Central African Republic: The
The other side of Batangafo is controlled by an anti-balaka group. Antibalaka is the term used to describe the loose coalition of self-defence militias formed to resist the Seleka. They don’t have any central leadership, or any real ideology, and the aims and tactics of each militia can vary wildly from town to town.
Both groups survive by taxing and terrorising the local population — the same population that both claim to be protecting.
Between these two armed groups, where the centre of Batangafo used to be, is a no-go zone except for United Nations peacekeepers and the few nongovernmental organisations that still operate here. Weeds grow through the foundations of Batangafo’s only permanent structures: its town hall, its police station, its municipal market, its schools.
For armed groups, the real prize is not Batangafo itself but the roads that lead into it. Control the roads and you control all the goods and people that must move along it.
‘Government has forgotten us’
In July, a tentative ceasefire between the armed groups in the area was shattered when fighting erupted along one of these roads. More than a dozen people were killed. Batangafo’s inhabitants, those who are left, were forced — not for the first time — to make an agonising choice: remain in their homes and risk being targeted by combatants, flee into the bush or seek sanctuary in one of those makeshift camps for internally displaced people.
Louisa Soubama (69) chose the third option. She ran into the grounds of the Batangafo hospital, which is still operational — now managed not by the state but by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which is the only international nongovernmental organisation that remains in Batangafo. MSF employs 180 people to keep the hospital running and manages a community health worker programme that provides basic health services to surrounding villages.
When she fled, Soubama took her six grandchildren and five nieces and nephews with her. “You see that small hut behind us,” she says, pointing with derision at a plastic sheet draped over a wooden frame. “That’s my house now. That’s where my whole family lives.”
Soubama’s house is one of hundreds of similar structures erected around the hospital, which at one point hosted 16000 people, all hoping that the presence of MSF would afford some kind of protection. It’s a chaotic scene. As doctors, nurses and patients try to go about their business, they must pick their way past mothers cooking porridge over open fires, young men playing cards to pass the time, bands of giggling children desperate for any diversion, trays of okra drying in the sunshine and heaped piles of furniture and cooking pots, the remaining possessions of the lucky few able to salvage something before being forced from their homes.
“When I heard the gunshots, I ran out of the house and left everything in the house. Then Seleka came and took everything. Here I don’t have anything,” said Soubama. She doesn’t know whether she will ever be able to return home. “Almost all our houses were systematically looted. They broke all the doors. So we ask ourselves: If we go home, where are we going to sleep? With what plates are we going to eat?”
To compound her problems, it is harvest time but Soubama and her family are unable to go to their fields. “If you’re unfortunate enough to meet men when you go into the fields, they can rape you or even kill you and leave your body there in the bush. There are pumpkins that are staying there in the field, peanuts that are staying there and that’s the way it will be. It’s certain there will be hunger later.”
Others in the hospital tend their crops at night, relying on the darkness to keep them safe.
Soubama has no sympathy for either the anti-balaka or the exSeleka, but her fiercest criticism is reserved for the government. “Right now, I don’t know if the state exists. The government has forgotten us, there are no military forces to protect us, they have abandoned the population. I hope you will broadcast loudly what I have told you, so all the world can hear about how the people of Batangafo are living. If it doesn’t get better, we will all abandon the town too.”
‘We are replacing the state’
The base of the local anti-balaka leader is just on the outskirts of Batangafo. It’s not much of a base: Commander Bruno Ganassere and his men have simply commandeered a few huts in a village alongside the road. Guards armed with rifles or machine guns are posted on every path into the settlement. Aside from the fighters, perhaps a dozen in all, there are three women and a handful of children sitting under a tree. Otherwise, the village and its surrounds are deserted.
Ganassere is well respected in Batangafo, seen as disciplined and brave. NGOs say he is reasonable, someone they can work with. The 28-year-old is young for a militia leader. Then again, most of his men appear to be a decade younger.
We sit on simple wooden furniture, also commandeered. Speaking from someone else’s chair, outside someone else’s home, Ganassere explains why his militants are the good guys. “The anti-balaka are local, from here. We are not rebels. What pushed us to fight is the behaviour of the Seleka. They are committing atrocities on the population and killing them. We are forced to defend the population.”
Ganassere describes his mission as keeping the peace until such time as the government is able to reassert its authority. “Today there are no police, no army. We are replacing all those institutions that do not exist in Batangafo. If we were not here, the fate of the town would be very bad.”
Ganassare and his men are Christian, and the ex-Seleka are overwhelmingly Muslim, but Ganassare denies that this is a religious conflict. “It’s not a conflict between Muslim and Christian people. The Muslims mostly support the Seleka, which makes a disagreement, but if the Seleka were not here there would be no trouble,” said the anti-balaka leader.
Nonetheless, he freely admits to punishing Muslims for the crimes of