Sifting Through the Cables: What did the U.S. Embassy in Bangui Know?

WikiLeaks maintains a host of dispatched cables from the American Embassy in Bangui between 2008 and 2010, the years in which the current conflict was seemingly allowed to foment.

A selection of cables point to knowledge of growing ethnic unrest, an increase of rebel factions, and food crises.

In February of 2009, a cable reported that a new rebel group had emerged in the northeast of the country – the Patriotic Convention for Justice and Peace (CPJP), one of the many factions that initially comprised the Séléka rebel movement prior to their dissolution by their leader, Michel Djotodia.

“While the group draws its force from long term ethnic tension between the Rounga and Gula tribes, the leadership of the group may well be Chadian or Sudanese,” the cable says.

Indeed, as mentioned in a previous post, the Gula tribes, politically marginalized by Bozizé, constituted the crux of Séléka might, along with Chadian and Sudanese support, in the form of mercenary fighters.

That same year, the embassy detailed how the Democratic Front of the Central African People (FDCP), another rebel group which made up the Séléka movement, was supported by Libya.

“It may be that the FDPC is being put into play to ensure that… the [Central African Republic government] remains weak,” the cable speculated.

The fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya had a ripple effect throughout much of the Sahel and the Savannah. Chad has sought to fill the military vacuum left by Gaddafi’s death, and threw its support behind the FDCP, and the Séléka as a whole.

Perhaps most tellingly, in August of 2009, a dispatch warned of an increasing likelihood of ethnic violence in the northeast of the country, foreseeing “Continued insurgency and instability.”

The current upheaval was born in the northeast Vakaga region that these cables constantly refer to.

As the country spirals into the nadir of food insecurity, the U.S. embassy had known of the possibility of a famine in the Vakaga region as early as 2009, citing World Food Programme information, but commenting that “the problem may be much worse and more widespread.”

It begs the question:  why did the U.S. choose not to reveal that the Central African Republic was a powder keg with a diminutive fuse?

(Featured photo: A Christian mob attacks a mosque in Bangui, Central African Republic, Tuesday Dec. 10, 2013. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

Assessing Genocide in the Central African Republic

“One man describes how his four-year-old son’s throat was slit, and how he saw a snake swallowing a baby. A woman explains that she is caring for a young girl because her mother went searching for medicine and was bludgeoned to death with Kalashnikov rifles. A young man tells how he was bound and thrown to the crocodiles, but managed to swim to safety,” writes David Smith in the Guardian.

Such atrocity has claimed over 1,000 lives on both sides, but exact figures remain tough to verify, as international aid agencies tend to the body count.

In November, Paris, with boots on the ground in Bangui and a substantial regional military presence waiting in the wings, was the first to warn of an impending genocide.

The Guardian’s eye-catching headline “Unspeakable horror in a country on the verge of genocide” also quotes a Human Rights Watch researcher as saying “It’s not a genocide and it’s not a civil war but it’s certainly trending in that direction.”

The Huffington Post entertained the views of Daniel Wagner, the CEO of an American cross-border risk advisory firm based in Connecticut, who argued that “The CAR may be host to the world’s next genocide, as well as being its latest failed state.”

In fact, following what some would see as France playing the “genocide card,” Western media outlets began using the “g” word before any international aid agency or humanitarian body on the ground did, perhaps out of fear of a premature prognosis.

Worsening spasms of immense violence and a rising death toll have only recently spurred John Ging, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, to declare that the Central African Republic is on the precipice of full-scale genocide, citing its morbid resemblance to 1994 Rwanda.

.@UNOCHA‘s Ging warning today that time is running out to prevent genocide in #CAR: 1/2 the country in need of humanitarian assistance.

— UNOCHA (@UNOCHA) January 17, 2014

“Ethnic cleansing” was the term preferred by Amnesty.

“Genocide” is becoming increasingly anathema in power circles, probably because, once invoked, it inherently demands an international intervention, with the onus on Washington to take some sort of lead.

U.S. State Department officials, at the height of the large-scale massacres in Rwanda, “were instructed not to utter the “g-word,” because “publicly acknowledging ‘genocide’ might commit the U.S. government to do something” in an interventionist era stymied by Somalia fatigue.

Barnaby Phillips, Al Jazeera’s CAR correspondent, one of a small cadre of foreign journalists operating in the major cities, rebukes the belief that the defined elements of genocide are taking place.

