Death stalks children trapped in Bangui’s PK12
MADAM Aichatou holds out her hand beseechingly. She has not eaten a proper meal for so long that she can hardly stand.
“Please, just a little food,” she pleads, waiting in line outside a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) clinic to be treated for constant vomiting.
Aichatou arrived in Bangui, the Central African Republic capital, two months ago. Since then she has been trapped in the Muslim enclave of PK12, which is subject to constant attacks by anti-balaka militia.
Sentries armed with bows and arrows are no match for militiamen, who regularly lob grenades and fire shots into the camp. It houses more than 2 000 refugees, mostly women and children from the surrounding countryside. “I lost so many of my people. All our animals have been eaten. There is nothing left,” said Aichatou. A week ago, she also lost her three-yearold granddaughter, Harouna, to malnutrition.
Zakaria, an emaciated 13year-old boy who weighs just 15kg, is likely to be next. Doctors say he needs a sevenday intensive treatment course for severe malnutrition, but his mother is too afraid to leave the enclave to go to the hospital.
“It’s been a constant nightmare since October,” said MSF project leader Francesco Minisini. “There is ongoing fighting that can surge out of control in a couple of minutes, especially at night. A few weeks ago, an RPG was fired into the camp. People get caught in the crossfire.”
Apart from bullet and machete wounds, malnutrition and malaria are rife and will get worse as the rains set in. “People don’t have access to their fields. The wells are contaminated by bodies,” said Minisini.
Nicholas Fuchs, who works for French charity ACF, says the United Nations must expedite its plans to evacuate PK12’s besieged Muslims. “Peacekeepers aren’t protecting them. They don’t have enough food, water and fuel. We either relocate them or watch them die.”
On Thursday, the UN’s humanitarian head, Abdou Dieng, visited a site near the town of Paoua, close to the Chad border, which has been earmarked for the first relocations. But angry locals mobbed his convoy.
“A group of youths don’t agree,” he said. “They don’t want Muslims in their place, but we have put a mediation team together to address this.”
Almost a million people have been displaced internally, fled or been killed since the country descended into chaos after a coup by mostly Muslim Seleka rebels on March 24 last year.
In a battle that cost 15 South African soldiers their lives, the Seleka deposed president François Bozizé, then started looting, raping and massacring the local population. This sparked a popular backlash by the antibalaka, self-defence units that have committed widespread atrocities and massacres of Muslims.
Nowhere is the human cost to children — Muslim and Christian — more evident than Bangui paediatric hospital, the only one in the country. Suirie, an 11-yearold, lies in the intensive care unit after he was shot in the face and a grenade exploded at his feet, severely injuring his genitals and abdomen. Carine, 2, is being treated in a general ward for severe wounds because the hospital has no burns unit. Her family fled into the bush to escape fighting in their village, Bohong, in the north of the country. Seleka rebels set fire to the bush to drive out everyone hiding there.
Severe cases of malnutrition are treated in another ward of the hospital. There are so many children there that tents have been pitched in the courtyard to cope with the influx.
The journalists were sponsored in part by MSF, msf.org.za