The Central African Republic is a rich and fertile land, but growing unrest and humanitarian crises are now threatening its people. Marcus Prior travels through a land the world forgot
he early morning fog lies thick across the landscape below, yet to be washed away by the rising sun. Our plane circles above the milky whiteness, descending slowly into its soft embrace. For a brief moment the familiar markings of a runway are faintly visible just metres below, but then the engines roar and we are climbing.
Our aborted landing – we touch down safely after a second approach from the opposite direction – is appropriately symbolic: even getting into the Central African Republic (CAR) is a challenge. Air France flies into Bangui M’Poko International Airport just once a week from Paris. Commercial flights from neighbouring countries are infrequent and highly unreliable. The country is firmly landlocked, a debilitating economic albatross. Overland routes are time-consuming and often preyed upon by bandits with medieval intent.
Since independence from France in 1958, CAR has gained greatest notoriety through its eccentric, self-proclaimed emperor, Jean-Bédel Bokassa. Celebrations for his ‘coronation’ in 1977 reportedly set the country back over $20m – at least a quarter of its annual budget. A 13-year reign of despotism ended with his overthrow in 1979, and Bokassa was later tried for treason, murder, embezzlement and, infamously though ultimately unsuccessfully, for cannibalism. Apart from chaos and misrule, Bokassa’s ‘empire’ had also produced its own postage stamps bearing images of authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Jules Verne, and scientist Albert Einstein, as well as a 100-franc imperial coin.
Recent history has been less colourful but equally turbulent. Four coups in the past 10 years have created a climate of uncertainty and blunted development, to the point where CAR – despite significant mineral wealth – is considered one of the poorest countries in the world. Now, the government of president François Bozizé is fighting disparate rebel groups on at least two fronts, the flames fed by conflicts across the country’s porous borders to Darfur and eastern Chad. In the wake of the violence is a growing humanitarian crisis, the full scale of which the world has yet to grasp.
A deep and instinctive fear is gripping vast swathes of CAR. Terror is being spread down the barrel of a gun. At the heart of a volatile region, the actions of the military, rebel groups, bandits and thugs are pushing more and more innocent people into a living hell.
As we venture north of the capital, the tension that holds much of the region in bondage becomes perfectly clear as people hear the sound of our approaching vehicles. Just ahead of us, two boys pushing a handcart piled high with produce panic sending it into a spin as they throw themselves into the bush. An upturned bowl of manioc sprinkles its burnt white contents onto the black tarmac. We swerve and pass.
In the midst of the chaos, the few aid groups present in the area – including the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) – are struggling to reach the victims.
The two boys and their handcart stocked with food are a telling image – of fear, but also of plenty. CAR is a fertile land. Rain falls and rivers flow. In peacetime, not one of its nearly four million people should go hungry.
But in the densely populated northwest, peace is a dull memory. The WFP estimates that at least 220,000 people have been displaced by fighting and are now living in the bush, surviving off dwindling food stocks and the wild fruit and berries that grow around them. Many children are falling ill. Malnutrition stalks the weakest. Schools have been closed. Fields have been left untended.
Wherever we go in the northwest, people flee for their lives at the sound of our approaching convoy. Bicycles and pushcarts are abandoned on the road; pots are left steaming on open fires, pigs and goats the only remaining signs of life.
‘All we want is peace,’ says the headman of a village several kilometres south of the market town of Paoua. Most people flee too fast for us to meet them, but this time we stop and wait. Slowly, nervously, some young men emerge and approach us. We follow them at least one kilometre into the thick forest to find a small settlement of impromptu shelters.
‘Our only politics is farming,’ the headman says. ‘We don’t understand why soldiers come and fire on us. We’ve twice tried to go back to the village but both times we have been forced back into the bush by armed men.’
The village used to number over 800 people. Now only four of the oldest and most infirm remain. The rest have fled even further into bush than the small group we meet, which tells us they survive on what they can pick wild.
In a sense, this village is lucky. Unlike many others we pass, it has not been burnt to the ground. Charred remains along the roadside bear a haunting resemblance to the chilling scenes of devastation not too far away in Darfur – there it is desert, here deep forest. In the two days before our arrival, there had been a several violent engagements along the road on which we are travelling. In another village people say that their granaries have been deliberately targeted and razed to the ground by attackers, leaving them with barely a grain to survive through to the next harvest, which will not come until September.
A few kilometres further on, we come across another group of people who again turn to run before they spot the UN flags flying from our cars. They are mourning the death of a 30-yearold woman. Her body lays before them, wrapped in linen, her young son at her side. She had died of natural causes, but the villagers complain that it had been too dangerous to take her to the nearest hospital. They had been too scared to move. She died when she might have lived.
It is probably only the natural fertility of the region that means many more people remain alive where elsewhere they might have died. Wild roots and berries may not be the healthiest diet, but at least even the most desperate have something, however basic, to eat. In a more hostile climate, WFP might already be responding to a full-scale famine.
But the way things are going, unless the world focuses its eye firmly and fast on one of its most neglected corners, 2007 may turn into the year CAR tipped over the edge.
