The President of the Central African Republic is irritated. All day long Faustin-Archange Touadéra has struggled to be a man of the people under a merciless sun. For hours he sat on a plastic chair along the main road to his country house just outside the capital Bangui, while the best triathletes from the country gushed by him, pouring with sweat. He encouraged them. He presented their prizes.
But at the end of the day, puffing out under the banana trees around his porch, he must answer another question that isn’t about him or his run-down country, but about his muscular bodyguards, mercenaries from the Russian Wagner Group. The Russians never left his side all day, their masks pulled up to just below their eyes, their eyes covered in sunglasses so no camera could capture their true face. “Is that the only question that interests you? The Russian question?” says Touadéra, with fire in his eyes. “When your house is on fire, you don’t ask about the color of the water, do you?”
The Central African Republic, the second poorest country in the world, has become a testing ground in a larger geopolitical game. As Western countries accelerate their arms deliveries to Ukraine, Russia is planting flags on the African continent. Russia supplies almost half of all weapons currently in circulation in Africa and has entered into military agreements with 29 African countries. Wagner mercenaries are now active in Mali, Libya and Sudan.
Nowhere is the Russian presence more visible than in the Central African Republic. Wagner’s mercenaries can be found in the main restaurants and supermarkets and on the street, in their khaki all-terrain vehicles without number plates. The Russian embassy opened a Russia house, including a merry-go-round, where students can take Russian language lessons every week. Bangui’s main street is lined with billboards touting Russian vodka. A Russian film crew shot a war film with Westerners as villains and Russians as liberators.
This is a country that has been on fire according to the president’s metaphor for quite some time. Since independence from France in 1960, there have been five successful coups. A coalition of mostly Islamist rebel groups called Seleka took over the capital Bangui in 2013. The civil war that followed was ended with a peace agreement and elections in 2016, which Touadéra won. But because he was unable to arm himself due to an arms embargo, he enlisted the help of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He sent – officially – 1,100 ‘unarmed trainers’ to assist the national army. In reality, these were mercenaries of the Wagner Group, a private military company infamous for operations in Ukraine and Syria and founded by Dmitry Utkin, allegedly an admirer of the Third Reich, and German composer Richard Wagner.
Hostage-taking and beheadings
When armed groups tried to retake Bangui in January 2021, the Wagner mercenaries fought side by side with the national army and soldiers from Rwanda, who also came to the rescue. 90 percent of the territory is now back in government hands.
“Without Russia, we would no longer be a state,” says Fidele Gouandjika, a close friend, adviser and multiple minister in President Touadéra’s cabinet for sixty years. “The United Nations has been here since 1998, they have done nothing for us. The European Union, the French: all they do is pet and talk about human rights. But we are waging a war against armed groups who are burning down our homes, raping our women, murdering our children. We carry out attacks with our partners from Russia and Rwanda. Call it a special operation. The complete destruction of the enemy.”
Back in the capital Bangui, in the PK5 slum, Ali Osman opens a plastic bag. He takes out a notebook with a brown leather cover. Osman is the coordinator of the Islamic communities in the Central African Republic, a country that is 80 percent Christian and 10 percent Muslim. He puts his folding reading glasses on the tip of his nose and begins to flip through his handwritten notes. He lists: Muslim hostage-taking during nightly Wagner patrols. Burning down Muslim shops in towns where gold and diamonds are mined and which have been taken over by the Russians. Executions in prisons and the dumping of victims on the side of the road, with hands tied behind their backs and plastic bags over their heads. Militia beheadings, with Wagner air support. He names the crime scenes: Boyo, Bambari, Gallougou, Bria. “And it’s still going on. People are being killed, Muslims as well as Christians, with barbaric methods. Excesses all over the country. That, sir, is what the Russians are doing here.”
The excesses are confirmed in a recently released report from Human Rights Watch† Witnesses tell of “men in khaki uniforms with white skin, masks up to their eyes, sunglasses, Russian speaking.”
