Regional turmoil is fuelling Central African Republic's descent

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 18TH FEBRUARY, 2015

On 18th February 2015, I attended a talk led by Sarah Covington and Albert Caramés Boada to discuss the ongoing Central African Republic conflict and understanding the actors behind the violence in the regional crisis. Sarah Covington is the lead analyst on the Central African Republic for the Country Risk Team at HIS which is a specialist intelligence unit that forecasts political and violent risks worldwide. Albert Caramés Boada is an associate researcher at the Groupe de Recherche d’Information sur la Paix (GRIP), working closely with the International Catalan Institute for Peace.

In sum, the speakers argued that it would be an oversimplification in any conflict to assume that sectarian violence is the singular root cause of conflict.

Firstly, Ms Covington illustrated how there are regional factors which must not be overlooked. The geographical position and size of the Central African Republic emphasise this. It borders numerous unstable and conflict-affected countries including Chad, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and also endures cross-border interference by Ugandan rebel groups seeking to recruit disenfranchised refugees. She argued that the sectarian violence between Christian and Muslim groups in the Central African Republic is therefore not just a domestic conflict, it is a regional problem that should be addressed within a regional context and regional framework.

Next, Mr Boada went on to highlight that while the focus of the conflict has been predominantly on the ethnic cleansing that took place in 2014, the crisis in CAR is rooted in deep-seated economic, social and political issues which remain unaddressed:

“Negligence of development, the population, the lack of democratic traditions (particularly in rural areas), corruption has exacerbated the lack of unity inside the country as early as 2011, if not before then. Necessities are lacking and addressing the roots of the conflict means tackling the chronic lack of development in the country as well as solving the current conflict. The lack of political will and intelligence on the ground within the international community and their reaction to the current humanitarian catastrophe have been slow. Whilst the French troops were part of the solution In intervening in December 2013, they are also part of the problem as former colonialists. Preventing all-out war did not solve the underlying issues plaguing the country.”

In these circumstances, the ability to build a civil administration will be undermined in the short-term and long-term. Ms Covington commented that it is difficult to build an administration if people aren’t being paid. The government’s limited geographical outreach (restricted to the capital Bangui) means that they are unable to restart the economy, especially if rebel groups are fighting each other over the economic resources. Even if a mandated constitution and foreign companies return to kick-start the economy after the elections, hundreds of thousands of Central Africans will still either be disenfranchised or displaced. Simply restarting the economy won’t solve the underlying issues.

At the same time, the U.N is struggling to provide funds to support their soldiers, let alone to restore order and instigate the development projects which have the potential to provide a sustainable solution to the issues tearing down the Central African Republic. The result is the sectarian violence that we have seen escalating in the past year, which may not be addressed by the international community. If that is the case, the root causes of discontent will not be directly addressed, and as such, the future of the Central African Republic may remain tenuously unstable.

Voices from the Central African Republic

THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC IS ONE OF AFRICA'S FORGOTTEN CONFLICTS. SINCE SERIOUS VIOLENCE AND FIGHTING BETWEEN MILITIAS, GOVERNMENT FORCES AND OTHER ARMED GROUPS SWEPT THE CAPITAL BANGUI IN 2013, CONFLICT HAS SPREAD ACROSS THE COUNTRY AND CONTINUED.

The consequences of violent conflict are deepening with each passing year. In 2017, half a million Central Africans were estimated to be refugees while the number of internally displaced persons rose by a staggering 50 per cent last year leaving one quarter of the entire population displaced. Two weeks ago, over 40 people were killed in an attack on a refugee base in Alindao alone.

This conflict has generated a silent crisis across the country which needs solving urgently: hunger and severe acute malnutrition. The Central African Republic's hunger crisis, caused by the brutal bush war, is not an anomaly. It is one country - like Yemen, Lake Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria and Nigeria - where hunger and conflict walk hand-in-hand. Today, it is estimated that 60% of undernourished people around the world live in a war-zone as families face a daily struggle to survive due to deliberate acts of burning agricultural land, poisoning water wells, bombing food markets and destroying or confiscating harvests. 