“There’s a big difference with Rwanda- the 1994 genocide was organised by a strong state that had a fiendish master plan. There’s no strong state in CAR, so I don’t think we’ll see ‘industrial’ (sorry for that ugly word) killing,” says Phillips in an “Ask Me Anything” forum on Reddit.

In the face of comparisons to Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia, Africaisacountry.com voices frustration that “Rarely does the CAR just get to be itself, because the CAR doesn’t matter much in the calculus of Western newsrooms. It matters only to the degree that it can be compared to places that do.”

(Featured photo: Mobs of Christians attack suspected Seleka members near the airport in  Bangui, Central African Republic, Dec. 9, 2013.  Both Christian and Muslim mobs went on lynching sprees as French Forces deploy in the capital. French forces  fired warning shots to disperse the crowds. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

The Sahel and the Savannah: In Conversation with Dr. Mamadou Diouf

Mamadou Diouf, director of Columbia University’s Institute for African Studies, speaks to The Boganda Journal about the changing interpretations of African conflicts, the Sahel-Savannah nexus, and France’s longstanding role in its former African colonies. 

TBJ: How is the academic and scholarly world interpreting the conflict in the Central African Republic?

MD: “With Central African Republic, it’s really a kind of turning point in which conflicts are debated, discussed in Africa – within Africa by policymakers, outside of Africa by people who are in human rights or by journalists. Usually it was kind of simple picture.

Along the Sahara and the eastern part of Africa is where you have religious conflicts: the Horn, East Africa, and Sahara-Sahel. Everything else is “ethnic.”

What is actually happening with this kind of interpretation is that with the crisis in the Ivory Coast, we began looking at a geography in which the north is Muslim and the south is Christian or “pagan.”

For the Ivory Coast, you could still think about such a geography from the Sahel to the Savannah.

But the Central African Republic is quite different. And if you look at the accounts of what is happening there – from the first post-colonial crisis to the creation of the “empire” by Bokassa, and many of the civil wars which were going on – no mention of Islam.

You had people discover that you had Muslims in Central Africa with the conflict. Before they didn’t know.

The discussion was framed in a way that was saying, ‘The Muslims are coming from Chad.’ Again the Sahel-Savannah transition becomes a very important element in interpreting what is happening there.

But if you look carefully, of course you have people from Chad there, you have people from the Sahel coming and settling there – Senegalese, Malian, etc. – for the simple reason that this is part of a continuity of a French Empire.

This is a space in which West Africa and equatorial Africa were within the empire; these were spaces where people were moving.

And in many cases, many of these people were moving, and many of the people who converted to Islam in the Central African Republic, as well as people coming from Chad, were usually traders, and were usually settling in cities and creating their own communities, usually around a market or around a Mosque.

In many cases, they were not involved in the political process; they were not social and political actors. So in moments of crisis you see exactly a situation in which identifications are shifting – from social or cultural to religious.

In cases in where the state was the main provider of resources – resources people were accessing as political actors, as I was saying Muslim communities were usually marginal in the political process, but very powerful in some cases in the economic system.

When the state collapsed, they are in many cases the people who are able to maintain a kind of prosperity. They can keep accumulating resources – not a lot – but being able to survive in a system which collapsed, which of course creates tensions with other communities, a tension which forces Muslims to enter the political system to try to defend themselves.

As a result, they move from a position of a victim to a position of people who are able to defend themselves. In some cases, they are able to launch attacks – and it has happened [in the Central African Republic], where the Séléka was able to organize and take over.”

TBJ: There have been retaliatory attacks by both the Séléka and the anti-Balaka. Have those two entities, since the state has collapsed, taken on religious identities?

MD: “Absolutely. You know in a situation where you no longer have rules, you no longer have protection, the only way you can protect not only yourself, but your wife, your family, your community, you have to find elements of identification. In this case, what has happened is religion.

Amongst Christians, you can have competition amongst ethnic lines, but this is put aside. But for the Muslims – and this is the complication of conversion – the kind of process of converting to Islam in Africa is a process in which you shed your ethnic identity and you redefine yourself as a Muslim.

It’s why a lot of Central Africans are being qualified as North Africans, not Central Africans, they are coming from somewhere else. And I was saying, in many cases, it’s not true, but you cannot prove it.

When you convert, you pick up a new history, you pick up a new name. Your old genealogy is interrupted. This is the problem communities are facing when they are trying to push them out by saying ‘They are from somewhere else.'”

TBJ: What has France’s redefined role been in Africa, and in the conflict in the Central African Republic, after its intervention in Mali?

MD: “This is a completely new context. If you look at how France has been trying to redefine its relation with Africa since the ‘60’s, you have at least three cycles.

