The tragic orphans of Africa's forgotten war

Recent violence in South Sudan has captured the headlines, but just across the border, similar horrors have been visited upon a country hidden from the outside world. For ten deadly months, the Central African Republic has been ravaged by atrocities between Muslim Séléka rebels, who seized power last March, and Christian militias. Thousands have been killed and almost a million – a fifth of the population – driven from their homes. As the UN warns of impending genocide, The Mail on Sunday reports on a humanitarian crisis where tiny children are being targeted by vigilante mobs.

The horrors I witnessed in the Central African Republic will haunt me for the rest of my life. I have been a war correspondent for more than 20 years and have covered conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and witnessed the bloody ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. But the slaughter I saw in Africa’s new Heart of Darkness shocked me to my core. 

TRAUMATISED: A relative keeps a vigil on an injured orphan, above, in a shocking picture taken by Pierre Terdjman in the Central African Republic

One particular memory stands out. I was at Complexe Pédiatrique, a children’s hospital in the capital, Bangui, run by Emergency, a humanitarian organisation that provides free medical care for civilian victims of war, on December 5. Ten children were brought in –  their heads, hands and legs had been mutilated by machete strikes. Their tiny bodies were covered in blood. 

These small innocent souls, from a nomadic Muslim group called Peul, witnessed a Christian militia massacre their parents in a village 53 miles to the north. They were then lined up and maimed in an attack designed  to leave them with indelible memories of the horrors they were forced to witness.

An Anti-Balaka Christian militiaman poses for a portrait outside Central African Republic's capital Bangui

I cannot speak highly enough of the Italian surgeons who battled to save their lives. These doctors were risking their safety when diplomats and most aid agency representatives had fled because of the security situation. The children’s injuries were the worst these doctors had ever seen. One child had two bullets in his legs. He was shot before being hacked with a machete.

The child in the main picture on this page, taken by photographer Pierre Terdjman, shows just one of those victims – one who escaped relatively lightly. The stories the others told were as chilling as they were chaotic.  

They spoke of people running with no belongings into the wild – trying to flee the blood lust of the militiamen. The children unable to escape were forced to line up while these barbaric ‘soldiers’ mutilated them one by one. The militiamen hacked off a hand or an arm, or sliced open their foreheads. They came into this centre on stretchers, but they did not cry. They were too traumatised. 

I looked into some of their eyes and there was nothing behind them.
Souleymane Diabate, head of Unicef in the Central African Republic (CAR), said last week: ‘Attacks against children have sunk to a vicious new low, with at least two beheaded.’

His organisation has verified cases of at least 16 children killed in the past month alone, but the true number is surely far higher.

Almost unnoticed by the rest of the world – which has its gaze  fixed firmly on the problems in South Sudan – the CAR, formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, has spiralled into bloody civil war since a mostly Muslim alliance of rebels called Séléka ousted the country’s Christian president, Francois Bozizé, in a coup last March. 

Fleeing for their lives: A man stumbles as people desperately try to escape a machete-wielding assailant in another of Pierre Terdjman's distressing pictures

They then installed Michel Djotodia as the country’s first Muslim president, but he appears to have no control over the Séléka, which continues to carry out brutal attacks on the Christian community that makes up 80 per cent of the population. Christian groups, meanwhile, are retaliating. Now both sides are carrying out unimaginable atrocities on the civilian population. Thousands have been killed and more than 800,000 – of a population of about 4.4 million – have been driven from their homes. 

In another of Pierre’s pictures, reproduced above, a man trips while running away from a man brandishing a machete. God knows what happened to him. People who talk  to each other one day are killing each other the next. President Djotodia has admitted that ‘an angel from the sky’ could not solve his country’s problems. The CAR – a landlocked nation bordering Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo – is one of the poorest countries in the world. Yet  it has substantial deposits of uranium, oil, gold and diamonds – assets many believe are the real target of the warring factions.

As the former colonial power until 1960, France last month deployed  a 1,600-strong peacekeeping force to assist 4,500 African troops trying to impose order.

So far, they have failed. The fighting is intensifying day by day. Refugees camp out in the open. 

Many from the Christian majority are squatting next to churches in the hope of some protection, while more than 100,000 desperate people ring the perimeter of Bangui’s airport, where the French military are based. It is estimated that nearly 400,000 refugees are dispersed in makeshift camps around the city, Most have no basic facilities. Most of the time they have no food. 

Depending on the day, Bangui’s streets witness bloodsoaked chaos or utter stillness. Some days the streets are empty, giving the capital the feel of a ghost town. On others the sense of fear is so great that even the critically wounded don’t make it to hospital because their relatives are too scared to take them. The only sound is the intermittent rattle of automatic weapons. The stench of death and human waste is everywhere. Flies, blood and dust fill the air.

At night, anything can happen. Electricity in the centre of the city is intermittent, and when the lights go out, the militia emerge from their hiding places. Most nights the outskirts are shrouded in darkness. There, it feels as if danger is everywhere. Whole districts are deserted. The French troops stick to the main roads and come under fire whenever they enter Muslim areas. African peacekeepers, if Muslim, receive similar hostility in Christian areas.

Even the city’s main hospital, the Hôpital Communautaire, is not immune from the violence. A mob recently stormed the building in an attempt to attack patients inside.

European Union foreign ministers meet later this month to discuss how to support the French initiative to stabilise the country. They will be deeply aware that a power vacuum in the CAR will act as a magnet for Muslim extremists. 

To the West, the jihadists of Boko Haram exert more and more influence in Nigeria, while to the east, we need no reminding of the exploits of Al Shabaab in Somalia. It’s important to shine a light on what’s happening in the CAR before it’s too late.

SOURCE-DAILYM