Keeping the Peace?

UN peacekeepers shot dead a 16-year old boy and his father and raped a 12-year-old girl in Central African Republic according to AmnestyInternational.

The next day, after armed clashes with residents had killed a soldier from Cameroon and injured several others, peacekeepers went to the area and “began shooting indiscriminately in the street where the killings had taken place,” Amnesty alleged. Joanne Mariner, its senior crisis response adviser, said: “These allegations of rape and indiscriminate killings committed by UN troops are supported by physical evidence and multiple witness accounts.

UN peacekeepers have been in CAR since September last year. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, was “personally dismayed and disappointed, not just by these latest reports, but by the series of allegations that have surfaced in the Central African Republic mission in recent months”, his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said. Earlier this year it emerged that French peacekeeping troops had been accused of abusing children in CAR.

Does the press care in CAR

Some media outlets believe that Muslims are only newsworthy when behind the gun, not in front of it. There has been systematic targeting of Muslims in the Central African Republic (CAR), a nation ravaged by strife since March of 2013, which has now developed into massive scale ethnic cleansing. In the past several weeks, armed militias have roved through the western part of the nation, intimidating and brutalising Muslims. Anti-Balaka, a fundamentalist group comprised of animists and Christians, is forcing Muslims to worship in private, remove religious garb, and convert at gunpoint. In addition to compelling Muslims to convert and decimating mosques, reports about Muslims paying anti-Balaka militants large sums of money to spare their lives are widespread. Anti-Balaka militants intensified their killing and forced-conversion spree during this past Ramadan, which proved dangerous, and even fatal, for CAR Muslims fasting, praying, and openly observing the holy month. Yet few are even minimally aware of the problem. Anti-Balaka's aim is as plain as it is gruesome: rid the nation of its Muslim population. At any cost. While the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) remains in the headlines, the mere mention of anti-Muslim terrorism in CAR - which has claimed at least 6,000 lives, pushed 30,000 Muslims to live in UN protected enclaves, and left scores of mosques destroyed - remains largely unknown. Would this be the case if Muslims were the villains of the human rights atrocities in CAR, instead of victims?

While the description “fundamentalist” seems reserved exclusively for Muslim groups, Christian and animist militias in CAR have brandished religious fervour to terrorise the nation's 750,000 Muslims - who make up 15 percent of the nation's population. The media quickly concentrtes attention towards Muslim villains, but it is consistently slow - or wholly absent - when the victims are Muslim. Mainstream media outlets have long neglected the humanitarian plight of black victims, particularly on the African continent. Unfortunately for the victims in CAR, they are both black and Muslim.

Media outlets may fashion themselves as objective bystanders, but they are functionally key actors in any unfolding crisis. Media coverage, particularly within the most prominent outlets, means far more than simply highlighting and sharing a story. Events like in CAR, coverage means generating global consciousness that would spur political mobilisation, fundraising, and pressure on governments to act, typically energised by the pressure headlines. Robust and active media intervention can check the actions of culprits and prompt humanitarian rescue, while neglect facilitates, and indeed emboldens, the aims of terrorists. The CAR case vividly illustrates the latter. Anti-Balaka forces have benefited immensely from the lack of coverage. Their numbers have grown, and their violence is ever increasing in severity.

Cameras and reporters flocked to Rwanda when it was far too late. When they arrived, the genocide had claimed virtually all of its targets. Since then, scores of scholars, human rights advocates, statesmen and stateswomen have argued that timely media attention could have created the pressure needed to spur more comprehensive humanitarian intervention. Thousands upon thousands of lives, and future generations of Tutsis, could have been saved. As highlighted in CAR, lessons from Rwanda have not been heeded, exposing its diminishing and imperiled Muslim population to unspeakable violence and arming its anti-Muslim militias with the green light to continue the killing spree.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201508190370.html

Conflict In CAR and Bangui's Ghettoes

Photo: Phil Moore/IRIN

Refugees at Bangui's airport

 

BANGUI, 13 March 2014 (IRIN) - The capital of the Central African Republic is usually home to more than 130,000 Muslims, integrated with the rest of the population. Now, fewer than 1,000 remain in the city, the rest having fled amid a veritable pogrom carried out in reprisal for atrocities committed by an alliance of mainly Muslim rebels who had seized power in March 2013.

Those left behind are stuck in ghettos or makeshift camps, protected by African Union troops but still surrounded by units of hostile anti-balaka militiamen.

Their life of fear and deprivation is captured in IRIN’s latest multimedia production: Bangui’s ghettos.


[see 6 minute video at link below]



"We can't stay here," says Nass, a community leader taking refuge in the PK-12 neighbourhood on the northern edge of the city, one of the three sites featured in our film.

Nass fled his home in neighbouring PK-13 as violence broke out in December 2013 when anti-balaka forces stormed the capital. "What we really need is to leave here. It's our biggest concern."

“We would rather be killed on the road than here,” Ibrahim Awad, a trader, told visiting Senior Humanitarian Coordinator Abdou Dieng. Nearby, troops from Rwanda and France formed a cordon between the ghetto and an area dense with anti-balaka.

In Kilometre 5 District, a few hundred Muslims live trapped between a roundabout and an intersection. According to the local imam, whose mosque is one of the few in the whole city that is still intact, those venturing outside the area risk being lynched. As a proud Central African citizen, he is outraged that all Muslims are being made to pay for the crimes of the Seleka.

One the most distressing consequences of this isolation is that cemeteries are unreachable. So the dead are buried in backyards or, if unclaimed, collected by the Red Cross.

As Mamadou Lamine prays over the corpses of a friend’s two sons, despair takes hold. “The hatred has become murderous. We no longer have a nation,” he said.

A few hundred Muslims are camped out at the military sector of M’Poko airport (which lies adjacent to the international, civilian sector, itself teeming with thousands of displaced people) hoping against hope for a resumption of evacuation flights.

from here