ERNESTINE AND PRISCILLA

"I came across little Priscilla five years ago." says Ernestine. At 57, Ernestine, who lives in a small village on the road to Bouali, takes care of Priscilla, 7, an orphan. "Her parents are dead, she has only me," continues Ernestine, who now acts as grandmother. The daily life of Ernestine, however, is not easy as her livelihood as a farmer has been hampered by armed conflict. A month ago, Priscilla started to cough. As her condition deteriorated, Ernestine took her to the Action Against Hunger paediatric centre in Bangui. On arrival, Priscilla weighed only twelve kilos. "She had no appetite, her stomach had swelled and I knew she needed treatment," said Ernestine. Diagnosed with malnutrition, Priscilla was taken care of and eventually she started regaining her appetite and also began gaining weight. After five days of treatment, she now weighs thirteen kilos. 

JOSIANE AND FIRMINE

Josiane is 32 years old, and she has given birth to seven children. Sadly she lost one of them, who died of severe acute malnutrition a few years ago. Her last child, Firmine, is 2 years old. Firmine accompanies her in focus group sessions on breastfeeding and infant and young child feeding practices which have been implemented by Action Against Hunger in the Kokoro community since 2016. Prior to the 2013 conflict, Josiane was a street vendor of vegetables and her husband was in full-time employment. "In 2013, because of violence, my entire family was forced to flee to Mpoko camp to avoid looting, robbery and killings." Since her return to Kokoro in 2014, she and her husband have been unable to generate an income. They live with their parents and their children, and the lack of financial means impacts both the nutritional and psychological health of the whole family. "I am suffering from mental disorders today, and my children are short of food," says Josiane. At the Kokoro Community Centere, Josiane receives counselling and learns practices to take care of her children and herself through focus groups and games and relaxation sessions. "I am grateful to Action Against Hunger for the assistance offered several times a week in terms of psychological support and good breastfeeding and feeding practices," she says. 

LEONIE AND BENADIA

Little Benadia is 9 months old, and he lost both his parents to violence. "The Seleka came, and they killed both parents," said Leonie, Benadia’s grandmother. From that moment, the little boy started to be sick: "He was not eating anymore, he was not playing anymore. I came to Action Against Hunger's facilities to find help," she said. Upon arrival, the boy received ready-to-use therapeutic food to treat his malnutrition, and received a hygiene kit containing a bucket, jerry cans, bleach, and soap. "Without Action Against Hunger, I do not know where my grandson would be today. He has already lost his parents, but now he is in good health." 

MARIAM AND ADAMA

At four months, the little Adama weighs just three kilos. The grandmother of the child, Mariam, has been raising the girl since the death of her mother as a result of an illness. Mariam has already lost her husband, killed by rebels because he was a Muslim. Mariam, forced from her home, became a refugee and fled to Cameroon in 2013, where she stayed for four years. Since her return, Mariam has nothing: no job, no food, no husband and her granddaughter was suffering from severe diarrhoea and weight loss. She went to the Action Against Hunger health centre for treatment. Mariam is reassured to be there "At least we can treat her illness and feed her properly," she said. 

 

Displacement and Hunger: An Unprecedented Crisis in Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso and the wider Sahel region in Africa is in the middle of a serious crisis. Access to jobs, education and health care, conflict and the effects of climate change are affecting millions of people. Burkina Faso has a growing population but the unequal distribution of wealth continues to put communities at risk of malnutrition. Undernutrition is widespread, with 8.6% of the population classed as acutely malnourished in 2017. 

CONFLICT AND HUNGER

Earlier this month, 150,000 civilians fled their communities because of escalating violence in the country. The International Rescue Committee – currently leading a consortium of four charities (including Action Against Hunger) focused on improving access to nutrition and treatment – described the number of people displaced by conflict as 'unprecedented'. The violence is driven by community disputes and conflict over land, but it’s also linked to the growth of terrorist and insurgent groups in the region such as Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The conflict in the north of the country has accelerated the crisis, creating the largest internal displacement in the country's recorded history.

Violence has prevented the delivery of humanitarian aid, which already had huge problems with accessibility. Poor and non-existent roads were already constant challenges and potholes can be so big that locals called them “elephant nests". 

