The Triple Crisis: Why Humanitarian Organisations (and Others) Need to Do More for the Central African Republic
| Published date | 01 May 2015 |
| Author | Marcel Langenbach,Tarak Bach Baouab |
| Date | 01 May 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12179 |
The Triple Crisis: Why Humanitarian
Organisations (and Others) Need to Do
More for the Central African Republic
Marcel Langenbach and Tarak Bach Baouab
M
edecins Sans Fronti
eres, Amsterdam
On 12 December 2013, M
edecins Sans Fronti
eres (MSF)
published an open letter to Valerie Amos, United Nations
(UN) Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs
and Emergency Relief Coordinator.
1
The letter was issued
after months of bilateral advocacy by MSF towards UN
humanitarian agencies and other NGOs to increase their
emergency response to the crisis in the Central African
Republic (CAR).
The March 2013 coup d’
etat in CAR had brought to
power a military alliance of rebel groups known as the
S
el
eka, and the months that followed were filled with
violence. The S
el
eka mainly, but not exclusively, targeted
the majority Christian population, abusing and killing civ-
ilians in a bid to control the country. By the summer,
self-defence militias called AntiBalaka had organised
themselves locally to rid their villages and towns of the
S
el
eka, and started to attack Muslim communities who
they viewed as in league with the new regime. Following
gruesome violence perpetrated by both the S
el
eka and
the AntiBalaka, rural villages were abandoned and over
400,000 people were displaced, leaving only the bigger
cities inhabited.
The CAR population had known decades of low-inten-
sity conflict, but the level of fear gripping the country in
2013 was unprecedented. It culminated on 5 December
with a coordinated attack by the AntiBalaka on the capi-
tal, Bangui. The arrival of French troops to disarm the
S
el
eka led to a power vacuum, the result of which was
bloodshed. President Michel Djotodia was pressured into
stepping down in January 2014, and attacks on Muslims
followed by revenge killings against Christians took place
around the country as the ex-S
el
eka withdrew from Ban-
gui. The AntiBalaka increased the number of attacks
against Muslim communities in the North and West of
the country, and what had started as a fight against the
S
el
eka was now directed at all Muslims. The AntiBalaka
took it upon themselves to ‘clean up the country’, rid-
ding it of people they perceived as foreigners while also
attacking convoys of displaced Muslims along the roads
to Northern CAR and violently pillaging Bangui’s Christian
quarters in a general atmosphere of impunity and
lawlessness.
Despite the extreme level of violence and displace-
ment experienced by the people living in CAR, their situ-
ation went largely unnoticed by international politicians
and the media in 2013. This was what prompted MSF to
raise the country’s profile through its public communica-
tions as of July of that year. Repeated rounds of meet-
ings with UN officials across field locations in CAR and
in the UN offices in Geneva and New York had not
yielded tangible results, explaining the public call for
action. Months after MSF urged the UN to reinforce its
capacity on the ground what has changed?
The violence in CAR reached its peak between Decem-
ber 2013 and January 2014, when the clashes between
the S
el
eka and the AntiBalaka were at their worst. It
should, however, be noted that the violence levels
recorded since March 2014 are still significantly higher
than those from before March 2013. The attacks have
mainly been concentrated in areas where there are Mus-
lim enclaves, such as the PK5 neighbourhood in Bangui,
and also along the evolving frontline between the two
zones of control, which runs from Ouham-Pend
e to the
towns of Bambari and Grimari in Ouaka. The current
violence includes the targeting of civilians seen as pro-
AntiBalaka in areas controlled by the S
el
eka, criminal vio-
lence by certain AntiBalaka members targeting everyone
in areas under their control, and long-running conflicts
between sedentary agriculturalists (mostly Christians) and
armed (Muslim) Peuhl pastoralists.
There are two main reasons for the decline in violence.
One is that the S
el
eka and most of the Muslim popula-
tion have either withdrawn or been driven out from Anti-
Balaka-controlled areas and there are therefore fewer
people to target. The second is the presence of interna-
tional troops. In general, whenever international forces
arrive in an area, the levels of violence drop. For exam-
ple, in February in Carnot, the AntiBalaka descended on
the town as soon as the S
el
eka withdrew; the four days
of violence that followed only ended with the arrival of
Global Policy (2015) 6:2 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12179 ©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 2 . May 2015 163
Practitioner Commentary
To continue reading
Request your trial