The CAR has made a serious effort at a free and competently-run election as a first step to bringing stability to one of the region’s most volatile countries. Only the eradication of militias will ensure ultimate peace.
The salutations from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that followed successfully conducted elections in the Central African Republic (CAR) were more than a pro-forma expression of cheer underscored with a note of relief that the insurgency-torn nation had pulled off a peaceful election. Under Ki-moon’s authority, the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the CAR (MINUSCA), with its 11,000-strong fighting force, is the glue that holds the country together. The decision to keep in place or withdraw the forces belongs to Ban. The holding of the presidential and ongoing legislative elections and the transitioning to a functioning government that will follow are key points in determining how long MINUSCA will stay. The UN has botched a sex scandal involving MINUSCA soldiers exploiting and abusing boy and girl child refugees by covering-up the crimes, which were eventually exposed in the media. During the fracas, Ki-moon threatened to disband MINUSCA if the contributing nations did not investigate their soldiers’ misdeeds.
MINUSCA’s main challenge is the rebel group, the Séléka. Predominately Muslim in membership but not a jihadist organisation seeking an Islamic state, Séléka ousted President Francois Bozizé in March 2013. In the ensuing months, Séléka committed atrocities against civilians and an opposing Christian militia called the anti-Balaka. With Séléka in possession of much of the country in 2014, peace was restored in an agreement that saw Bangui mayor Catherine Samba-Panza become president of an interim government. Keeping a lid on further violence as elections for a permanent government were carried out has been MINUSCA’s preoccupation. The task has made MINUSCA the UN’s most expensive mission ever. That the elections resulted in an administration headed by Faustin Archange Touadèra, who earned 62.7% of the 14 February 2016 runoff vote, was validation of the forces’ presence. On 20 February 2016, the Elections Commission declared that Touadèra had won a landslide 63% of the vote.
Whether the new government can function without the firepower backup of MINUSCA is the unsettling but unavoidable question. The people’s desire for normalcy was displayed in the election. What has kept the citizenry displaced, insecure and suppressed for decades have been rebel insurgencies and autocratic governments. A democratically-founded government was to have been in place by 31 March 2016. A delay in the completion of parliamentary elections resulted in a missed deadline, but this delay will be transitory, the insurgencies remain the longer-term barrier to forward movement in nation building.
This article is extracted from the April 2016 edition of IOA’s Africa Conflict Monitor (ACM) – The essential +70 page monthly report dissects conflict developments and trends across the African continent to guide businesses, governments, academics and other stakeholders in Africa’s growth and stability.
Current ACM subscribers include AFGRI, AngloAmerican, BP, CNN International, eNCA, Halliburton, IBM, KPMG, MSF, various international government departments and major universities around the globe, ranging from UCT here in South Africa to MIT in Boston, USA.
The CAR’s first priority: Security
A second round of legislative elections must still be scheduled and completed for the transition to full government to be complete. These parliamentary elections will also be made possible by MINUSCA’s presence. The year 2015 progressed without incident until September, when a flare-up of sectarian violence in the capital Bangui killed 130 people. A further 474,500 people were displaced within the CAR by year’s end, when half the country had little or no food. There is little formal economic activity beyond Bangui, and the population still faces a major food crisis. However, first-round parliamentary elections were held without serious incident on 30 December 2015.
What will Séléka do now? With most of the country under the rebels’ control, will they be satisfied that their nemesis, President Bozizé, is now neutralised and that his attempt to run in the presidential election was blocked by the Electoral Commission last year? The group’s motivation has been political rather than ideological or religious. The conflict in the CAR can also be described as tribal, similar to the case in neighbouring Burundi. Originating in the Sango language, the name Séléka means ‘coalition’, indicating a political rather than ideological or religious focus. The atrocity-filled factional fighting of 2014 did pit Séléka against the Christian anti-Balaka, but in retrospect, that also seemed political and in the case of the anti-Balaka, a revenge-motivated conflict rather than one motivated by religion. In any event, having ousted Bozizé in 2013 and replaced him with Michel Djotodia, Séléka agreed with regional leaders in 2014 that Djotodia was incapable of stemming rising sectarian violence. He was pressured into resigning as head of the interim government, paving the way for Samba-Panza.
