Central African Republic

[waltky]

Human Rights Watch: Widespread rape, sexual slavery in CAR feud...

Widespread rape, sexual slavery in CAR feud: HRW
Fri, Oct 06, 2017 | WEAPONS OF WAR:Sexual violence is being used by the Seleka rebels and the Christian anti-balaka militias fighting them, and could be crimes against humanity

Armed groups in Central African Republic (CAR) are using rape and sexual slavery as weapons of war in an abuse that may amount to crimes against humanity, a rights group said yesterday. Thousands have died and a fifth of Central Africans have been uprooted in a conflict that broke out after the mainly Muslim Seleka rebels ousted former Central African Republic president Francois Bozize in early 2013, provoking a backlash from Christian anti-balaka militias. Both the Seleka and the anti-balaka have sexually assaulted, raped and enslaved civilians as revenge against those believed to be supporting the other side, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.

Yet not a single militant on either side of the conflict has been arrested or tried for sexual violence, HRW said. “Armed groups are using rape in a brutal, calculated way to punish and terrorize women and girls,” HRW researcher Hillary Margolis said following the release of a report documenting 305 cases of rape and sexual slavery against women and girls. “Under international law, these offences ... may be considered crimes against humanity and war crimes,” HRW said. Victims told HRW how militants often raped them in front of their children, and abused, attacked and killed their relatives.

Many women and girls were whipped, tied up and burned, and gang raped repeatedly while being held as sex slaves, HRW said. “Every day we could not rest — every day there was rape, by different fighters,” 30-year-old Jeanne, who was held captive by Seleka fighters for six months in 2014, told the rights group. Stigma, impunity for attackers and a dysfunctional justice system have prevented many victims from speaking out, HRW said. Only 11 of the 296 survivors interviewed by HRW said they had tried to seek justice, with some victims blamed for their ordeal and others told to present their attackers for arrest.

Most victims said they had not received post-rape medical or mental healthcare — such as drugs to prevent HIV and unwanted pregnancy — due to a lack of health facilities, the cost of services or transport, and misconceptions about their options. “Every day, survivors live with the devastating aftermath of rape, and the knowledge that their attackers are walking free, perhaps holding positions of power, and to date facing no consequences whatsoever,” Margolis said in a statement.

Widespread killings and rapes of civilians by militants in Central African Republic — where militia violence has risen this year — have also been documented by the UN and other rights groups, such as Amnesty International. The UN is helping the government to establish a Special Criminal Court, agreed to in 2015, to try the worst crimes committed in the landlocked nation.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worl.../06/2003679837

[Peter1469]

Status quo for that part of the world.

[waltky]

Central African Republic Continues to Deteriorate...

UN: Conditions in Central African Republic Continue to Deteriorate
October 17, 2017 — The United Nations reports conditions in Central African Republic have continued to deteriorate since a serious outbreak of inter-communal violence in mid-May between the Muslim Seleka and largely Christian anti-Balaka armed groups.

Fighting in some parts of Central African Republic has become so intense that United Nations and private aid agencies have had to suspend their activities. The U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the C.A.R., Najat Rochdi, says security has become so bad in the East, agencies have had to change their mode of operations. "We cannot do it anymore business as usual having bases, you know, here and there, but rather strengthening some hubs actually, around a number of cities where the security is much more important and from there fly in special emergency teams, a kind of surge teams," she said.


Since January, the United Nations reports a 50 percent increase in the number of internally displaced people to 600,000. Refugee numbers also have increased to nearly one-half million. Rochdi says humanitarian operations in the country are suffering from severe under-funding. She says only 39 percent of the nearly $500 million appeal for this year has been received. Because of the lack of funding, she says food rations have been cut in half. "And that there are places where actually we have stopped the food distribution. We already had very serious worsening of the malnutrition situation. For example, unfortunately, in the southeast, we started already seeing children dying from severe malnutrition," said Rochdi.


Humanitarian coordinator Rochdi says there are unconfirmed reports that 10 children have died from malnutrition-related causes in the town of Zemio in southeastern C.A.R. She says shelter and protection concerns also are growing. Another cause for alarm is education. She says 400,000 children are not going to school. She warns nearly a whole generation of children who have lost out on education may not have a viable future. And this, she says, will spell disaster for the whole country.


https://www.voanews.com/a/conditions...e/4074767.html

See also:


Many More Refugees Flee CAR Violence to Cameroon
October 07, 2017 — U.N. aid agencies are struggling to meet the needs of refugees in eastern Cameroon as multitudes flee the renewed violence in neighboring Central African Republic. The population of the Gado refugee camp has exploded from just 1,000 refugees in January to 25,000 today.