But it is not only the civilian population that is threatened. Government forces and their Russian counterparts now regularly clash with representatives of the international community. In November, soldiers of the Presidential Guard fired on a bus carrying United Nations personnel. Ten blue helmets were injured. A month later, four French soldiers were arrested at Bangui airport and charged with plotting a coup. They were the bodyguards of a senior French general. Wagner mercenaries last year threatened a senior UN diplomat who was visiting a village on the border with Cameroon and forced her to leave.
Dead end
“Do you know that the Central Africans call Bangui a city full of rumours? It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between truth and fiction”, sighs the consul of the Russian Federation, Vladislav Ilin. Every Saturday morning he teaches international relations at Bangui University of Applied Sciences. “Ukraine and Russia are brothers. We did not want Ukraine to join NATO and the EU. But the West has ignored our demand.”
In the back of the class, student Alain Mogboko shakes his head. “So NATO and the EU have turned Ukraine against Russia, sir? Once Ukraine turned to the West, things started to go wrong. Just like here in the Central African Republic. All the African colonies are fed up with France. Isn’t that the same sir?” The consul nods.
The Central African Republic is also known as the dead end of French colonialism. The French arrived there by accident after their advance from West Africa to the Red Sea was stopped by the British in Fachoda, in present-day Sudan, at the end of the nineteenth century. The French lost and descended the Oubangui River to lick their wounds. Half a century after the arrival of the first French missionaries, the population of what is now called the Central African Republic halved. as a result of diseases, deportations and exploitation in penal camps† The country was too big to govern, so the territory was divided into concessions and outsourced to companies, wildlife parks, loggers, miners. The anger at the French exploitation already drove the Central Africans into the arms of the Russians after independence. General Jean-Bedel Bokassa already strengthened ties with Moscow in the 1970s. In 1979, the self-proclaimed emperor was overthrown with French help.
The Russian return is a thorn in the side of Paris. In 2021 France stopped all direct budget support (10 million euros per year) and military aid. “We don’t want to pay Wagner in a roundabout way,” says a French diplomat in the capital.
The Russian consul laughs at that reasoning. “On the one hand, the French are happy that the Central African Republic is now stable again. On the other hand, they stop funding. And now they claim that we have taken the Central African Republic hostage. We are only here to help the Central Africans.”
Anti-French sentiment
The French army has become invisible on the streets of the capital Bangui. The troops have withdrawn to the army base near the airport. French soldiers only show up on Saturday mornings on the lawn of the Alliance Française, the French culture house.
The soldiers have rolled up the sleeves of their camouflage shirts to read from French children’s books cross-legged to the very youngest. Further on, Central African teenagers listen to the edifying words of the white soldiers. “My name is Corinne, I’ve been here for a year and a half and today we want to talk about tolerance. Tolerance means accepting people of a different skin color and religion,” says Corinne Brogly-Wittersheim. The students on the other side of the lawn shook their heads. One of them says: “White people, especially French people, still tend to look down on black people. We now have the French culture here telling us to be tolerant. But there are French who still call Africans by the n-word. You hear that on the radio, on television. It is you who discriminate against us.”
On that wave of anti-French sentiment, the Russians are making their comeback. Disinformation campaigns against the French and the international community are fueling those feelings even further. The Russians finance a radio station and a TV cartoon in which Russians come to rescue their friends in Africa.
Street protests are organized against the United Nations, against the French and for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Journalists who want to fight disinformation are threatened or disappear. On February 22, journalist Saint-Clair Maka Gbossokotto died under suspicious circumstances. According to his wife, he foamed at the mouth and showed other signs of poisoning. The journalist wrote extensively about Wagner and the Russian presence in the Central African Republic.
“We all have to be careful now. There are constant rumors of poisonings,” said investigative journalist Georges Ouapure, who leads a campaign against disinformation. “There is a geopolitical conflict going on. And we are right in the middle of it.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 14, 2022
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