Mass murderers are not reasonable people but dangerous fanatics. Human rights atrocities were committed by Séléka in a country that is 80% Christian. The anti-Balaka committed its own abuses. Both groups were monitored by the international advocacy group Human Rights Watch, based in Washington. “Séléka leaders promised a new beginning for the people of the Central African Republic, but instead have carried out large-scale attacks on civilians, looting and murder,” stated Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. Eventually, there will be a reckoning, and as indictments for crimes against humanity and war crimes begin to be handed down at some future date from the International Criminal Court (ICC) or possibly a nationally-constituted court, how Séléka responds will inform the course of the CAR’s progress toward stability. Certainly, Séléka will have to be disarmed. In the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and elsewhere in the region, such demilitarisation was preceded by the issuance of amnesties and programmes to reintegrate fighters into society. Séléka has complicated the process of reintegrating its fighters through the war crime of abducting boys as young as 13 to be fighters. Reintegrating such lost youths has been a challenge in other African countries where insurgencies have used child soldiers, and those prior experiences can at least be used instructively in the CAR.
Under MINUSCA’s vigilant watch, should disarmament be accomplished, the CAR’s future will unfold in the Rwandan model, where top leaders who made the decisions that set in motion war crimes and crimes against humanity are prosecuted. While a legal path is pursued against those who destroyed the CAR, from Bozizé and his predecessors to Séléka and anti-Balaka leadership, a separate economic track can be pursued by government. Again, the Rwandan post-genocide paradigm is a likely model.
The CAR’s second priorities: Return of displaced individuals, rebooting economy
A majority of the half-million displaced people in the CAR are rural farming families who may return home and resume the business of food production, even on the subsistence level. Their villages may be rebuilt, and the fertile land has not been disturbed but for a weed overgrowth (although reconditioning fields is an immense task for individual farmers). Food security is a principal and immediate need for the CAR’s population.
The CAR’s economy was the weakest in the region and its people one of Africa’s poorest long before the destabilising events of 2013. Since independence from France in 1960, the country has been unable to thrust its economy forward more than a few steps before a blockage in the form of a coup d’état or insurgency interfered. Whether the era of political violence disturbing national growth has been put in the past will partly be determined by the degree of international support given to the new Touadèra government. International aid is required to move the country forward from its current state of near economic catatonia.
Amongst the 54 African nations rated in the Africa Country Benchmark Report (ACBR) 2016, compiled by the Johannesburg-based consultancy firm In On Africa (IOA), the publisher of ACM, the CAR ranks third from the bottom, at position 52, above only Chad and Somalia. The country barometer assembles scores of indexes from economic, political and social organisations, whose low rankings of the CAR account for the cumulative low ACBR ranking. The statistics underscore the long road ahead for the country to achieve a stable democracy and a modern economy.
This article is extracted from the April 2016 edition of IOA’s Africa Conflict Monitor (ACM) – The essential +70 page monthly report dissects conflict developments and trends across the African continent to guide businesses, governments, academics and other stakeholders in Africa’s growth and stability.
Current ACM subscribers include AFGRI, AngloAmerican, BP, CNN International, eNCA, Halliburton, IBM, KPMG, MSF, various international government departments and major universities around the globe, ranging from UCT here in South Africa to MIT in Boston, USA.
Peace is predicated on a new start
The foundation of peace for the CAR, envisioned by negotiations that led to the interim government, would be entirely new faces in government freed from links with the past. A fresh start would be required for the nation to move forward. Acceptance of this proposition was the reason Séléka fighters put down their arms, though did not cede any territory. By mid-year 2016, a new government will be functioning. President Touadèra received a resounding majority vote in February’s run-off election, and a leader with such a mandate can begin his administration buttressed by popular good will. As all leaders know, there is a time limit for such a ‘honeymoon’. This period of grace ends when citizens feel their expectations are not being met (or that their expectations were too optimistic in the first place).
It may be too much to ask President Touadèra’s government to pursue means of prosecution against the foreign troops who wantonly abused the nation’s boys and girls that they were sent to protect (see ACM February 2016 special report, ‘Children condemned by the UN to sexual abuse’). In practical terms, this would be like biting the hand that provides your security, at least until the time when a national army is reconstituted and strong enough to take over national security. In any event, soldiers participating in UN peacekeeping missions are the responsibility of their national armies, who must take corrective steps when soldiers commit crimes. However, the CAR can put in place special courts to prosecute CAR government and rebel officials who committed crimes against humanity and war crimes. Following Bozizé’s ouster, Human Rights Watch and the UN amassed evidence of many offenses. As was the case in South Africa and Rwanda, national reconciliation is achieved through the acknowledgement and punishment of individuals who brought darkness to their countries, and by popular determination and optimism to move forward collectively in the task of nation building.