Over two and a half million people in Burkina Faso are now suffering from food insecurity due to food shortages and rising prices. The influx of refugees crossing the border into Burkina Faso from Mali and Niger – countries in the Sahel region suffering from similar challenges of conflict and hunger – is also placing a strain on the country's resources. 

CLIMATE CHANGE

Along with conflict, climate change also threatens to undermine farmers’ livelihoods. Flash floods and drought have consistently destroyed crops, roads and houses leaving thousands in need and children suffering from severe acute malnutrition. 

Climate change will create new challenges for vulnerable communities in Burkina Faso who are dependent on farming. So far, the biggest effects have been shorter, more violent spells of heavy, tropical rain. Too much or too little rain can have disastrous consequences, and climate change will bring even more uncertainty.

SOLUTIONS

Despite the many challenges, hope remains for communities in Burkina Faso. Thanks to our support, mothers receive packs of seeds, soil and tools as part of our gardening and resilience programmes. This allows them to grow the nutritious fruit and vegetables – reducing the threat of poor nutrition during pregnancy.  Mothers are now also able to support their children and sell some of the extra produce at the market. 

"All the women working in the garden get along very well." said Ouoaba, president of community garden initiative in the village of Birminga. "We have made new friends while working together here. The most important thing is that our children are much happier now. They are stronger, they smile more, they get over illnesses faster, and they grow faster."

The Lake Chad Crisis: A short history of colonialism and Islamism

For ten years, Boko Haram, a Salafi-jihadist movement and terrorist organisation has brought terror and violence to a region sagging under the weight of poverty, hunger and overlapping climate emergencies. In the Lake Chad Basin, a geographical region home to 30 million people and spans seven countries, the group - led by Abubakar Shekau - has wrought havoc on communities across the region, and latched itself onto the interwoven crises affecting men, women and children in Niger, Chad, Nigeria and Cameroon. 

Boko Haram, and its splinter group Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP), have killed between 30,000 - 70,000 men, women and children utilising suicide bombs, kidnap, displacement, simmering ethnic tensions and scorched earth policies to bring disorder and chaos to hundreds of thousands of people.

Shekau’s soldiers, supported by Abu Musab al-Barnawi’s ISWAP, have outlasted their parent organisations such as Islamic State and Al-Qa’ida in terms of relevance, brutality and successfully holding onto territories it has captured. After a decade, the insurgency has deepened its roots and exploited one of the largest and least covered humanitarian crises in the world; the Lake Chad Crisis.

The statistics emanating from the Lake Chad Crisis are alarming. Fifty per cent of Chad’s population is in urgent need of humanitarian support. [1] The war with Boko Haram in the northeast of Nigeria has caused devastation leaving 7.1 million people needing assistance and left 1.8 million internally displaced. [2] It is estimated that 823,000 people live in areas inaccessible to international humanitarian organisations leaving parts of Borno State in a state of famine in February 2017. [3] Clashes between farmers and herders have killed thousands of people, ‘claiming far more lives than the Boko Haram insurgency’ with Amnesty International report, The Harvest of Death, noting that 3,641 people killed between January 2016 and October 2018, 57 per cent of them in 2018 alone. [4]

In northern Cameroon, malnutrition and hunger are rife. The Cameroonian government has been supporting the regional counter-insurgency effort to uproot Boko Haram and ISWAP yet it has been unable to quash unrest at home. In the English-speaking regions in the west of Cameroon, a conflict between the French-speaking government in Yaoundé and the separatist Anglophone Ambazonia Defence Forces has displaced half a million people. Villages have been incinerated, extra-judicial killings have been widespread and rape has been used as a weapon of war. [5] One refugee went as far as to describe the crackdown of President Paul Biya’s government as a “genocide”. 

