MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Sayre Nyce, Congressional Advocate at Refugees International, traveled to the Central African Republic (CAR) in late 2006 to evaluate humanitarian conditions in northwest CAR and refugees in southern Chad. She talks with Jerry Fowler about the conditions of life, political tensions, the role of ethnicity in CAR, and the exacerbated violence in the country as a result of the conflict in Darfur.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: Today we will be discussing some of the regional implications of the ongoing Darfur catastrophe with my guest, Sayre Nyce. Sayre is Congressional Advocate with Refugees International. Late last year, she traveled to the Central African Republic, a country that has been affected by the violence in Darfur. Sayre, welcome to the program.
SAYRE NYCE: Thanks very much.
JERRY FOWLER: Sayre, we have talked several times on this program about the affects of the violence in Darfur on Chad, and I think most people are familiar with where Chad is; it is the western neighbor of Sudan, but Central African Republic is perhaps a little bit more elusive. Can you just start out by telling us where the Central African Republic is?
SAYRE NYCE: Sure, the Central African Republic, CAR as we call it, is a land-locked country in the middle of Central Africa. It does border Chad on the North, Sudan on the East, Democratic Republic [of Congo] on the South, so it is in a very difficult neighborhood.
JERRY FOWLER: What does it look like? When you go to CAR, what do you see? What does the terrain look like?
SAYRE NYCE: It is quite a beautiful place. There is not much water, except on the southern border with Congo, but it is very fertile. You could just about throw anything in the ground and it will grow. The people that I met are wonderful. They were very generous in their time and very open to talk with us.
JERRY FOWLER: How long were you there?
SAYRE NYCE: We spent, gosh, three weeks about, and we were traveling up in Northern CAR for about five days, and that is where the most affected population is.
JERRY FOWLER: When you say the northern part, were you kind of in the northeast, towards where the border with Sudan is?
SAYRE NYCE: More in the northwest where the majority of the displaced people are, and that is close to the border of Chad. People have been displaced from their homes over the years by fighting between government forces and rebels.
JERRY FOWLER: When you say fighting between government forces and rebels, can you give us a little more detail about what is at stake in CAR?
SAYRE NYCE: Right, right; the country, since independence from France in 1960, the country has just been rife with political tension, and there have been more coup d’etat in that country than free and fair elections, so there has been great political tension. There is a very poor economy; it is one of the poorest countries in the world, and in the northwest you have a rebellion that is working to overthrow President Bozize. The population up there is really caught between them and the fighting by government sources who come up to attack the rebels, and then there is also the president guard who comes up there to burn homes—village after village—because they are calling the whole population up there rebels. There are also bandits all over, so it is quite a dangerous area. It is almost lawless. So that is what the population up there is facing right now. Then you also have, in the northeast of the country, another rebellion with the same goal of overthrowing the president. Conditions up there are not quite known at this point.
JERRY FOWLER: And the northeastern part is the part that is closet to Darfur, right?
SAYRE NYCE: Exactly; I have heard that called the Triangle of Instability or the Triangle of Anarchy where Darfur, Sudan, Chad and CAR meet, so it is a tough area.
JERRY FOWLER: One thing you mention there is that there are rebellions ongoing and then the existence of bandits. How do you explain the difference to people between rebels and bandits? When does one become another, or vice versa?
SAYRE NYCE: That is a good question. Any guy with a weapon, you cannot call him a rebel. These groups in the northeast and the northwest, they do have an agenda, and they have serious concerns with the government. The bandits are taking advantage of impunity and lawlessness and stealing whatever they want from the population just because they have the guns. There is no organized structure to the banditry, and that is across a lot of that country. The rebels—the ones in the northwest and the northeast—some of them support the former president, Patassé, who was overthrown by current President Bozize. Some helped Bozize get to power, and he had promised them a good chunk of money, up to $14,000 dollars, they did not receive that much money, some received maybe a few hundred dollars, and so they are frustrated and took up arms for that reason.
JERRY FOWLER: When you talk about an agenda, apart from the grievance that former supporters of President Bozize may feel because they did not get what was promised to them, what would be the agenda of the rebels? Or the agendas? I imagine there are multiple agendas.
SAYRE NYCE: So far all we know is that they want to overthrow President Bozize. They are saying that he is mismanaging the country, there is corruption, etc. When we talk to the population and ask about the political situation, the population says, “Look, it is not going to matter to us. We have faced coup after coup and it is the same guys or different people with the same response to the population which is very little; no social services, no protection for people. The population really does not see that any guys would be much better than the other.
JERRY FOWLER: Your sense was that the rebels do not enjoy necessarily popular support in the regions where they are operating?
