33 - The Heart of Africa's Darkness, now with Russians
When I visited my eldest daughter, then training midwives in the Peace Corps and stationed in Bria, an overgrown village smack in the center of the Central African Republic, the ex-French colony was poor, underdeveloped, and largely isolated from the rest of the world in the pre-cell phone era.
It was a military dictatorship, run by an intolerant general who had usurped power a few years before by ousting an elected president in a bloodless coup. President André-Dieudonné Kolingba, corrupt and not very forward-looking, ruled in a very tight-fisted manner. His government did little for its citizens, especially those outside Bangui, the nation’s capital. Fortunately, however, Kolingba’s cohort was focused on lining its pockets rather than on brutalizing its citizens. There were no state-sponsored massacres.
Much of the rural areas of this Texas-sized land, now with only 5 million people, was neglected, however. The roads remained mostly unpaved and villagers mostly grew subsistence crops of manioc (cassava), bananas, corn, plantains, millet, and sorghum. Cash crops for export then and now included cotton, coffee, and peanuts. Diamond and gold were the main exports. Now those resources have attracted Russian exploiters connected to Putin.
Indeed, the decades of internal tumult and violence that followed the Kolingba era have now been capped by the government’s employment of several thousand Russian armed fighters belonging to the infamous Wagner Group, a mercenary-for-hire enterprise run – many assert at Putin’s behest and to his profit – by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy oligarchic fixer for Putin. (Some of those combatants left the Central African Republic in recent weeks to fight in Ukraine.) Erik Prince’s Blackwater Group was once associated with the Wagner outfit. (More about the Wagner machine in my Newsletter, #6, March 12.)
Central Africa’s current president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, has long had but a tenuous hold on his office. He therefore invited the Wagner establishment to protect him and his regime in 2019. He must also have given it license to plunder as the mercenaries fought his opponents throughout the country. They have pillaged diamonds and gold from northern areas, elephant ivory from the east, and cash crops from western regions.
The Wagnerites are also responsible for a series of massacres in the central parts of the country ostensibly perpetrated to sustain Touadéra’s rule, but also to facilitate stripping the nation of its mineral wealth. A former high-ranking member of Putin’s security services acts as special advisor to President Touadéra.
This influx of Russians and Russian influence began when Putin saw that Central Africa was in desperate straits and that he could forge an arrangement with Touadéra that would give Russia influence in Africa for the first time since the 1960s and 1970s, and also enable his people to acquire gold and diamonds.
Unlike China, Russia has had no serious diplomatic, trade, or military presence in Africa for decades. Russians assisted the MPLA and FLGC liberation movements against colonial Portuguese control of Angola and Guinea, backed the least successful of the main Zimbabwean freedom movements, and was very supportive of the South African National Congress and the Southwest African People’s Organization of Namibia when both were fighting their respective apartheid antagonists during the Cold War. But Russia had little agency during the anti-colonial struggle in Francophone Africa (south of Algeria).
Central Africa (CAR) was administered by the French as a portion of Equatorial Africa (Chad, Gabon, Central Africa, Cameroon, and what is now the Republic of Congo). It built a railway in the last colony on the backs of laborers from the other places, collected ivory and rubber, but otherwise largely ignored the needs of their inhabitants.
Starting in 2012, a militant group of Muslim rebels, possibly backed by the then government of Chad, swept out of the northern reaches of the CAR, rapidly passed through Bria and Bambari on the road south and west, committed frequent atrocities, killed and raped villagers, and finally stormed Bangui in 2013. Séléka (“alliance” in Sango) or ex-Séléka, as this group of marauders called themselves, ousted President François Bozize and installed their own replacement.
This coup led to Bozize’s recruitment of Christian militias known as anti-Balaka (balaka means machete) and an all-out conflict between Séléka and anti-Balaka contingents that engulfed Central Africa from 2013 to 2018, and simmers still. The anti-Balaka fighters committed as many atrocities as Séléka; the ongoing civil war caused unspeakable hardships for civilians, each side being as rapacious as the other. International groups active in the CAR assert that both Séléka and anti-Balaka committed innumerable war crimes against civilians, and should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.
Thousands lost their lives, as many as 600,000 villagers were internally displaced and equal numbers forced to seek refuge in Cameroon and other nearby countries. The ongoing conflict has left 75 percent of the country’s citizens stuck in poverty. Nearly 3 million Central Africans are now in need of humanitarian assistance. The Wagnerites are only exacerbating that huge problem.
Touadéra’s election to the presidency in 2016 occurred after French paratroopers and a 15,000 person UN Peacekeeping Mission had managed to separate Séléka from anti-Balaka, and to impose a ceasefire throughout much of the country. But it lasts only intermittently and persistent lawlessness has allowed armed groups to thrive, with the Russians exploiting and arousing internecine antagonisms. Somehow, Paris and Washington need to bring the CAR back into a Western-leaning fold, and more for the benefit of the country’s citizens than for any strategic or economic interest that the West has in the heart of Africa’s darkness.
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