CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: REBELS CLOSING IN ON POWER

Happy New Year to all the readers of the weblog. It was a really successful 2012 and we hope 2013 continues in the same vein. Having taken a 3-week break at the end of 2012, 1worldinternational returns with a piece on the troubled Central African Republic whose future is precociously balanced on a precipice.

 

 

Just when one thought that the state of affairs in the West and Central parts of Africa couldn’t deteriorate any further, what with the turmoil in Mali, Nigeria and the Congo, the Central African Republic succumbed to the disease which its aforementioned neighbours have been diagnosed with.

Background

By way of a brief background to recent events, the Seleka rebel group launched its offensive against the government of President Francois Bozize who has been in power since 2003. His subsequent victories in two further elections held since then, namely in 2005 and 2011 have done nothing to boost his democratic credentials as these have unsurprisingly been mired in and discredited by claims of electoral malpractice. The rebels’ discontent lies in Bozize’s alleged mismanagement of the country’s affairs and reneging on promises made to former rebels to provide financial assistance and jobs for them. The Seleka alliance is said to be made up of a collection of several rebel groups who have seemingly heeded the message contained in the mantra: “together we stand, divided we fall”.

 

Attempts at Resolving the Conflict

Africa’s latest civil war has luckily failed to escape the attention of the international community - unlike that of the Congo and Sudan where there has been a significant lack of political will to bring the conflicts to an end - with the Africa and European Unions, France and the United States nudging the warring parties to settle their grievances through dialogue rather than bullets. A further round of talks is scheduled for 10^th January with Libreville, the capital city of Gabon, providing the venue for the latest attempt at a peaceful resolution.

Unfortunately not much hope is being held out for a resolution of the conflict next week not least because the rebels are only a few miles outside of the country’s capital city of Bangui and appear to have victory within striking distance. In addition, the rebels have claimed that Bozize is prone to renege on promises and as a result, there are no guarantees that he will honour his own side of any agreement, if any is arrived at, between both sides at next week’s talks. The rebels are also almost certainly expected to insist on the resignation of President Bozize as a pre-condition for engaging fervently in the talks and at the time of writing, Bozize’s camp has flat out ruled out the rebel’s demands. President Bozize, in an interview with the Reuters news agency, via his spokesman, Cyriac Gonda stated: “The question of President Bozize leaving…will be rejected systematically if it is proposed.”

 

Sound-off

The rebels’ successes have occurred in spite of the military assistance provided by some of the country’s neighbours such as Cameroon, Gabon and Chad. This week’s plea, presumably aimed at the rebels from Bozize, urged the rebels to allow him to complete his mandate which is set to terminate in three years time. Bozize also promised that he would not participate in the country’s next presidential elections scheduled for 2016.

The significance of next week’s talks cannot be overstated due to the involvement of the country’s aforementioned neighbours as one can easily foresee a Congo-like scenario where these neighbours in tandem launch an offensive against the victorious rebels thus plunging the region into further instability. President Idriss Deby and the Republic of Chad in particular, with the most to lose from the rebel’s victory owing to their long-term support for Bozize, will no doubt be at the forefront of any such moves to forcibly remove the rebels from their seat of power. Commonsense would suggest that the rebels should allow Bozize to finish his term but if Bozize’s previous form is taken into account, i.e. reneging on promises, one can understand why the rebels fail to believe that Bozize’s word is bond.