In Niger, Boko Haram’s operations in the Diffa region continues to deteriorate. In April 2019, a further 87,000 people were displaced by increased inter-communal and jihadist violence in Mali, a 450% increase in the number of families displaced across the country since 2018. [6] The conflicts in Mali have increased pressure on Niger’s ability to cope with the escalating violence in northern Mali and is destabilising the country’s south-western regions. 5 million people across four countries are facing the threat of famine due to food shortages. [7]

To compound the regional crisis, Lake Chad and the Sahel region are on the front-lines of the climate emergency. As with the major floods which put East Africa underwater in November, flash floods in 2018 killed over 200 people in Nigeria. Nearly 10,000 people living in displacement camps in Maiduguri were impacted by floods in August and September 2019. Drought has also led to a surge in resource scarcity, exacerbating conflict between farmers and herders and over several decades has caused Lake Chad, the source of life in the Sahel region, to all but disappear. 

With crops and prized assets such as cattle dying or weakening and water scarcity rife, thousands are being forced to migrate in search of income in North Africa and Europe. The gateway to Europe for many thousands of migrants from the Sahel is Libya, whose response to the migration crisis has sparked on-mass trafficking and human rights violations.  

It is in this context of inter-communal conflict, refugees, corruption, mass migration and climate catastrophe that Boko Haram and ISWAP have risen to prominence and allowed the Lake Chad region to become an incubator for the global ideology of militant Salafi-jihadism.

While Boko Haram and ISWAP fill the vacuum left by the Lake Chad Crisis with its military presence, the rise of their ideology is steeped in West Africa’s medieval history which runs through the colonial era and to the spread of militant Salafi-jihadism and puritanical Wahhabi ideology from the Arabian peninsula and South Asia for several hundred years. 

The ideological roots of Salafism in Lake Chad are complex. Islam’s introduction to West Africa came through commerce as merchant and trading convoys from North Africa. [8] In West Africa, the young religion was slowly spread across the Sahel region, a broad band of land stretching from east to west of the continent, as trade fuelled the exchange of ideas in the West African kingdoms. Further south, Islam had begun to spread into Nigeria in the 15th century and the rulers of Hausaland eventually converted and empires in Mali and Ghana eventually took up the faith.

Islam reached the Lake Chad region in the 9th century when traders reached one of the key trading hubs in West Africa, the Kingdom of Kanem. A vast empire reaching southern Libya and extending to Niger in the west, the nomadic Tebu-speaking Kanembu had united under King Sef to form a city-state under the Dugawa dynasty. The capital of Nijimi was a key place to do business for Arab and Berber traders and for imams and scholars to introduce Islamic culture and administrative styles to the Kanem Empire. 

Controlling and protecting these economic routes brought wealth and power to the Kanembu and exposed its courts to the traditions of Islam. Under the Duguwa and Sefuwa dynasties which ruled the empire, particularly the latter, ‘radical changes were introduced…including the Islamisation of court and state policies’ as ‘(Islam) offered the Sayfawa rulers the advantage of new ideas from Arabia and the Mediterranean world, as well as literacy in administration.’ [9] By the 11th century, the king was Muslim, and Kanem had become an Islamic State under King Umme, who adopted the nom de guerre, Ibn ʿAbd al-Jalīl. 

The initial integration of Islamic society and values with the pagan practices used by locals was slow. ‘Life was a fearful and complicated web of taboos and ritual…and spirits called boruruka. What people believed in this part of the world before the coming of Islam would have been a cult-like belief, centred around a secretive priesthood who revered animal totems.’ [10] (Walker, 8-9) Islam, for a time, was an elite religion for the aristocracy, and its spread amongst the broader population was resisted. Repressive methods of Islamisation were not utilised by the aristocracy to impose the Islamic practice, rather the religion fused with pagan practices which were ‘Islamically acceptable’. [11] (Walker, 11) by Islamic journeymen known as mallams.

