Bishop details humanitarian crisis in remote area of CAR, top cardinal signals security progress

The Coadjutor Bishop of Bangassou in the Central African Republic (CAR) is raising the alarm over mass displacement of persons in the southeast of his country.

Speaking with the official Fides news service of the Vatican’s missionary dicastery this past week, Bishop Aurelio Gazzera told of more than 30,000 displaced people in the far southeastern Zémio area of the CAR, some 200 miles east of Bangassou, which is located in the southeast of the Central African Republic near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“The Zémio area, like the Mbomou, Haut-Mbomou, and Boki, has been suffering for over 15 years from the violence of armed groups,” Gazzera told the Fides News agency.

According to Gazzera, more than 2,000 of the displaced live in extreme poverty, scattered between a local Catholic mission and the town of Zapaye just across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A lack of infrastructure has virtually disconnected the community from the rest of the country. Children are denied an education, families are starving, and the few health facilities that once existed are now dysfunctional, according to the Bishop.

In partnership with the Catholic Church’s humanitarian arm Caritas, the Italian-born Gazzera’s diocese is preparing supplies of food and basic necessities.

The primary obstacle is not a lack of supplies, but the immense danger and difficulty of delivering them.

 “The real problem is getting the aid to the people,” Gazzera told Fides.

The 187-mile road connecting the city of Bangassou to Zémio is a grueling 16-to-17-hour ordeal, a journey made perilous by the constant threat of militia attacks.

“There are well-founded fears that the situation could deteriorate further,” the bishop said, recalling past incidents where NGO workers have been ambushed on the same route. In one chilling example Gazzera described to Fides, militiamen attacked a local hospital in Mbomou searching for wounded soldiers they believed were being treated there.

This dire situation is fueled by a dizzying array of armed groups that have plagued the region for years, including the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the various Séleka militias that emerged during the 2012 civil war, the Unité pour la Paix en Centrafrique (UPC) which split from Séleka in 2014, and more recently, the Azandé Ani Kpi Gbé (AAKG) militias. While the AAKG began as a movement to protect the population, Bishop Gazzera laments that they have ultimately “caused more problems than they intended to solve.”

Gazzera’s description of ongoing security crisis and humanitarian emergency in the CAR’s remote southeast stands in counterpoint to the improved security situation in the west of the country, described to Crux recently by the CAR’s senior churchman.

In an interview with Crux published earlier this month, Cardinal Dieudonné Nzapalainga of the capital archdiocese, Bangui, said there has been a marked improvement in the country’s security outlook since the CAR descended into chaos in 2013.

“In the past, from 2013 to 2015, we went through difficult times,” Nzapalainga said. “There was insecurity, and the authority of the state was reduced to Bangui,” he said.

“However,” he also said, “since 2020, we have seen the effective presence of internal security forces that are operational. Today, we cannot say that the rebels control most of the territory as they did in the past.”

He admitted there are still “acts of banditry and extremists too,” but said he also sees “a clear improvement in security” when compared with his experience, “because you can leave Bangui and travel to the Cameroon border.”

“I can leave Bangui and travel to Bambari without being stopped by bandits on the road,” he said.

The trek from Bangui to Cameroon is westward and the journey from Bangui to Bambari is northeast, but the trouble Gazzera reported to Fides is far to the east of the capital city.

More broadly, the conflict in the Central African Republic has very often been simplified as a religious war between Christians and Muslims.

In essence, a coalition of Muslim rebel groups known as the Séléka (“alliance” in the common Sango language of the CAR) launched a major offensive targeting President François Bozizé, a Christian from the South. The President was eventually toppled, and Michel Djotodia, a Muslim, was installed as president in 2013, but his turn as interim president was chaotic and short-lived, ending in 2014.

The whole Séléka rule was marked by gross human rights abuses, mostly against the Christian population. Christian youths then constituted themselves into a self-defense militia known as the anti-balaka” (meaning “anti-machete” in Sango). The two groups thus started fighting each other.

The two militias eventually splintered into several different groups, making it even more difficult for negotiations to take place.

Rebel groups have lost significant territory to the country’s security forces, but improved security is still a distant dream for the 30,000 people who live in Zémio, for whom reality is a daily struggle for survival.