SAYRE NYCE: Not necessarily; we did not find that, although, I have to say that we did not go to the northeast. There are no United Nations groups up there. There is not one international humanitarian organization. That is really an area that you cannot get access to because there is a rebellion up there and the government says that they are not allowing aid workers to get up in that area, so I cannot really speak to that population. One thing we have heard—it has been confirmed by different sources, but again I did not see it—is that the rebels in that area are not stealing from the population. When they go to the market, they are actually paying for their goods. That is an interesting distinction from the rebellion in the northwest where the rebels are stealing from the population, going into villages, making people cook for them, etc.
JERRY FOWLER: CAR is very ethnically diverse. It has something like eighty different ethnic groups. To what extent are these conflict related to ethnic divisions?
SAYRE NYCE: I am glad you asked that because I have heard in some reports that it is an ethnic conflict in the CAR. That is not true according to our assessments, and we asked numerous people this question while we were in the country. There have been a lot of ethnic tensions in the past; they are still there. The conflict does sort of fall along ethnic lines, but it is not an ethnically motivated conflict. The rebels have legitimate grievances with the government, and the government is trying to quell those groups.
JERRY FOWLER: When you have a figure like the current president, President Bozize, who I believe was originally in the army and then left the country and came back and overthrew the previous president, Ange-Félix Patasse, where does his support come from? Does it come from his ethnic group or does he have support kind of across ethnic lines?
SAYRE NYCE: For the government; I do not know. They are quite poor. The government is not providing a lot for its country, so I am not sure where the money is coming from. There are some foreign investors—the Chinese are there, a lot of South African businesses—so I imagine that there is some revenue from the sale of gold, diamonds, uranium; otherwise I am not sure what other support that country is getting.
JERRY FOWLER: I was referring more actually to his political support within the country; in the sense that he originally seized power—as I understand it—but then they did have an election which was, I think, generally considered to be fair, and in two rounds he got a substantial amount of the vote, including a majority in the second round. Does he enjoy support across ethnic lines, or his power kind of based in his ethnic group?
SAYRE NYCE: His power is, I think, kind of based in his ethnic group, so there is that tension, but he is from part of the northwest, and some of the previous presidents have also been from that neighborhood who met with one human rights actor who is Central African and he said, “Gosh, the guys in power now, we know the people who are in the rebellion. We went to school together or we worked together in the past.”
JERRY FOWLER: Can you give us a sense of what the humanitarian situation is? You have spoken broadly about the fact that there is not a lot of international assistance, especially in the northeast, but in terms of numbers, what is the humanitarian situation for the civilian population?
SAYRE NYCE: There are about 220 thousand or 230 thousand people that have been displaced from their homes. That includes about 50 thousand refugees in southern Chad, 20 to 30 thousand refugees in Cameroon to the west, and then inside the northeast and northwest of the country a lot of people who are just too scared to be in their villages, so they are kind of living a few kilometers behind their villages, in basically the bush. They have makeshift shelters that are not durable, that do not protect them from the rain, and that is where they have been living, some for the last year, some for several years. The conditions in CAR; I was shocked to see so many needs across every sector and so little response. They need healthcare, education, potable water, food assistance, clothing, everything. They absolutely need support across the board. That was quite shocking to see there great needs and maybe just a handful of organizations that are based in the northwest, and I have to say that there are not any American organizations doing humanitarian work up there, and that was quite shocking.
JERRY FOWLER: Why do you think that is?
SAYRE NYCE: I was saying that, gosh CAR was a forgotten country, and then I thought, forgotten country implies prior knowledge. I think it is just virtually unknown, unrecognized, so it has just gotten very little attention over the years, but now because it is in a dangerous region, bordering Sudan and Chad, it is getting more attention, so we do hope, and we are advocating for, more American organizations to go into the country, both to do humanitarian relief and even development work in the southern part of the country. That is what we are advocating for.
A few more things, just to give an idea of how poor the country is and how much assistance was needed, it is ranked 169 out of 175 countries on the human development index, so that just kind of shows the extreme poverty in the country.
JERRY FOWLER: The Human Development Index is a—
SAYRE NYCE: It is a United Nations index to show how people are living. For example, life expectancy is about 40, 41 years of age; it is extremely low. Literacy is about maybe 57% illiteracy in the country. You have high maternal mortality, high HIV/AIDS rates—about 15% across the nation and up to 30% in some areas—so a great many needs in the country.
Also, on the political front, there are many problems with the government. WE have to say that he was elected, free and fair, and so I think we should help continue that process, that democratic process. We are not necessarily saying that we support President Bozize, but we are saying that we support a democratic process. The international community should step up. If we helped with elections, let us continue that and help CAR pull itself out of the mire that they are in.
JERRY FOWLER: You have mostly been talking about the humanitarian situation; what about the human rights situation?
