In less than two months’ time, the world will be marking the 20th anniversary of the worst genocide that has been seen in Africa since the end of colonialism, namely, the Rwanda pogrom that began on April 6, 1994.
This genocide was so horrendous that it has irretrievably robbed every African of part of his or her dignity as a human being. You see, in Europe and America, all Blacks are looked upon as being largely the same, with the result that the shameful things that the Rwandans did to one another in 1994 have become a “historical millstone” around the necks of all Blacks, however far away they are from Rwanda.
Why then are we Africans allowing the same thing to happen again in the Central African Republic?
Admittedly, there is an African Union force there, helping the French to try and save the lives of people threatened by murderous religious strife. But the number of troops is so woefully inadequate that the UN Secretary- General, Mr Ban Ki-Moon, has called for an additional 3,000 troops, equipped with “air mobility”. His appeal comes in the wake of an ever escalating violent conflict between Christians and Muslims which, in spite of the presence of the foreign troops, is continuing. Many Muslim communities in the capital, Bangui, and the north-western part of the CAR, are reported to have been “wiped off the map, their residents massacred and survivors forced to flee.” A sequence of major tit-for-tat killing between Christians and Muslims has been going on in the country since the end of 2013.
There is little doubt now that the massacres were initially started by Muslim militias, known as the Séléka. Muslims only make up about 15 percent of the CAR’s population, but after a coup that brought a self-appointed president, Michel Djotodia, to power, Muslims began to kill Christians, many of whom had to flee from their homes.
But then, Djotodia was deposed and forced into exile by a combination of regional and international forces. Many of the Séléka generals who terrorised the Christian communities also fled.
The Christians took advantage of the arrival of French forces to launch reprisal massacres against the Muslims.
The Christians’ actions caused the French ambassador to the UN, Mr Gérard Araud, to tell a UN meeting in New York on January 15, 2014 that his country “underestimated the levels of hatred” between Christians and Muslims in the Central African Republic, before launching its intervention.
Mr Geraud admitted: “We knew there was some inter-sectarian violence, but we did not foresee such deep, ingrained hatred. We are facing a situation where we are between two communities that want to kill each other.
It is nearly an impossible situation for the African [Union] and French soldier.”
This admission by the French ambassador came as an extremely shocking statement to international political observers, for if any country should intimately know the situation in CAR, it is the French. Since CAR was granted its “independence” by France in 1960, France has always been in the background, dictating the direction the country should take, first through a clandestine system of political manipulation carried out by General Charles de Gaulle’s African “czar”, Jacques Foccart, and followed by other French administrators.
The most notorious exhibition of France’s continued tutelage over an independent” CAR occurred in 1977, when the country’s military dictator of the time, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, decided to crown himself as an “emperor”.
“Inspired by [French Emperor] Napoleon’s coronation in 1804, “Bokassa I” staged his own elaborate ritual inside a large outdoor stadium in Bangui, his capital, on December 4, 1977. …[Bokassa] ascended a giant golden throne shaped like an eagle with outstretched wings, donned a 32-pound coronation robe containing 785,000 pearls and 1,220,000 crystal beads, and then crowned himself with a gold crown topped by a 138- carat diamond that cost over $2,000,000 to manufacture. .. The total bill for Bokassa’s regalia alone came to $5,000,000. 240 tons of food and drink were flown into Bangui [from France] for Bokassa’s coronation banquet, including a tureen of caviar so large that two chefs had to carry it, and a seven-layer cake. Sixty new Mercedes- Benz limousines were airlifted into the capital, at a hefty cost of $300,000 for airfreight alone. … The entire ceremony cost $20,000,000 to stage, an astronomical sum in a nation whose annual gross domestic product was only $250,000,000. The newly crowned Emperor used French aid grants to cover a significant portion of the bill.
Time Magazine quoted him as revealing that “Everything here was financed by the French government. We ask the French for money, get it and waste it”… In 1979, Bokassa was overthrown in a coup, carried out with French military support, by the very man he had overthrown in 1965, David Dacko.
What really happened is that the French did not care about what happened to the country and its people, so long as French companies and their European associates continued to enjoy their profits in CAR. (The country’s main exports are cotton, coffee, tobacco; cocoa, rubber, and palm-oil products.
Timber is also an important export product, while mineral exports include some of the world’s most spectacular diamonds, uranium, and gold.)
The question posed by the self-deception of the French (alas only now – belatedly – realised) and the customary inability of the UN to apply enough robustness to save human lives in Africa, is this: “What can the world do now?”
One aspect of the horrible situation that makes for a tiny bit of optimism is this: as a largely religious conflagration, it may be easier to stem than in other ethnic conflicts. My own proposal is this: the UN Secretary-General should undertake a mission to the Vatican and Saudi Arabia immediately to prevail upon the authorities there to constitute a joint-delegation to go to the CAR. This delegation should hold public meetings, at which the following measures would be announced:
1. Any Christian militia leaders who incite Christians to kill or harm Muslims in any way, will be ex-communicated by the Roman Catholic Church.
2. Similarly, any Muslim militia leaders who incite their followers to kill or harm Christians will be barred from performing the Hajj [Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca] for life.
The joint delegation should then constitute a Monitoring Group, made up of enlightened Christian and Muslim leaders, who would observe the situation in the country and compile the names of community leaders and other individuals known to be carrying out killings of fellow citizens. The Monitoring Group should publicise its work widely and invite reports from citizens across the length and breadth of the country. The Vatican and the authorities in Riyadh should publish the names of suspects who would be deemed to be in danger of the proposed measures of exclusion, so as to convince the populace that the Vatican and the Riyadh authorities are really serious in their attempt to eradicate the bloodshed.
Most important of all, if this scheme works in the CAR, it could offer an important template for the solution of similar conflicts throughout the world in future.
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