The Myopic Truth Behind the Central African Republic's Civil War
For most of its history, it was difficult to imagine that eventually, the Central African Republic (CAR) would fall victim to a war of religion. After all, the CAR was never a nation in which religious tension was the watermark for political instability, let alone violence. A nation of just over five million located directly above the Congo, the CAR has long fallen into the category of a failing state. The country has little international or media exposure, high levels of corruption, and for the entirety of the nation’s history, has been ruled by leaders who have failed to address socio-political issues whilst lining their own pockets via the country’s vast national resources.
From this description, the Central African Republic, in many regards, may well sound like a host of other states in Africa. Angola, Equatorial Guinea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and more have faced similar issues, mutated with their regional blend of corruption, violence, or other factors that put their governments and populations on the brink of national collapse. It is no surprise, therefore, that just like many of its neighbors, a war in the Central African Republic seemed inevitable. After all, the nation had all the key elements that typically spur conflict in the region and a population that had fallen under the influence of leaders with little regard for the needs of the nation.
Like most civil wars in the region, the Central African Republic’s started with a coup attempt. In this case, the instigators were a coalition of loosely allied militias known as the Seleka. On March 23rd of 2013, the Seleka seized the nation’s capital, Bangui, and within a day, the CAR’s president; Francois Bozize, had been overthrown and a new leader; Michel Djotodia, had taken power, with the Seleka serving as his very own personal guard. However, this phenomenon was nothing new for the CAR, which has been plagued by coups since its inception as a nation-state in the 1960s. Virtually every leader in the CAR’s history has overthrown his predecessor, securing the “right,” in a way, to leadership. However, less than a month into Djotodia’s rule, the killing started. The majority Muslim Seleka, whose position as political allies gave them an almost inhuman level of legal immunity, began harassing and subsequently killing many of the CAR’s people, most notably the country’s Christian population. Although human rights abuses were not a rare occurrence in the country, they were never so fervently repelled as when they were committed by the Seleka, and soon, armed Christian militias known as the Anti-Balaka formed to fight back. These skirmishes between the two groups soon devolved into full-scale warfare and marked a turning point in the history of the CAR as a country insusceptible to religious conflict.
It is difficult to fully quantify the long term effects of religious conflict in the Central African Republic. After all, the idea behind the conflict itself seems to be flawed. The Seleka were less religiously motivated than they were purely violent, and more, the notion that only the Christian sect of the population of the CAR would be up in arms over the Seleka’s actions seems to negate the group’s very real predilection towards violence regardless of ethnoreligious standing. These factors make the very idea of a religious war breaking out a tough pill to swallow, and at best, point towards a limited grasp of the situation on the ground in the CAR.
Based on these objections, it would be wise to examine the factors that may limit the general understanding of the war in the Central African Republic. One of the most prominent of these factors is, of course, general unrest. It is hard for a nation to be fully examined by a foreign or even internal media presence whilst at war, and although a war may draw far more media attention to a nation than when it is at peace, the level of reporting can never truly be free, as it is usually stifled by the threat of violence or a lack of safety. Adding to this lack of clear reporting, the CAR is neither a prominent nor known country on the stage of international politics and is generally unknown to most in the west, perhaps cementing the nation’s status as the perennially dreaded “forgotten African country” to many foreigners. Finally, the CAR’s status as a former French colonial possession, and France’s multiple military interventions there, coupled with the French military's multiple alleged human rights abuses, makes the country even more of a wild card, and can drive public perceptions even further back, as the level of intervention in the nation by the French may well be a threat to the sovereignty of the CAR as a whole.
Of course, this analysis will have some flaws, and there are numerous factors that this article will have forgotten to include or will have deemed irrelevant, but the fact of the matter remains that the Central African
Republic’s civil war can still be examined, and is still caused by factors unknown. Theories exist, of course, such as my notion that whilst previous dictators in the CAR were strongmen who held power on their own, the Seleka were a coalition. And due to this fact, the CAR’s populace looked to find a single unifying factor about the Seleka that they could vilify, as they did with previous leaders. In the case of the Seleka, the populace chose to vilify their Islamic faith, leading to a religious conflict.
However, these theories are still based on historical evidence and limited knowledge of the situation on the ground, meaning that in the future, to truly examine the conflict in the CAR, we must dig far deeper. The importance of the conflict in the nation may not seem as though it is worth the time or support of western media, but perhaps if the war is thought of as a template for the future of conflict in the region, an in-depth analysis would help to mitigate many of the issues that nations around the world may one day face.