Scores of children are being attended to by medical staff at the Gado refugee camp on Cameroon's eastern border with the C.A.R. At least a hundred children fleeing with their parents have been received by humanitarian workers this week. 22-year-old Magloire Zema, who arrived at Gado last week, says she is happy her 6-month-old son has recovered his health. She says he was neither eating nor had access to clean drinkable water, but today the situation is better because he can drink milk and eat a bit of their traditional meals.

Refugees from Central Africa sit in the eastern Cameroonian village of Gado Badzere, near the city of Garoua-Boulai, not far from the border with Central Africa.

Health worker Gerimie Dicia says Magloire is lucky her son has recovered. He says many children who arrive at Gado die from hunger, malnutrition, or wounds inflicted on them by fighters while they are escaping from C.A.R. He says malnutrition and hunger are becoming public health problems for children from Central African Republic arriving in the camp. He says many of them under the age of 5 end up dying. He says when the children are brought to them at the early stages of malnourishment, they are treated for three or four days, and then are referred to their community workers for psychological and health follow up care. Religious and ethnic unrest erupted in C.A.R. after Muslim Seleka rebels seized power in the majority Christian country in 2013 and left the nation divided.


Three years of violence has killed thousands and led more than 300 000 to run for safety in neighboring Cameroon. Allegra Baiocchi, resident coordinator of the U.N. system in Cameroon, says despite the increasing number of refugees and shortage of humanitarian assistance, many refugees have continued to flee to Cameroon as the crisis escalates. "We have heard stories of unstoppable violence. People who have lost their husbands, their children, their parents on their way here," said Baiocchi. "Their first message was, 'please give us something to do, please allow us to become more self-reliant and independent,' but unfortunately there was just not enough funding. Our response is underfunded. Overall, the humanitarian response in Cameroon is 40 percent funded. When it comes to refugees, that figure goes down to 20 percent. There is not much we can do with 20 percent of the funding."

Children escaped from the Central African Republic civil war study at Gado Badzere refugee camp in Cameroon.

Najat Rochdi, the humanitarian coordinator of the United Nations office for humanitarian affairs in C.A.R. says she is launching an appeal to humanitarian agencies, the international community and persons of goodwill to help the suffering multitudes in C.A.R. and neighboring countries. She says this year the needs of the refugees have increased to $498 million. She says the refugees have come to Cameroon to meet donor agencies who relocated because of the carnage. The United Nations raised less than half of the money it asked for in its last appeal, yet the number of C.A.R. refugees and internally displaced persons has increased from 2.2 million at the beginning of this year to 2.4 million currently. Last week, Cameroon reported it had sealed its border with C.A.R. after violence had escalated.


https://www.voanews.com/a/many-more-...n/4060632.html

[Captdon]

I remember the early sixties. This is standard for that part of the world. Civilization passed them by.

[waltky]

Rape as a weapon of war...

Militia commits mass rape: MSF
Sat, Mar 10, 2018 - PEACE AND STABILITY: Gabon is to withdraw its soldiers from a UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic, despite a surge in violence that started in 2016

Militia fighters attacked, kidnapped and raped en masse a large group of women in an isolated area of the Central African Republic last month, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Thursday. The medical charity treated 10 survivors of the Feb. 17 violence near Kiriwiri, a village in the country’s northwest. Fearing further attacks if they tried to reach a hospital, the women were unable to seek medical treatment until about two weeks later, it said. Many other victims remained behind, fearing that, as rape victims, they would be stigmatized in their community. “Some were totally in shock, others paralyzed by fear or unable to talk about the incident. Some of the women had open wounds caused by blades,” said Soulemane Amoin, a midwife at the hospital in the town of Bossangoa where the women were treated. “It was terrible to see. It broke my heart,” Amoin added.

The Central African Republic descended into chaos after mainly Seleka rebels ousted then-Central African president Francois Bozize in 2013, provoking a spate of killing by Anti-Balaka militias. Despite the deployment of a 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission, rival armed groups still stalk much of the countryside. The UN Security Council approved an extra 900 peacekeepers in November last year to help to protect civilians. However, Gabon, which contributes about 550 soldiers to the mission, on Thursday announced it was planning to withdraw its contingent, citing what it said was a “progressive return of peace and stability.” The rapes near Kiriwiri coincided with a surge in violence in Bossangoa and the surrounding areas.