The process had to be gradual, as it could lead to the death or rejection of the mallam attempting to change customs too quickly (not dissimilar from Christian priests spreading the word of God in the New World) in rural, localised environments around Chad. The best expression of the development of Islamic and local practices came through Sufism. As Walker notes in Eat The Heart of the Infidel, the spiritual elements of paganism such as boruruka were similar to the concepts of spiritual wisdom and the spirit soul of Sufism, a branch of the Islamic faith. [12] (Walker, 11)

In Njimi under kings such as Umme and Dunama Dabbalemi, diplomatic ties with Sultanic Empires in North Africa strengthened the ability of the elite to conduct pilgrimages to Mecca. Dabbalemi and the Kanembu declared a holy war, jihad, during the period against pagan tribes such as Mune, Tubu and Bulala, a disaster which sparked widespread revolt across the empire in the 13th and 14th centuries. The war with the Bulala forced the Sayfuwa Dynasty to relocate to Bornu on the western edge of Lake Chad where a new capital was created: Birni Ngazargamu.

The fortress city in Niger, the new seat of the weakened Kanem Empire endured with Njimi being recaptured by the Kanembu (who had by this point become the Kanuri after intermarriages between Kanembu and Bornu). The wars with the pagan tribes, which had drastically weakened the empire, acted as a warning to the Kanembu kings that to wage jihad to convert its population was an act of folly for the political stability of the dynasty. 

Reform, and balancing paganism with Islamic traditions, were key to maintaining the Kanuri’s grip on power, and under King Idris Alwma, several legal and administrative reforms based on Islamic law (sharia) revolutionised the region. [13] ‘He sponsored the construction of numerous mosques and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he arranged for the establishment of a hostel to be used by pilgrims from his empire.’ [14] The trade routes were maintained and expanded, and the empire held clout on trade to North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahara becoming a key for the exchange of natron (sodium carbonate), cotton, kola nuts, ivory, ostrich feathers, perfume, wax, hides and slaves and brought in imports such as salt, horses, silks, glass, muskets, and copper. [15] 

King Alwma remade the Lake Chad region and empire which occupied it as the protector and facilitator of trade in the 16th and 17th century. Alwma’s death hastened the eventual decline and fall of the empire, as new ideas began to grip the region. The collapse of the Kanem Empire was catalysed by an individual who remains relevant to Salafism in the region to this day: Othman Dan Fodiyo. 

As the medieval history of Lake Chad demonstrates, the region is steeped in Islamic tradition, however, in the early modern period radicalism and revolutionary ideas began to take hold in the Islamic faith in the 19th century. These ideas, including the rise of Wahabbism and Salafism in Arabia, were to ripple across the Islamic World into West Africa. The creation of the Saudi states, most importantly by Muhammed ibn Sa’ud and his ally, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, ‘inspired the renewal and moral reform of Islamic practices’ in Arabia’ who were dismayed by the new ways in which Islam was being practised. [16] 

Both men, in the context of the divided Arabian peninsula where the future Saudi Arabian state would take root, saw these ‘practices as threatening both the authenticity and purity of Arabian Islam.’ [17] Vying for religious and political power, the alliance between Wahhab and Sa’ud ‘transformed the political landscape of global Islam’ with Wahhab’s family, Al ash-Shaykh, and the al-Sa’uds pact distributing societal and political responsibilities between them. [18] ‘The rise and fall of the first two Saudi states provided important contexts for the early politicisation of several concepts in Salafi thought.’ [19]

Salafi thought is broad and contentious, and like other faiths and varients of Islam (Sufism, Sunni, Shia, and Alawite) it is not monolithic. As the Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, Shiraz Maher, summarises in Salafi-Jihadism, The History of an Idea, Salafism is as an idea of redemption: 

Salafism is a philosophy that believes in progression through regression. The perfect life is realised only by reviving the Islam of its first three generations. The message is a revivalist one, seeking to bring Muslims back to what is regarded as the “authentic” and “pure” Islam. Salafism is a redemptive philosophy based around an idealised version of Islam. [20]

There are a variety of expressions of Salafism, many (and most of them) non-violent, and peaceful but its idea as a socio-religious movement was profound. In this context, the Lake Chad region experienced its religious upheaval and was partly reshaped by the events in the Gulf and the rise of the Saudi states. Othman Dan Fodiyo - who would create the Sokoto Caliphate and revive jihad in the Lake Chad region - was born, and lived, during the rise and fall of the first Saudi state (1744 - 1818). 

