Chaos in the Heart of Africa

This isn't a religious war. It's a war whose roots are based in poverty, corruption. Central African Republic for a time went psychotic.

Peter Gwin: You know here we have a country that has 4.5 million people. It's a little bit smaller than the state of Texas. It's 85 percent Christian or traditional animist beliefs. And 15 percent identifies as Muslim. But here's how the people in the Central African Republic identify themselves.

I'm going to refer to the Central African Republic by the shorthand that we sort of all default to CAR, so if you are confused that's what I am talking about. This is a map from a high school geography book. And it shows the ethnic groups. And there are more than 50 ethnic groups and sub-groups. It's also a nation filled with treasure literally. Fairly famous for its diamonds. One of the biggest diamonds ever found, almost 400 carats was found in the CAR. It also has gold mines. Both of these resources are mined using artisanal methods, that means it's not an industrial scale thing. It's all like open-pit mine, digging like that. In recent years, petroleum has been found up near the Chad border. And, there's also deposits of uranium. France's first atomic weapon came from uranium that was mined in the CAR. It also has huge reserves of timber, game animals, but also the potential for hydropower.

So what went wrong? What happened? Usually this is the equation for... for prosperity, right? You have a fairly good-sized country, with a relatively small population and all these resources. So, you know, why are we where we are today? And a lot of the answer has to lie at the feet of these men. These are the six leaders of the Central African Republic since independence. This is a monument in Bangui. It was erected in 2008, which was the 50th anniversary of independence. And each person on each one of these gold busts betrayed one of the guys up here. The guy that takes the cake of the leaders in terms of driving the country into the ground is this guy, Jean-Bédel Bokassa. He was the president for life and then decided that wasn't a grand enough title, so he decided to become the Emperor of the Central African Empire. He was going to rename the whole country. He styled himself sort of the Napoleon of Africa. And in an era when we saw Muammar Gaddafi rise, Idi Amin was in his day, Mobutu Sese Seko was there, Bokassa gives them all a run for their money. He actually met his nadir when he decreed that all school children had to buy their school uniforms from his, a company that he owned. And when they had... a rebellion, when there was a protest, he had a hundred of them arrested, many were beaten, some killed and that was sort of the moment that he... he met his downfall.

Another issue that's been happening over the past 10 years or so, more than that but 10 years is really the area that we focus on is poaching the game. And specifically the forest elephants. Poachers have been coming to the CAR mostly from Sudan in organized fashion. Many of these are Janjaweed. In fact one man described it to me as it's an ivory bank account. We just come when we need money. In the past ten years, I think they estimate 5,500 elephants have been killed for their ivory. And that's about 62 percent of the population. So, only about 30 percent remain.

The Séléka are a group of militias predominantly from the north, Muslim based. And funded by Chad to come and fight the Bozizé government. They were opposed by the anti-balaka, begun as a sort of a local neighborhood security force. When the Séléka rose up, these guys organized, they realized they needed some protection. Once the Séléka were gone they took out reprisals on the Muslim population. They committed many of the same atrocities the Séléka had committed. So that's not the whole story though.

That's just what's happening in predominantly the East and the North of the country. There's another conflict that's going on-- far away, in the far eastern corner is a little village called Obo. It's a village of about 6,000 people. In Obo, we don't have the Séléka, we don't have concerns about anti-balaka. These are both Muslim and Christian children playing. These children are also under threat from another place. And that is, remember this guy? Joseph Kony rose to fame a couple of years ago, with the Kony 2012 video that went viral. For those of you who don't know the story, he is a Ugandan warlord who for the better part of the last two decades has been kidnapping children to fight in his guerilla army and he sort of moved from South Sudan to the DRC, and now he's found his way into the Central African Republic. And, especially given the security situation that we have been facing in CAR over the past year or so, his forces have moved, you know, more forcefully into this area.

But what's keeping the people in Obo safe for the moment-- is your tax dollars. This is actually a Special Forces, US Special Forces base. It sits right on the corner of the village. And the US has been there for three years now, actually. In part providing security but in large part training Ugandan troops and advising them on tracking Kony and his... and his group. So these are the Ugandan troops that they train. What's different apparently about this is that they are actually getting jungle war fighting training before they are sent actually to track Kony and his men. And when I talk to people in the village are they happy that these guys are here, they said, “if the United States and Uganda wasn't here, Joseph Kony would be sleeping in Obo tonight.”

