The Central African Republic’s descent into chaos has been gruesome:
villages burned to the ground, massacres with rusty machetes and a
million displaced by Christian and Muslim militias that deliberately
target civilians.
The escalating sectarian violence in the former French colony has
uprooted a quarter of the population, threatened to destabilize the
geographic centre of Africa and shocked even veteran Canadian aid
workers like Julian Donald.
“I experienced things there which, even as an international aid
worker, I never expected to,” Mr. Donald said in an interview last week
after returning from a three-month assignment with Médecins Sans
Frontières.
Nine years of humanitarian work had brought him to Sierra Leone and
Haiti, among other hot spots, but he had never experienced anything like
the CAR, he said. “It was probably the most stressful environment I’ve
ever worked in.”
The disorder is fast becoming a regional emergency. The United
Nations said last week that thousands had been killed, 15,000 were
surrounded by hostile armed groups, a quarter of a million had fled to
neighboring countries and 2.2-million required humanitarian assistance.
“We are appealing again to all armed elements to stop indiscriminate
attacks against civilians. We are also calling for the deployment of
more international troops as their numbers are far too low considering
the size and the scope of the crisis,” said the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees spokesman, Adrian Edwards.
The crisis began when Muslim Séléka rebels brutally attacked
Christian villages and, in March 2013, seized control of the government.
(Only about 15% of the population are Muslims while 25% are Catholics
and another 25% are Protestants.)
Last September, Christian militias known as anti-Balaka formed and
began retaliating against Muslims. “I saw what I would characterize as
atrocities by both sides. In the region there was a series of reprisals,
escalating, so neither side were angels,” Mr. Donald said.
The 38-year-old arrived in Bossangoa last October to co-ordinate an
MSF mobile outreach team that provided medical care to the most
vulnerable, notably children under five suffering from rampant malaria
and malnutrition.
The small team focused its efforts on the outlying areas. “We were
providing medical services to people in the countryside, most of whom
had been displaced by the conflict.” The team often found them hiding in
the bush to avoid the militias.
“I remember in particular the first time we visited the second
largest town in the region. It had been attacked approximately four
weeks earlier and almost completely burned to the ground,” he said.
“Every house in the town had been burned and so the population had fled
into the countryside and the condition of the people was just horrific.”
The Séléka carried out the attack, but later Mr. Donald witnessed the
increasing assaults on Muslims by Christian militias that did not
distinguish between combatants and civilians. Survivors have reported
hearing anti-Balaka fighters saying they intended to kill all the
Muslims, according to Human Rights Watch.
“There was a big movement in the town around that time of mostly just
angry young men from the Christian camp, which had about 30,000 to
35,000 people in it, to attacking the Muslim population, which until
that time had still been living in their houses,” he said.
“So over a period of two or three days the entire Muslim population
had to move into a different camp for their own protection and all their
shops were burned and looted and many people were killed.”
Some have stood up to the vigilantes. Muslims have tried to stop the
razing of Christian homes, and Christians have sheltered Muslims by
helping them hide in the forests or giving them sanctuary in churches.
“In my mind, to some extent this religious aspect of the conflict
must have been manufactured. Some people were pushing for it to become
that and we saw the results first hand, because these people had all
been living in mixed neighbourhoods. They were neighbours, they had been
living beside each other, they had gone to school together and then all
of a sudden they were burning each others houses and attacking each
others families.”
The rising inter-communal violence has led many civilians to make
their way to makeshift camps that are segregated along religious lines.
The largest, near the Bangui airport, where French troops are based,
holds about 100,000.
“People were living on top of one another,” said Martha Gartley, an
MSF water and sanitation expert who described the camp as a “really,
really horrible setup for a population that’s terrified.” She returned
to Canada in February, having helped set up water treatment facilities
and hundreds of latrines at camps in Bossangoa and Bangui.
France voted last week to indefinitely extend its military mission in
the country and increase its troop presence to 2,000, and the European
Union agreed to send 500 troops to supplement the contingent of African
Union peacekeepers.
“I think the international humanitarian community and donors need to
work much harder to provide help to those people, because it’s not your
fault if you’re born in the middle of a war,” Mr. Donald said. “And I
think in terms of stabilizing the security situation, I believe that the
international community continues to prevaricate and that more needs to
be done sooner rather than later. It’s been many months now since this
started and the commitment by the international community has been
lacking.”
No comments:
Post a Comment