Powerful Central Africa armed group vows to quit rebel coalition

BANGUI - The most powerful of the Central African Republic’s armed groups said in a statement on Monday it will quit a rebel coalition aiming to unseat President Faustin Archange Touadera.

The Unity for Peace in Central Africa (UPC), mainly active in the country’s east, “commits to withdraw from the Coalition of Patriots for Change” (CPC), the group’s head Ali Darassa wrote.

The coalition is an alliance of some of the war-torn country’s most powerful armed groups, who joined together on December 19 accusing Touadera, the frontrunner in the December 27 elections, of trying to fix the vote. Its components were drawn from militia groups that, together, controlled two-thirds of the impoverished country.

Touadera was reelected with barely one in three voters able to cast their ballot because rebel groups control most of the country.

Darassa said on Monday that since the “electoral crisis, the population has suffered terribly from insecurity, the health situation, famine and the lack of humanitarian assistance.”

The UPC, the statement continued, “reiterates its commitment to the Khartoum Accord process,” a peace agreement signed in February 2019 between the government and 14 armed groups.

Tensions have been high in the Central

African Republic since the December election, although the surge in violence in recent months is just the latest flare-up in a civil war that has lasted eight years since the ouster of President Francois

Bozize.

The UPC announcement came just days after another powerful group in the CPC announced that its chief had died from wounds suffered during an attack, in another blow to the rebel alliance.

Sidiki Abass, head of Return, Reclamation and Rehabilitation (3R), died on March 25, the rebel group announced on Friday.