the man who should have been the country's first president, Barthélemy Boganda, died in a mysterious plane crash in 1958. They continued with the rise of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, a ruthless military dictator whose excesses were rumored to include cannibalism. He declared himself emperor of this tiny country in 1976, crowning himself in a lavish ceremony that cost $20 million. He was overthrown in 1979.

Democracy arrived in the 1990s, with the election of Ange-Félix Patassé, but his rule was marked by corruption and mismanagement that only deepened the despair. He was overthrown in 2002 by General Francois Bozizé, who eventually was elected president in 2005 in an election that was judged free and fair by international observers. The rebellion in the northeast is led by allies of Patassé, the former president, along with Chadian rebels, who seek to overthrow Chad's president, a close ally of Bozize.

Like so many countries in Africa, the Central African Republic has the potential of vast wealth in its natural resources - diamonds, timber, hydroelectric power and commercial farming. But over the years its economy has shriveled. "Since independence, our country has never known stability," said Lea Koyassoum-Doumta, a top adviser to the government. "We have plenty of problems of our own. We don't need these problems from outside, in Sudan and Chad, making things worse for us. We need peace so we can finally have some development and progress."

 

 

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