The British and French Empires and the Scramble for Africa were beginning. In the 19th century, in an ominous foreshadowing of today’s events in the United States and Western Europe, the dervishes (the terminology applied for Sufis) had ‘caught hold of the late-19th century British imagination’ as the concept of jihadism and the Global War on Terror has both terrified, challenged and fascinated the 21st. Victorian era jihadists in Sudan, Egypt, Afghanistan and modern-day Pakistan had baffled writers, and generals, of the time, who struggled to ‘make sense of why such primitive forces were able to defeat modern, trained and well-equipped armies and to control such extensive territory…who sprang, stabbed and shot their way across the pages of newspapers, novels and magazines.’  

This was no exception in north-east Nigeria and the wider Lake Chad region to both French and British soldiers arriving in a region where Islam was ingrained in the local culture and the aristocracies who contested and dominated West Africa. The campaigns bore little fruit for the French colonialists and brought death and dislocation. According to French historian Jean-Louis Triaud, ‘disruption to economic life brought about by the French conquest caused more deaths than the fighting…livestock was largely decimated and cultivation interrupted…traditional trade circuits were progressively dislocated.’ 

Much of French-ruled Chad lacked the resources that fuelled a modern European empire, and the new province added to France’s territories was neglected and became an outpost where the ‘least experienced and worst-behaved officers’ were sent to govern in one of the least important colonies of French Equatorial Africa. French power was concentrated in the south where the colonists were able to produce cotton with forced labour in ‘Useful Chad’. With a lack of resources, development and modernisation were neglected, and the region was decentralised. Cotton, and maintaining ‘a semblance of law and order’ to extract it, was the priority for colonists, and both were scarce to find. 

The conquest of Chad took over a decade to repress the rebellions in the province and even in the south where French priorities lay, parts remained ungovernable. A French captain on a military expedition described the vast lake of Chad and its islands as a terrible paradise writing that the “…dreaded islanders…spread terror. Their audacious robberies gave them the reputation of being terrible warriors.” In a little-understood land whose local cultures and customs the deployment of the most brutal and ill-disciplined officers courted disaster as ‘French military campaigns disrupted trade routes and local economies contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from famine.’ 

Tit-for-tat atrocities and brutality accompanied France’s man-made famines. French counter-insurgency campaigns went from house-to-house and many villages and towns were wiped off the face of the map. The failure of the authorities to keep accurate records meant the death toll in the murderous and protracted war in the Chad region will remain unknown. In northeastern Nigeria, Sir Fredrick Lugard encountered similar difficulties and courted controversy and scandal in his ‘civilising’ mission in West Africa. Lugard was aware of France’s military struggles further north, and acutely aware of Britain’s ongoing struggle with ‘The Mahdi’.

The Mahdi was an expected spiritual and temporal ruler destined to establish a reign of righteousness throughout the world after the coming of Yajuj and Majuj, the forces of corruption and death. In Sudan, General Gordon had been decapitated by the previous self-proclaimed ‘Mahdi’ and rebel, Muhammad Ahmad, in 1885 and Lugard was determined to avoid the same fate as his idol. 

Lugard was responsible for killing at least 2,000 men, women and children when he ordered the West African Frontier Force of European officers and their soldiers into Satiru. Thousands more were sold into slavery by the pagan troopers working with the British units, and many were tortured to death. ‘The massacre was suppressed from the British public,’ and reportedly turned the stomach of Winston Churchill in the Colonial Office in London. [Walker, 59] The massacre served as a message to Sokoto that insurgency and violence against the British colonists would be met with annihilation. 

Boko Haram emerged against the backdrop of the wider spread of Salafist thought and scholarship in north Nigeria. Some of Boko Haram’s strongest critics are Salafi activists and imams. As this demonstrates, as with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Middle East, many of its recruits were sourced from communities which were dismayed by poor governance, stark inequalities and corruption.

It would be an oversimplification to point to one factor, religious zealotry, as the sole cause for Boko Haram reigniting jihad in the north-east, and subsequent attempts by ISWAP to exploit the void left by the region’s chronic instability. To understand the Lake Chad Crisis means coming to terms with Britain and France’s violent legacy of colonialism as well as the historical influence of Islam in the region. 

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