But I understand human nature, you want to put some faces, specific faces on these issues. So, I want to introduce you to three people, so the next time you see a random CAR news report or a 500-word AP story perhaps, you'll think of these three people. So... This is Aramis. He is from Obo. And he was kidnapped when he was 17 years old at his grandfather's house. And taken by the LRA into the jungle. He spent five years as a guerrilla fighter. He had horrible things done to him. And he did horrible things. But he escaped about a year ago. And now he works with the US and Ugandans to broadcast radio messages into the jungle. And basically they are trying to encourage the fighthers to give themselves up, just like Aramis did. And that's been a pretty successful strategy. But so, once a week Aramis goes into the radio station and basically talks to his former comrades. And I sat in on one of the sessions. And you know, he calls them by name, he tells them, you know, your... you know, your family wants you home. There's amnesty for anybody. The guys that they are really, basically going after these days are Kony and the other leaders.

Another guy that I'd like you to meet is Albert. So, Albert I met on a trip this summer to Bangui. I'd barely gotten, you know, into the city and he was knocking on my door wanting to sell me something, you know. He kept saying, I want you to buy these pictures. I've got these great pictures. And I was looking at the pictures, like picture of a chicken, you know, Man, do I really want a chicken picture? And you know, I am sitting there looking at this thing and then I realize it's made out of butterfly wings. And I was blown away. So, he took me back to his workshop and he showed me how he does these. He collects these butterflies meticulously and makes these stained glass images of life in the Central African Republic. Boy climbing a tree. And this picture has special significance because it's his sister. And she was killed by the Séléka early this Spring.

Lastly, I want to introduce you to the National Ballet of the Central African Republic. They perform ethnic dances, so there's dancers from all those ethnic communities that I showed you. They are missing 14 of their members since the violence and their rehearsal space has been completely destroyed. So, they perform--They perform in a vacant lot in downtown Bangui. And people just come and watch, it's like free performances. And I happened to come by one day when they were performing this piece, which is actually a pygmy dance. And it tells the story of two women who are rivals for the affections of a man. And one of the women poisons her rival, and so an old healer is brought in to raise this woman from the dead. And this is the scene that you are going to see. So, now I'm going to pass it over to Marcus.

Marcus Bleasdale: Thanks, Peter, for that. I think it's really important to highlight very early on in this evening that this isn't a religious war. It's a war whose roots are based fundamentally in poverty. It's based in corruption. It's based in mismanagement, bad leadership, many of which, you know, the leaders we were introduced to through Peter tonight. And... religion has been used by the perpetrators to draw lines, to draw allegiances and to try to create power. So, I think we should try to rise above that this evening, and try to think in a much more complex way about what is driving this conflict.

What I'd like to do is to introduce you to the chronology of the conflict. It started as we were introduced to earlier on that the Séléka were funded by Idriss Deby, Chad to come in and destabilize the Central African Republic, maybe take resources, send those back to Chad but also destabilize the Central African Republic, for the benefit of its neighbors. And so this Séléka group that was-- that came into the country... attacked the then government, took power from the government and...and then started to rule over the population in a very authoritarian way. And the people who suffered most under that very early Séléka rule were the Christians. They were the ones that were forced out of their homes because they were persecuted by the rebels, that were working in different zones. And many of these Sélékas have gone kinda AWOL. They were funded to an extent by external powers, they were funded to an extent by their leaders, but they were also working for themselves. They were also trying to fund their own lives and their own, their own personal wealth gathering through looting, through killing, through amassing wealth, through stealing property. And that insecurity of these Séléka coming into the regions where predominantly Christian populations were living led the Christian population to flee into the bush.

So, I'd like you to try to kind of put yourself into that context when I show you the next series of images because essentially these, the next series of image I'm going to try and put you into that early stages as the Séléka is ruling and the Christian population has been persecuted and are fleeing. This is an image in a compound, in a town called Bossangoa. It was taken in December 2013, and this is a mother trying to protect her child from the gun fire and the RPG's that are flying all around this compound as the Muslim Séléka are coming in to attack the town of Bossangoa, where there are about 10,000 Muslim refugees staying in the local school and about 30,000 Christians displaced staying in the church.

This is a young girl who was injured in a fighting as she tried to flee to the FOMAC base, which is where now I am living with about 5,000 displaced people. The fight is going on outside the walls of this compound And where they are protected by a small group of Congolese soldiers. This image was taken very early in the morning about 5 o'clock, just as the sun is starting to rise. And normally about the time when, if a town is going to be attacked, it is attacked. And this is the time when the Séléka were coming in Bossangoa and the local population had amassed around the FOMAC base because they could feel it, they could hear it, they could... villages like this, small as they are, start to feel that there is something wrong quite early. And so this population is kinda waiting at the FOMAC base to flee, so that they can get sanctuary.