SAYRE NYCE: I would say that there is a human rights crisis in CAR. Peoples’ homes are being burned by the presidential guard, hundreds, even thousands of homes being burned, along with their property. Cattle are being stolen, other property. One thing that was especially shocking to hear about was how the rebels are preying on children. They are taking children from their families and holding them for months and asking for ransom. Families sometimes have to sell all of their cattle that they may have to get the two or four thousand dollars that they need to retrieve their child.
JERRY FOWLER: Two or four thousand dollars?
SAYRE NYCE: Yes; it is a great deal of money, and some families are somehow able to sell everything they own and everything neighbors and friends are willing to contribute and get their family member back. Others, the child might be killed or the father of the family might be taken and killed. One refugee in southern Chad who is from CAR told me that, “if you do not pay with money then you pay with your skin.” Basically he was meaning that if, “we could not get the money together, then one of us in the family is going to die.” That was horrible to hear. We talked to children—ages 6, 8, one little girl who was 5 years old—they were terrified to talk to us, and we asked if it was just us that they were scared of, and the mother said, “No, they are afraid of absolutely everyone now.”
JERRY FOWLER: Apart from kidnapping children for ransom, do the rebels impress children as child soldiers or use the girls as sex slaves, as happens in some other parts of the world?
SAYRE NYCE: Child soldiers; there is not much evidence of that, thankfully, however there is a lot of sexual violence, and that is by all forces on young girls, including government forces. There are also practices of interrogation by both government and rebel forces which results in serious bodily damage. That is happening as well.
JERRY FOWLER: We have mostly been talking about the situation indigenous to the Central African Republic, but it is being affected by the conflict in Darfur, and in fact, the African Union and the Bozize government have asked for international force to protect the border between CAR and Sudan and Darfur. What is the effect that the conflict in Darfur is having on the situation in CAR?
SAYRE NYCE: There are strong indications that elements within Sudan are funding the rebellion in northeast CAR. That is not confirmed, but there are indications that it is happening. What we are mostly concerned about is that the government control and services outside of the capital Bangui are almost nonexistent. When you do not have the authority to govern and protect your borders, that can be an easy launching pad for a rebellion into Chad for example, or for a training ground for any armed group from the neighboring countries. Yes, in that northeast province, that is a haven for irregular armed groups from Chad, from Sudan, but we do not know the extent to which they are supporting the CAR rebellion.
JERRY FOWLER: Do you have any plans to go back to CAR?
SAYRE NYCE: Definitely, we were just going to start planning that tomorrow. That country needs as much attention as it can get. We are encouraging not just humanitarian organizations to set up shop there, but also other groups—human rights groups, political analysis groups—to go in and examine the situation. This country is extremely important because of where it is in Africa and because it is not well governed, not governed much at all outside of the capital, so we hope that there are going to be more groups going in certainly.
JERRY FOWLER: When you say that it is not governed much at all outside of the capital, and you said that you could not travel to the northeast—the government would not let you because of the insecurity—but how much security did you have traveling in the northwest?
SAYRE NYCE: The United Nations has been required to use armed escorts in the northwest. That is hopefully changing because they cannot access the most vulnerable people if they are traveling with armed escorts.
JERRY FOWLER: Who are the armed escorts?
SAYRE NYCE: They are government forces. We went along with the United Nations up until just south of the conflict affected area, and then we left the government forces and we were traveling in a United Nations convoy throughout the northwest. We did not have any problems; certainly we could have; we were very fortunate not to run into any bandits or get stuck between the rebels and the government forces, but mostly the NGOs operating in that area have not had major problems. They are able to carry out humanitarian activities, so we would really push for the United Nations to develop a permanent presence in that area; currently they have no permanent presence up there.
JERRY FOWLER: Did you see any rebels when you were traveling up through that region?
SAYRE NYCE: No, we did not, although we were in one town called Palola and we had a day trip outside of the town. We got back to the town and there had been an ambush by the rebels on the government forces just a mile or so outside of town. We did miss that which we were pleased about, but we did not have any problems. In fact, we saw very few people at all. People were mostly hiding. They hear cars coming and they run into the forest to hide. They do not know if it is rebels, military or bandits. We would have to stop the vehicles and wait, and slowly, slowly, people would see that we were not with military escorts, and then they would come out and speak with us.
JERRY FOWLER: You made a reference a little bit earlier to talking to human rights activists in the northwest. What kind of civil society organizations are there in CAR?
SAYRE NYCE: There are some civil society organizations; it is not very strong. We did meet with a few human rights groups based in the capital. There are some journalists that do excellent work, but civil society organizations, there are not many in the country, and in the northwest, we did not find many at all. There were just a few international NGOs and then the Catholic missionaries who were providing a lot of services, and that really was about it.
JERRY FOWLER: I have been talking to Sayre Nyce who is Congressional Advocate with Refugees International about her mission to the Central African Republic late last year. Sayre, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
SAYRE NYCE: Thank you so much.
