Violence, lawlessness, and impunity—these words are common in the international vocabulary that surrounds the Central African Republic. As one of the least-developed countries in the world, this former French colony of Ubangi-Shari, sitting between the DRC, Sudan, and Chad, had been crippled by three decades of military misrule until the establishment of civilian government in 1993. When French-backed General François Bozizé went on to win a democratic election in May of 2005, things finally seemed to be looking up for the small landlocked state.
But, like most developing “democratic” regimes, Bozizé’s veneer of stability was simply that: it dissolved in a malaise of corruption, nepotism, and fraudulent elections that unsurprisingly handed Bozizé his second term in March of 2011. With the government’s failure to abide by peace agreements signed between rebel groups and the state in 2011, public discontent and anti-government fervor started to climb at an unprecedented rate. Enter Seleka, a newly emergent, motley coalition of rebel groups of all assortments, missions, and backgrounds.
A Rebel “Victory”
After several rebel offensives and successful attacks on various government strongholds, Bozizé was overthrown on March 24, 2013. Now, with the first elected president deposed, the country is beginning to revert to its chaotic past—a time during which illegal weapons proliferated far faster than food or money. Governance has all but disappeared and Prime Minister Nicolas Tiangaye has unpromisingly described the country’s status as “anarchy, a non-state.”
But the latest in a dreadful series of violent outbreaks may be the biggest yet. The pattern of broken governments and military overhauls may not repeat itself, but this deviation would not be for the better. The level of conflict that now prevails in the CAR has now been deemed “a human catastrophe of epic proportions”, according to Amnesty International, and thousands of civilian lives are at stake. Suddenly, actors caught within a political struggle have turned their crosshairs to a much more dangerous goal: religious eradication and inter-confessional mayhem between the Muslim factions of Seleka and a Christian majority that now finds itself increasingly threatened in the CAR’s complicated political arena.
The rise in severity of this conflict—from struggle for governmental control to interfaith feuding—has shocked the international community, and leaders of states have all begun to grow wary of addressing what seems like an enigmatic symptom of the failure of post-imperialist Africa.
A Leader’s Decision: Coup vs. Civil War
Both the questions of the current crisis and the success of Bozizé’s government can be answered by a look into the turn-of-the-century military changes undergone within the Central African Armed Forces, the official state military whose disloyalty to the president was spotlighted during mutinies in 1996 and 1997. Evidence of heavy military involvement with domestic politics in the past is clear: three of the country’s five presidents in its short post-independence history have been former army chiefs-of-staff, all of whom had taken power through coups d’état. First, President David Dacko was overthrown by his army chief-of-staff in 1966, only to be restored and overthrown again by new army chief-of-staff General Andre Kolingba in 1981. After the mutinies in ‘96 and ’97 led way to Bozizé’s military coup against newly elected president Ange-Félix Patassé, Bozizé knew that holding onto power meant crippling the very means by which it was constructed, broken, and reconstructed.
And so Bozizé reformed the military in the name of “stability and security,” not of his country, but of his own political status. What had essentially come under Bozizé’s decision-making calculus was a choice between two poisons, each with their own flavor of chaos: coup d’état or civil war. Seeing the former as the most immediate and consistent threat to him and his predecessors, Bozizé’s military reform centered around his weakening the military and placing those closest to him—namely, members of his family and of his own rebel group from the Gbaya tribe—in positions of high power.
As such, the Central African Armed Forces, the once-dominant kingmaker of Centrafrique, has been reduced to a weak institution dependent on international support to hold back its many enemies. Current commander-in-chief Michel Djotodia, who has succeeded in overthrowing Bozizé despite all the ex-president’s designs, now finds himself caught in a situation in which the government has little say or control over the situation within its borders. Government and military-sanctioned chaos has been replaced by the even more unpredictable factional chaos that has pushed the CAR to the brink of genocide.
A Tale of Two Problems
But to say that the government-military complex is the only actor at fault ignores the primary source of the chaos itself. The post-war fragmentation of the Seleka, the main opposition to Bozizé’s corrupt government, has largely caused what seemed like a unified alliance of all backgrounds to suddenly turn against one particular constituency. The group that had once remained a united front against political corruption has now broken down to a core of its most extreme Muslim members commanding its ever-unpredictable direction. The ruthless rebellion that installed Djotodia, the first Muslim president of this majority-Christian nation, has transformed rapidly into a fight to the death for sectarian hegemony. And while the Christians may have more numbers, the most extreme Seleka far exceed the collections of Christian villages in both the resources needed and the capacity required to commit the religion-based extermination.
Under Muslim onslaught, Christian militias known as “anti-balaka” (anti-machete) have initiated attacks on Muslim communities. Many of these attacks, following the metamorphosis of the conflict into a power grab done in the name of religion, have targeted civilians, as Christian militia members continue to slit the throats of women and children with the goal of exterminating all Muslims. In the void of a strong state military to control the situation, Christian attacks and brutal Seleka reprisals have become the norm.
This trend is somewhat reminiscent of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, as the nature of the situation has changed from what had largely been believed to be an internal political struggle to one that indiscriminately threatens sectarian populations through killings and counter-killings. With the dissolution of the government and a powerless military, Seleka has had free reign in determining the outcome of their once-altruistic fight against corruption, imitating the postbellum breakdown of opposition groups in other countries such as Libya and Sudan. And the crisis within which the CAR is now caught serves as a testament to the danger of loosely-tied opposition movements, even if they seek to dismantle or “reform” non-ideal governments.
On December 6, 600 French troops entered the Central African Republic’s capital, Bangui, on a peacekeeping mission, and the survival of the CAR as a legitimate political entity depends on this mission’s success. With the old government scrapped, only foreign powers have the military capacity to hold the nation together in the coming months. In the long-term, however, the most substantive challenge will not come in the form of gun battles on the streets of Bangui, but in the establishment of a stable civilian government in a nation that has, in its 53 years of independence, proved untamable.
Image credits: cnn.com; cia.gov