And this is in the local hospital that was being run by Doctors Without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières. And ironically, here we have on right side an anti-balaka fighter and his wife and child in the middle, and on the left side is a Séléka fighter. Both sitting, lying side-by-side receiving the same medical care from the same doctor. And living in perfect harmony as they had done before the battle. As their populations had done for many generations before. And children have played a large part in this conflict and this young Séléka fighter was actually brought from Sudan. So he is Sudanese, came through Chad and is now fighting in Central African Republic for the Séléka. And he is about 14 years old . Very few people really know their age but very clearly he is underage. And both sides were using children, and still are using children in the fight.

We talk about Muslim and we talk about anti-balaka and the Christian and the animists population but also there are kind of cultural group called the Peul, who are the nomadic herders, the people that look after the cattle and they have enormous wealth all embedded in cattle. And they wander through this whole region they wander through Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic and they follow the rains as the rains move, they move their cattle and the cattle graze and they move through this whole region. They don't consider themselves from Central African Republic or Chad or Cameroon, they are from their region. And they were hugely persecuted by the anti-balaka during this time because they were the source of beef. They were also pre-dominantly Muslim and so they were focused... the anti-balaka focused on them for that as well and this young woman saw her whole family massacred around her, her 12 children and her husband were killed and she was shot in the back of the head and was left for dead and she was only found by a group of Peul herders about five or six days later. And they brought her near dead to the hospital where she was cared for and survived. But she still has the bullet in the back of her skull.

This is the church in Bossangoa, the displaced camp for the Christian population about 30,000 people were there... and are still there actually. And this is a Peul lady who lost her husband, she lost five of her children and the only reason that she sat there with her young boy here was because she dressed him up as a girl and was allowed to leave the village that she was in because the group of anti-balaka that she was with, were not killing the young girls, they were just killing boys. This is inside the church, the displaced camp and the young girl in front you see here sat on the chair, she is 13 years old. She sat there with her daughter and this is another issue that we have in Central African Republic. The concept of child marriages is prolific. And we came across it in every town that we went to, every displaced camp that we went to.

For a lot of the time the anti-balaka were in these bushes hiding away like this and then things changed. December came around and the anti-balakas started organizing themselves and they became stronger to try and come and fight and engaged the Séléka in a more active way. And the Séléka were told you cannot treat your people with such disdain, you cannot treat your people with such hatred and expect them not to rebel against you. And time and time and time again organizations, NGOs, human rights organizations told them this and they ignored it. And the anti-balaka, the Christian population came out of the bush. The anit-balaka came out of the bush, strong, motivated and very, very angry. They started to rise up and attack the local population, sometimes the local Muslim population, sometimes they were just taking things to try to enhance their strength and have their assets.

This of course led to the local Muslim population and the Peul population, the nomads to flee and to try to find sanctuary and here we have Peul population hiding in a Christian church, protected by the priest in that Christian church. And this town is in Boali. And many of the priests in the churches all around Central African Republic were really sanctuaries for the Muslim population. They opened their doors in order to protect the Muslim population from their own Christian followers. This rise of the anti-balaka lead the Muslim population deciding to relocate. This is a Muslim man, what happened when these enclaves were created is that the anti-balaka then started picking off the Muslims on the edges. Firing, throwing grenades, throwing RPGs, and slowly this Muslim population started to be killed. They were waiting there in these enclaves where people were trapped, they couldn't leave, they couldn't go anywhere, they were completely surrounded by anti-balaka and there was no way out safely, no way out. And the United Nations, for much as though they were there to protect they were also very fearful at the beginning to... to contribute and assist ethnic cleansing. And so these people were trapped in these zones and were being killed on a daily basis.