The first cycle was where independence was nominal. The French still kept a firm grip on these African countries, and have been trying to always put in power people serving their own interest. The French have always been to support whoever they wanted or put in power whoever they wanted.

The second cycle, which began in the late ‘80’s, with structural adjustment programs and the process of globalization. But France was more and more investing in European integration, and adopting a kind of foreign policy – political and economic – which was trying to diversify its assets outside of its former colonial empire.

The French began a kind of process of disengagement. Not total, but a process in which the political factor was no longer playing a big role, in particular after the crisis in the Congo and Gabon with [oil giant] ELF.

And they basically opened space for French firms to conduct their own foreign policy. It’s why ELF Total was able to finance the civil war of [President] Denis Sassou-Nguesso in the [Republic of] Congo.

The attempt to disengage failed because of the intertwinedness between the French elite and the African elite.

France is coming back in the new context as a peaceful force, but at the same these conflicts are providing France opportunities to defend economic interests because they are losing it in particular to the Chinese.

The question for France is do they have not only the military, but the financial resources to support what is going on in Mali and in Bangui.”

TBJ: Unlike in Mali, the French seemed unwelcome in the Central African Republic, with some media sources showing anti-French graffiti on the walls across Bangui.

MD: “For one reason: when they stepped in, they were coming to defend the Christians.

They found out, after two weeks, that, actually, the anti-Séléka forces, the so-called “Christian forces,” were the aggressors and they were basically beginning a kind of genocide.”

(Featured photo credit: AP/Jerome Delay)

Behind the anti-Balaka

In the framing of Central African Republic’s haunting violence as a religious conflict, the anti-Balaka (“balaka” means machete in the local Sango language) are often characterized as a coalesced Christian militia, retaliating against the predominantly Islamic Séléka rebels.

They have not only targeted those they believe to be part of the Séléka rebel movement, but Muslim civilians as well, killing children and mutilating bodies.

“We had no intention of killing Muslims, but we later noticed that so many Muslims in the country were supporting the Séléka rebels,” Alfred Legrald Ngaya, an anti-Balaka leader, is quoted as saying in the Turkish press.

The rag-tag anti-Balaka was, in fact, set up half a decade ago, under the auspices of former leader, Francois Bozizé, to protect communities from bandits and cattle raiders. In the absence of the state’s ability to monopolize violence or provide any real form of security, the anti-Balaka took on a defensive role. An op-ed in Al Jazeera claims that they “are not motivated nor united by religion.”

“Before the anti Balaka fought street bandits because the police and the army were incapable of fighting them,” Jean Marius Toussaint Zoumalde, a Capuchin of the convent in Saint-Laurent, is quoted as saying in the Vatican’s news site.

General Francisco Soriano, commander of the French Sangari force in the country, said that he and his force do not know exactly who makes up the anti-Balaka. “Their leaders’ identity, their chain of command and their political programme are all unknowns,” according to Soriano.

But in one of their latest reports, Human Rights Watch voices fears that the anti-Balaka militias “are increasingly organized and using language that suggests their intent is to eliminate Muslim residents from the Central African Republic.”

Amnesty International believes that a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” is being carried out against Muslims in the western region of the Central African Republic, where the capital, Bangui, lies.

“Revenge is good sometimes, and it’s bad sometimes, but we have to do it,” Sebastien Wenezoui, an anti-Balaka leader, is quoted as saying in The Global and Mail.

A Christian anti-balaka militiaman poses for a photograph in Bangui. (Photo credit: Reuters)

Yet, some Muslims have sought refuge in a Catholic Church under the protection of Rev. Justin Nary, who believes he is firmly a target of the anti-Balaka.

As Chad has aided the Séléka rebels, because of shared ethnic and religious backgrounds, French soldiers have been accused of failing to protect the Muslim population against rampant anti-Balaka atrocity.

Peter Bouckart, the Human Rights Watch Emergency Director, posted an image on Twitter, purporting that French Sangari forces, just a stone’s throw away, did nothing as an anti-Balaka militiaman mutilated a Muslim’s body.

Even as Catherine Samba-Panza, a Christian, has come to power, her demands for the predominantly Christian anti-Balaka to disarm have been met with stiff opposition.

However one chooses to define the contours of this conflict – religious or not – radical Islamist forces in Africa have clearly taken their own stand. Nigeria’s Boko Haram has declared war on the anti-Balaka to “avenge the blood of Muslims massacred in the CAR,” in a cycle of vengeful violence that shows no sign of abating.

