I did not assume anything. I asked a question.
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Politics of the Central African Republic
- Thread starter Rhea
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I did not assume anything. I asked a question.
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
The present troubles in CAR are mainly religious. Minority Moslems took over the government and started to oppress the majority Christians to establish an Islamic theocracy. The Christians revolted and started to eliminate Islam as far as possible in CAR. Islam ignited the present day troubles, and foreign troops are the only thing left saving the remaining Moslems from being slaughtered or being forced to leave CAR. Islam seems to be prone to this sort of behavior, for example in Nigeria and the Philippines for example.CAR has a long, sad history.
https://thehill.com/opinion/interna...lic-is-indifferent-but-the-united-states-cant
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A Christian majority country, fighting between Muslim and Christian militias has regularly occurred since the 2013 coup by the largely Muslim Séléka coalition. In response, the deposed president brought together the predominantly Christian “anti-balaka” to avenge the Séléka attacks.
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https://thehill.com/opinion/interna...lic-is-indifferent-but-the-united-states-cant
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A Christian majority country, fighting between Muslim and Christian militias has regularly occurred since the 2013 coup by the largely Muslim Séléka coalition. In response, the deposed president brought together the predominantly Christian “anti-balaka” to avenge the Séléka attacks.
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BH
Veteran Member
Bokassa. I remember reading about him. He was the president of CAR then emperor for a few years. Rumor had it he would kill an enemy and eat the flesh. He caused quite a stir in France when he was deposed and got the president in a lot of trouble because he let s supposed cannibal into the country
https://www.france24.com/en/20180713-reporters-plus-central-african-republic-way-warlords
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3u3bqx28A
It's strange to see soldiers kitted out in proper combat gear and assault weapons, on the backdrop of a country that doesn't even have sealed roads in the capital.
The CAR has no control over its own destiny, because any foreign actor can can take destabilise the country with minimal effort. The documentary above shows Russian paramilitaries attempting to smuggle arms to rebels in Bria. It's a relatively small scale war, so it doesn't take much investment to buy off the rebels and ensure they maintain control of the mines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3u3bqx28A
It's strange to see soldiers kitted out in proper combat gear and assault weapons, on the backdrop of a country that doesn't even have sealed roads in the capital.
The CAR has no control over its own destiny, because any foreign actor can can take destabilise the country with minimal effort. The documentary above shows Russian paramilitaries attempting to smuggle arms to rebels in Bria. It's a relatively small scale war, so it doesn't take much investment to buy off the rebels and ensure they maintain control of the mines.
Colonialism has nothing to do with the Islam vs everyone fight. Sub-Saharan Africa is seeing a lot of trouble from that war.
If Africa at large had drawn it's borders based on cultural uniformity this wouldn't be as big of a problem, no? That's another issue Young spoke a lot about - cultural pluralism.
Eh, true. Europeans were able to draw their own borders with hardly any conflict.
Eldarion Lathria
Member
The OAU insisted on the colonial borders being retained, though many countries contained peoples who hated each other.
Eldarion Lathria
That's a short-sighted take on current events.
In order for a rebel group to seize power from the government, the government needs to be weak. Since its independence in 1960, the CAR has never known peace or stability, which in turn means that it lacks robust institutions and infrastructure. For almost all of it's history has been ruled by a series of warlords become dictators who barely cling onto power. None have had the resources to police more than fragments of their country, and they often abuse what little legitimate power they actually have. In this environment, rebels and bandits are inevitable. Since the country has a significant Muslim population in the north, so it's no surprise that the Northern rebels are Islamists.
I suppose we could look at that and say "well if the Central Africans had gotten their act together sooner, they wouldn't have Islamists, or would have been able to crush the rebels", but then we're immediately led to ask "why did the CAR fail to achieve the stability they needed?" The CAR seemed to get off to a good start: they had a democratically-elected government and it seemed there was going to be a smooth transition from French colony to independent country. But then their leader (Boganda) died, and his successor (Dacko) went a bit Stalin, suppressing his political opponents and squashing the democratic process even before the CAR formally received independence from France. He was deposed by Bokassa shortly after, and it all went downhill from there.
We could stop there and say "looks like the Central Africans destroyed their own democracy, so why blame decolonisation?" For one thing, France set the field of play. The CAR's territory is inherited from the French colony of Ubangi-Shari, which was nothing more than a mining and farming colony. The administrators of Ubangi-Shari had one job: get the natural resources out as quickly as possible and for as cheaply as possible. They weren't interested in building a society, so they spend nothing on infrastructure or services. The French administration didn't have to built up a robust local administration because they could always rely on the French Army if the locals tried to throw them out. The CAR's domestic government didn't have the same fallback, they had to maintain control with only the means that the French left for them. The French basically created a power vacuum.
Yea, I think the issue was that there weren't many great alternatives. The underlying problem being that the continent wasn't ready for a system of nation-states.
This is a very good synopsis of what happened across the entire continent. Young wrote a book on it called The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, got it for Christmas last year.
In some cases colonies did a better job with the transition, in others it was an utter disaster.
This isn't about Christian areas and Muslim areas forced together. It's simply Islam tried a takeover and failed and now they are crying because there has been some retaliation. Yes, retaliation is wrong but it's not like there is a strong enough government to stop it and it's the expected outcome of their actions.
The Islamists have substantial outside backing. This is far from the only country they have attempted to overthrow.
Fair enough. I guess my larger point is that if Africa's natural history had been allowed to continue, rather than being forcefully disjointed, the Islamic problem would eventually resolve itself, but on Africa's terms. Toward your point Islam would still be a major problem, but it would be a distinctly African problem and not one implanted on a history of European colonialism.
As it stands, though, colonialism has set a dysfunctional framework that the conflict is standing on. IOW, it's difficult for the conflict to resolve itself into a meaningful system, because the conflict is stuck in a static system that's already broken and is hard to change.
So fundamentally it's a question of self-determination, which sadly can never be now because traditional African culture has been attacked so violently.
BH
Veteran Member
One thing I get from watching the videos is that CAR is poor but it looks like a clean poor. The have what seems like nice clothes and they seem fed well enough.
BH
Veteran Member
Probably so. By nice I mean they are clean and not ragged looking like you would think a third world country would be like. And the homes seem very small with few amenities but the town seems clean and well kept. The peopl seem to have a lot of pride and self respect.
Just because there was colonialism does nothing to prove that colonialism is an important factor in the actions of the Islamists. Sorry, but when you look at the world there are plenty of places without colonialism that still have major problems with Islam.
So self-determination only matters when it's western powers involved. You don't care if you get a bloody mess because the Islamists weren't interested in them having self-determination.