In its statement, MSF said the women had left their village to fetch water and tend to their fields when the militiamen arrived. Some women fled, but others were grabbed and brought back to the militia’s base where they were repeatedly raped before being let go, it said. MSF did not identify the group behind the assault. “This attack is one of the consequences of the new wave of senseless violence that broke out at the end of 2016 and continues without let-up,” said Paul Brockmann, who heads MSF’s mission in the Central African Republic. The hospital at Bossangoa has treated 56 rape victims since September last year, up from 13 in the previous eight months, MSF reported. It has also treated about 300 victims of rape and sexual assault from around the country each month so far this year at Castor Maternity Hospital in the nation’s capital, Bangui.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worl.../10/2003689033

[donttread]

Rape as a weapon of war...

Militia commits mass rape: MSF
Sat, Mar 10, 2018 - PEACE AND STABILITY: Gabon is to withdraw its soldiers from a UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic, despite a surge in violence that started in 2016

Arm the women

[waltky]

New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof draws ire for his Op-ed...

'Times' Column Is Slammed For Its Portrayal Of Central African Republic
March 30, 2018 - The column was supposed to draw attention to a crisis in a country that Americans don't often hear about in the media: the Central African Republic.

Instead, it drew fury on social media this week for its portrayal of CAR and the sources interviewed. Sarah Knuckey, a professor at Columbia University's law school and the co-director of the university's Human Rights Institute, called it "shallow" and "reckless" in its reporting. The piece, "Conflict Is More Profitable Than Peace," written by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, was published in the Times on March 25. A two-time Pulitzer winner, Kristof explains why years of violence and conflict in the CAR have created major barriers to alleviating poverty, hunger and preventable disease. Kristof argues that international donors, including the U.S. government, should amp up investments in security efforts like the U.N. peacekeeper budget — not just humanitarian aid.

The story was part of Kristof's annual "Win A Trip" contest, where he takes a promising student journalist on a reporting trip to highlight under-covered global development issues. Kristof chose the CAR because it is indeed a country in crisis. It ranks 188 out of 188 in the Human Development Index, which measures such data as life expectancy, education and per capita income. As for the story's intent, in an interview with NPR on Thursday, Kristof said, "I was writing a piece about global conflict as an impediment to development and health care. I was using CAR as an example of that. South Sudan would have been as good an example." Within hours of publication, Kristof's column was slammed in a tweetstorm on Twitter by Knuckey, who has visited the CAR in her research on human rights crimes. Her tweets ignited a conversation across the global humanitarian community.

The Central African Republic has one of the world's highest neonatal mortality rates: 1 in 24, according to UNICEF. Above: A mother holds her child during a consultation on February 14 at the maternity clinic in the town of Boali.

A few thoughts on this @NickKristof piece on the Central African Republic 1/n https://t.co/DkdYcsdVGh
— Sarah Knuckey (@SarahKnuckey) March 25, 2018

There is little recognition of the agency and work of the countless Central Africans who run NGOs, provide healthcare, work for peace, prosecute crimes, risk their lives to protect others 11/n
— Sarah Knuckey (@SarahKnuckey) March 25, 2018

He tells his readers that death results from “chaos and dysfunction,” and fails to grapple with the complexities of the conflict, the harms of colonization, the systems & structures leading to poverty 17/n
— Sarah Knuckey (@SarahKnuckey) March 25, 2018

"Kristof represented CAR as if it were miserable across the board, and that the people who live there are victims," Knuckey told NPR. "It represents a brand of journalism that has been heavily criticized for decades, and that is harmful." Kristof himself says he was a "little bit" surprised by the reaction on social media but "understands the frustration that people have with the lack of coverage about things they care deeply about," referring to researchers, academics and aid workers who work to improve conditions in the CAR. For Moussa Abdoulaye, a Central African activist, founder of a community school and consultant for media companies like Al Jazeera, VICE and HBO, perhaps the worst offense was Kristof's depiction of his country as a hopeless place. Kristof described the CAR as "the world's most wretched country," "the capital of human misery" and home to "the world's most neglected crisis."

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