(Feature photo credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Africa’s Hat-Trick Heroine?

In the revolving door of Central African Republic leaders, the latest, tasked with ushering in some kind of working peace to safeguard elections for 2015, is Catherine Samba-Panza, the first female leader of the country, and only the fourth in Africa’s post-independence history, after Burundi’s Sylvie Kinigi, Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Malawi’s Joyce Banda.

In fact, out of the last three leaders of the CAR, the colorfully dressed Samba-Panza, dubbed “mother courage,” will be the first to have ascended to power not through an armed coup, but via a vote in the National Assembly. This is also the third transitional government since the Séléka offensive.

And, unlike those before her — Ange-Félix Patassé, Francois Bozizé, and Michel Djotodia — Samba-Panza had the backing of foreign donors and civil society groups.

Appointed as the mayor of Bangui by Séléka leader Michel Djotodia, Samba-Panza’s new role has ushered in optimism in some circles, with gender playing a substantial role.

There were reports of “singing and dancing in the streets of the dilapidated capital” following her appointment, and a feeling that men had “got the country into this mess. It would only take a woman to get us out.”

“Everything we have been through has been the fault of men,” Marie-Louise Yakemba, the head of an interfaith civil-society organization, is quoted as saying in the New York Times.

One Nigerian news outlet spoke with almost a sense of pride following her victory.

Of a successful business and corporate law background, Samba-Panza is also active with the Association of Women Jurists, a women’s rights group that aids victims of sexual violence, adding to the apparent optimism.

Despite being a Christian, she has been championed as an engine for reconciliation, and did not run on a religious platform.

However, as Christians make up a majority in the capital, and no Muslim representative has been appointed to Samba-Panza’s side, questions will remain if, despite her glowing resume, she can indeed, at the very least, broker a truce between the sparring kaleidoscopic factions decimating what remains of the Central African Republic, particularly given the events immediately after her inaugural speech, peppered as it was with reconciliatory rhetoric.

(Feature photo credit: AP/Jerome Delay)

The Séléka: Assembled and Disbanded

Former Nigerian President and revered African statesman, Olusegun Obasanjo, has argued that a sign of marked progress in African stability is the diminishing frequency of military coups threatening incumbencies.

Obasanjo, on China’s state-run CCTV Africa network, contended that, nowadays, “military coups are an aberration,” with only Mali and the Central African Republic registering upheavals in recent years.

Yet Obasanjo has missed a key facet of the composition of the militia men who swiftly ousted Bozizé. The Séléka rebels are anything but a centralized military unit. Thierry Vircoulon, project director for Central Africa at International Crisis Group, bluntly makes evident that Séléka rebels “are nothing else than militiamen and bandits without any other agenda than ousting president Bozizé and looting… accompanied by guns for hire from Darfur and Chad.”

By most accounts, the Séléka are a broad but loose coalition – “some a decade old, others having emerged just months ago” – waiting in the wings for an opportune moment to seize power as a means to CAR’s vast mineral wealth.

Disbanding a battle-hardened militia is never a good idea. And perhaps the death blow which propelled the country into a downward spiral of ineffable violence was Séléka leader Michel Djotodia’s decision to wholly dissolve his coalition of fighters.

The largely Islamic mercenary militia, armed to the teeth and wielding machetes, disbanded into several smaller groups and conducted a campaign of pillage and banditry across the country. With no chain of command, the Séléka targeted the majority Christian population of Bangui, prompting retaliatory strikes from vigilante Christian mobs, particularly the anti-Balaka (anti-machete).

Djotodia’s calculated decision to disband the Séléka possibly unleashed “between 20,000 and 25,000 armed fighters on a country known for recycled rebellions,” and was a “recipe for disaster,” according to the Institute for Security Studies.

Largely stifled from continuing its campaign in Bangui by the presence of a large, heavily armed African Union force (MISCA), a contingent of 200 South African troops, and French soldiers working in tandem, the Séléka are now regrouping in the northeast, inflicting even more horror on civilians.

The Séléka are on the verge of escalating the conflict by tightening its grip on a key town not far from its northeast base.

And, as mentioned in previous posts, they have the support of regional military power, Chad, and its troops.

(Featured Photo: Newly enlisted FACA (Central African Armed Forces) soldiers drag the lifeless body of a suspected Muslim Seleka militiaman moments after Central African Republic Interim President Catherine Samba-Panza addressed the troops in Bangui, Wednesday Feb. 5, 2014. The victim was lynched by hundreds of recruits, pelting him with bricks and mutilating his body with knives. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay) 

The Kingmaker

Landlocked and often obscured in African and international affairs, Chad has long played a strategic role in shaping events in its neighborhood.