This young man was demonstrating against the state that the Muslims were being held in, and was shot by French peacekeepers. And his wife a few minutes later finding out that her husband has been killed. As the Séléka started to leave, as the rise of the anti-balaka increased the Séléka started to decide to go, they started to kidnap people and they started to take them to help them, carry the baggage much as the... we see with the LRA carrying baggage to move it out of the country. Many of the local population was kidnapped by the Séléka and to take them out of country and this actually is a man I met on the street about 50 kilometers outside of Bangui and he'd been kidnapped by the Séléka. Spent nine days carrying baggage with the Séléka being beaten everyday to move quicker, move quicker, you know, don't stop because we need to leave this area very quickly because we are gonna be killed and he was being beaten to carry all the baggage, he managed to escape with his father and we found him on the side of the road emaciated and hungry and tired and we put him in our car and brought him back to Bangui and this is the moment, a very privileged moment that we have of taking him home and introducing him once more to his mother who thought he'd been killed. The anti-balaka rise up and continue to destroy the Muslim properties and here we see one of the main colonels, Colonel Dieudonné of the anti-balaka with his gris-gris and his grenades, ready for the fight.

And this is essentially what happened after that. The Séléka now left Bangui, there is no one to protect the Muslim population and so the... for a period of time between the last week in January perhaps and the middle of March, the way I describe it is that the country for a time went psychotic. There was killing on a scale I've never seen in 16 years covering conflict in Africa. And imagery that I prefer really not to have in my mind, but it's important that we recognize that it has happened, it's important that we understand the severity of this conflict and also the hatred that was for a period present in this area.

This is a young man being lynched on the streets he's a porter, a Christian porter who's bringing supplies into a Muslim enclave so that they could eat. They would have flour to cook with and sugar to use for their tea. And as he came in and he was caught by the Muslim population he was serving, and attacked and then beaten and then chased through the streets with machetes and with bows and arrows. Thankfully he escaped. Many, many more didn't. This young man actually is Muslim and is disabled and couldn't communicate that he was Muslim and so was beaten up to the point of almost death by his fellow Muslims. These are the reality of what happened day after day after day for six weeks in Bangui. I think I witnessed maybe 10 to 15 people being killed in front of my camera every day. The peacekeepers tried their best to keep the peace but... simply they couldn't control it, there weren't enough of them and the capital Bangui was completely out of control.

The anti-balaka throughout the country, took control of whatever they could take control of and preyed on the remaining Muslims. They were trapped in these enclaves and they were picking them off one by one. And so what did that lead to? Some people called it ethnic cleansing. Amnesty international have called it ethnic cleansing. What is ethnic cleansing? Ethnic cleansing is where a group, a population are targeted, very specific ethnic group are targeted by an organized group and it was very difficult to say at the beginning whether the anti-balaka were organized? Whether they were coordinated? Whether there was a chain of command? It's since been proved and they have admitted that there is the chain of command within the anti-balaka. And so, maybe we can call it ethnic cleansing. But really it's irrelevant what we call it. Because the effect, it was really the same.

This is a Chad Special Forces soldier coming into Bangui to escort tens of thousands of people out of the region on these trucks. I stood there for maybe 45 minutes as truck after truck after truck loaded up to the extent that this one is loaded up, left Bangui with Muslims on board. This is a young father with a new born waiting for the trucks to leave the center of Bangui. Many of these trucks were targeted by anti-balaka on the road and grenades were thrown into these trucks from the villages that they were passing through. So not everybody made it through. And the trip was hours, days to... you know, they were running the gauntlets of these anti-balaka groups for days to get to Cameroon and Chad.

I recently visited most of the Peul population, hundreds of thousands of the people that are seeking refuge in Cameroon. For the first time in 18 months they feel safe. For the first time in 18 months they have enough food. For the first time in a very long time they have shelter over their heads. Their children go to school and so it was very uplifting after such, after many, many months of hatred, many, many months of pain, many, many months of killing. I was starting to see the population that I'd known 10 years ago in Bangui. I saw the people that were making the butterflies. I saw the laughter again. I saw the children playing football again. All guarded by now the Cameroon military so that the anti-balaka don't come across and start attacking the local population. The children, some of them go to school for the first time. And they now live as they lived in Central African Republic in these camps in CAR.

And the UNHCR, United Nations High Commissions for Refugees is doing actually a really interesting... a really good job of integrating the refugee population with the local Cameroonian population so that... there is very little animosity between the two. So they go into a town and they bore 10 or 15 wells, they create 10 or 15 wells for the whole population, not just for the refugee population but for the whole population. They build schools for the whole population, not just for the refugee population. So in a way they are learning their lessons, they're becoming better in what they do and this is a great example. We were very encouraged by what we saw there. There is a lot of talk about return, like when can these people return. But I asked all of these people when did they want to return, if they wanted to return and no one wanted to return. No one needed to return. And this is a really interesting concept for refugees, should we force them, at some point to return? Should we be really be working for that end? And this is a really interesting question that we still don't know the answer to. Thank you very much indeed for listening.