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Sunday 18 December 2005


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CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Post-election focus – a country in crisis or recovery?

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

KM 5 market in Bangui, capital of Central African Republic

NAIROBI, 18 Mar 2005 (IRIN) - Sunday's presidential and parliamentary elections in the Central African Republic (CAR) were a step forward for the nation, but much-needed donor aid is unlikely to arrive for several months, aid experts say.

"CAR remains too unstable for donors to risk investing in large-scale development projects, yet few relief organisations are coming in to administer much-needed emergency assistance," Felix Ntumba, the representative for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the CAR's capital, Bangui, told IRIN earlier in March.

OCHA launched a CAR interagency appeal in 2005, asking for US $23.3 million in emergency aid.

Decades of political and economic crises have meant that the problems facing the country’s 3.2 million inhabitants are difficult to assess. Information on the humanitarian situation is hard to come by, and what is available is often contradictory.

According to some reports, acute malnutrition has reached 14 percent in some areas. Yet the government’s chief of preventative medicine, Dr Abel Namssenmo, told IRIN in February, "Malnutrition is not a big problem in the country."

WFP Programme Officer Albert Bango-Makoudou said on Tuesday there was malnutrition in CAR "but not a malnutrition crisis". He also said prices of basic foods had increased in some zones although food appeared to be readily available in markets that IRIN visited this month in Bangui and towns and villages in the northwest.

A humanitarian specialist for the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Fabrice Boussalem, said some aid workers in the CAR are more concerned with crisis prevention.

"I don't think there is really a humanitarian crisis here yet," he told IRIN. "But indicators show that the humanitarian situation is deteriorating."

Boussalem also said aid workers "have no idea what is going on in 95 percent of the CAR". Only a handful of NGOs and UN agencies are operating in country, which is larger than France.

Soldiers escort a UN convoy on the road between Bangui and Bossangoa, to the northwest of CAR.
Credit: IRIN

The humanitarian situation deteriorated markedly in 2002, when tens of thousands of people were forced to escape fighting between troops supporting François Bozize and those supporting the elected government of President Ange-Felix Patasse.

Among the forces supporting Patasse were rebels from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), led by Jean-Pierre Bemba, who have been accused of committing rape, murder and other human rights abuses. Fighters from the CAR's northern neighbour, Chad, supported Bozize, a former armed forces chief of staff. These fighters pillaged the towns and villages they controlled.

Ntumba said by the time Bozize overthrew Patasse on 15 March 2003, three-quarters of the country's schools lay in ruins, along with many health clinics and other public buildings.

Sources of insecurity

Since Bozize took control of the capital, unidentified gunmen have continued to stage attacks in various rural areas, by setting up roadblocks and taking whatever goods they can.

"They seem to be mostly interested in looting, rather than controlling territory," Lamine Cisse, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General to the CAR, said. "It would really become a problem if politicians manipulate the armed groups."

The groups, Cisse said, were "unemployed youths and former soldiers who joined Bozize's rebellion - as well as former Chadian troops". Some of the Chadian fighters supporting Bozize have remained in the CAR and joined the nation's army.

Other officials have speculated that the unidentified gunmen include Patasse's former presidential guards and Congolese rebels. Civilians may also be among the faceless attackers.

Unidentified armed groups have been active in remote eastern areas too, close to the border with Sudan's Darfur region, where an estimated 20,000 Sudanese refugees have crossed into the CAR.

"The east has few roads and poor communications with [the] capital Bangui," said Luke Beeder, country head of Médecins Sans Frontières, one of the few NGOs in the CAR with a programme in the area.

Frequent attacks have also been reported in northwest CAR, towards Chad, in an area where fighting was particularly intense between 2002 and 2003. People living in towns and villages there told IRIN of the presence of armed groups.

"There was [an] attack just last week, just 20 km from here," one man in the provincial town of Bossangoa, said in March.

He added that some of the people who fled into the forest in 2002 were still there.

Farther south at the village of Ndjoh, a man told IRIN that attackers only target the Fula (semi-nomadic cattle herders), because they own cows.

"We don't have problems any more in our village because we have nothing left to steal," he said.

Day-to-day survival

Citizens of the CAR are using money less than they used to. The UNDP estimates that 95 percent of the population live on less than $1 a day, up from 67 percent in 2000.

People have been mostly bartering, or subsisting on food they grow themselves, but without money they have been unable to access the fee-based health care system. The wards in hospitals and health clinics visited by IRIN were mostly empty.

Busy street in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic.
Credit: IRIN

Health officials have said there was evidence that diseases previously brought under control were now spreading again, such as human sleeping sickness and river blindness. There has also been a new outbreak of tropical ulcers.

Moreover, the government estimates that 15 percent of Central Africans have contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The transitional government has been unable to provide other social services. "Two-thirds of the country's children do not go to school. Three-quarters of the teachers here had no formal training," Ntumba said.

There are small signs of economic recovery. In Bossangoa, many homes that were destroyed during the fighting have been rebuilt. In February, a cotton-processing factory in the town that was looted during the conflict finally restarted operations.

The factory is expected to inject cash into the local economy by paying factory workers, as well as cotton farmers. However, the managers at the cotton factory expressed concern that the unidentified armed groups could learn of the new influx of cash and increase their attacks on civilians.

Obstacles for the new government

Diplomats in Bangui have said that the country's political crisis will not go away after the elected government takes power, because it will inherit its predecessor's empty coffers.

Although Bozize delayed the election date, donors failed to provide extra aid for the extended transitional period.

"With the last IMF mission [in late February] it is now clear that new aid is unlikely to arrive until perhaps as late as August," Cisse said.

The biggest single problem the next government will face, he said, was payment of salary arrears.

"As long as salaries are not paid there will be social instability and crises," he said.

Some unpaid civil servants have found alternative illegal sources of income, and diplomats in Bangui wonder how the new government will battle corruption if it fails to pay its employees.

Taxes are unlikely to provide the shortfall. The amount of import tax to enter government coffers was lower in 2004 than during the armed conflict in 2003, an economist, who requested anonymity, said.

Members of the armed forces demand payment at roadblocks, much like highway bandits. Security forces have been accused of committing widespread abuses against civilians.

The human rights section of the UN Peace-Building Support Office in the CAR, known as BONUCA, has documented many cases of rape, torture and murder. BONUCA also has evidence of the government granting impunity to some of the alleged perpetrators, while other people are held in prison without any charges being brought against them.

Cisse also expressed concern about ethnic tensions, particularly within the armed forces. "They continue to pose a grave danger to the stability of this country," he said. "If recruitment or promotion becomes an ethnic consideration, this could again lead to mutinies."

[ENDS]

Theme(s)	Democracy

Other recent CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC reports:

Police stops rally by unpaid civil servants , 12/Dec/05

Returning refugees risk being displaced, 6/Dec/05

Government sets up new road maintenance agency, 5/Dec/05

Minister warns media to end hostility to women, 5/Dec/05

UN appeals for US $4.7 billion in life-saving aid, 2/Dec/05

Other recent Democracy & Governance reports:

IRAN-IRAQ: Landmine agreement signed, 18/Dec/05

IRAQ: Election results to be delayed up to two weeks, 18/Dec/05

TANZANIA: Ruling party wins national elections in Zanzibar but islands remain divided, 16/Dec/05

SWAZILAND: Doubt over legality of protests keep Swazis at bay, for now, 16/Dec/05

SIERRA LEONE: Corruption may be illegal, but no one’s giving it up yet, 16/Dec/05

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