In the 1980s, Chad’s then dictator, Hissène Habré, was backed financially and militarily by Washington to act as a buffer against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi by deposing Gaddafi-backed militants occupying Chad’s northern border.

Idriss Déby, who deposed Habré in a swift, decisive coup 24 years ago, is seen by the West as a bulwark against Islamist expansion in the Sahel. Chad contributed 2,400 troops, highly trained in desert warfare, to aid France’s mission in northern Mali, suffering the most casualties.

Chinese oil exploration in Chad has reaped windfall profits for N’Djamena, which has invested much of its new found oil money into expanding and arming the Chadian army.  In 2006, the World Bank allowed Chad to access a key oil revenue account, previously frozen because Chad had diverted oil revenue for military purposes.

Lush with Western support and Chinese money, Déby has altered Chad’s role in the region, filling the power vacuum left by the death of Gaddafi, and supplying troops to multinational forces deployed on stabilizing missions in the region.

In the Central African Republic, Déby’s Chad is a “driving force behind key decisions in the current crisis.”

Chad initially took interest in the politics of Central Africa after a rebel offensive based in the porous border regions of Darfur and northwest CAR sought to overthrow Déby.

Bozizé was protected by a Chadian Presidential Guard, an elite unit specially designated by Déby. The CAR presidency is also stocked with Chadian advisers. Following Bozize’s departure from power, Chad’s “praetorian guard” stood by Djotodia’s side.

Djotodia only stepped down after pressure from N’Djamena following a regional summit in 2013 to help resolve the crisis.

Chad is believed to have supported Djotodia’s Séléka rebels. Chadian FOMAC (Multinational Force of Central Africa) troops share ethnic and religious ties to the Séléka rebels.

“Chad is the master of Séléka and Séléka is its attack dog,” a Bangui resident is quoted as saying in a Reuters analysis piece. Moreover, the scale of Chadian troops in the CAR has reached a size that is “uncontrollable.”

Chadian forces have been accused of carrying out atrocities against civilians, particularly Christians, arming the Seleka rebels, and, most recently, helping them flee the country.

(Featured photo credit: REUTERS/Luc Gnago)

Pawns of Power II: French Legacy Against Chinese Clout

Diamonds, timber, oil, tin, and, most significantly, uranium, the basis of nuclear energy, comprise the catacombs of mineral wealth beneath the soil of the Central African Republic. Africa is home to 18 percent of the world’s uranium supply, and the CAR remains one of the last untapped reserves, particularly in the Bakouma mines in the southeast of the country.

In 2008, France’s state-owned energy giant, AREVA, struck a deal with Bozizé’s government to mine at Bakouma in what Reuters calls “France’s biggest commercial interest in its former colony.” A stark fall in uranium prices on the global commodities market prompted AREVA to suspend mining activities at Bakouma. France derives 75 percent of its energy from nuclear power — the largest share in the world.

Concurrently, China, expanding its political and economic influence in Africa by the day, had established itself as a stiff economic competitor to traditional Western commercial entities in the CAR. While the returns on any investment in the CAR would be small when compared with Chinese business holdings in Zambia or Angola, Beijing left no stone unturned in its quest for continental clout.

In 2011, China penned a deal to construct a $30 million power plant to increase electricity in the capital, Bangui, in addition to the schools, hospital, and houses Chinese construction companies had already put up.

Bozizé signed a series of commercial contracts with Chinese and South African consortiums during his time in power. The Chinese National Petroleum Corporation won a contract to conduct oil explorations in Bokomata, in the north of the CAR, the homeland of the Séléka rebel movement. And, crucially, China acquired 49 percent of AREVA’s Bakouma mine project, which, according to some African commentators, “sealed the end of his regime.”

In a classified diplomatic cable made available by WikiLeaks, the U.S. Embassy in Bangui speculated that Bozizé is welcoming the host of deals with Beijing “as an alternative to more restrictive relations with the French and the West,” underscored by the fact that “a Chinese company has purchased a significant part of the French uranium company AREVA’s interest in Central African mines.”

Michael Djotodia, the Séléka rebel leader, made it a priority to review the mining deals with China and South Africa as one of his very first political moves.  Djotodia relinquished power after a regional summit in the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, highlighting Chad’s veiled role in Central African politics.

(Source: businessinsider.com; Updated to show Chinese projects in the Central African Republic)

(Feature photo credit: MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images)