The Seleka Rebels Killed More than 5,000 Christians
in Central African Republic
By KRISTA LARSON / Sept
12, 2014
At least 5,186 people have died in Central African
Republic since fighting between Muslims and Christians started in December,
according to an Associated Press tally gleaned from more than 50 of the
hardest-hit communities and the capital, Bangui. That's well more than double
the death toll of about 2,000 cited by the United Nations back in April, when
it approved a peacekeeping mission. The deaths have mounted steadily since,
with no official record.
As the U.N. prepares to go into the Central African
Republic next week, the death toll underscores how the aid is coming too late
for thousands of victims. The about 2,000 extra troops to boost African forces
fall short of the almost 7,000 authorized in April, with the rest expected by
early 2015. Yet the conflict has turned out to be far more deadly than it was
then, and warnings of potential mass carnage from former colonizer France and
from the U.N. itself have gone unheeded.
"The international community said it wanted to
put a stop to the genocide that was in the making. But months later, the war
has not stopped, " says Joseph Bindoumi, president of the Central African
Human Rights League, who collects handwritten testimonies from relatives
stapled together with photos of their slain loved ones.
"On the contrary, it has gotten worse. Today,
towns that were not under severe threat back in April have become the sites of
true disasters."
The AP counted bodies and gathered numbers from
dozens of survivors, priests, imams, human rights groups and local Red Cross
workers, including those in a vast, remote swath of the west that makes up a
third of the country. Many deaths here were not officially counted because the
region is still dangerous and can barely be reached in torrential rains. Others
were left out by overwhelmed aid workers but registered at mosques and at
private Christian funerals.
The U.N. is not recording civilian deaths on its
own, unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, for example. And it took months to gather
troops from different countries for the mission, which will take over from
regional peacekeeping forces on Sept. 15, said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for
the secretary-general.
"Mobilizing troops for peacekeeping mission
takes time because it's not like they're waiting in New York for us,"
Dujarric said Wednesday. "We have to go knock on doors for troops, for
equipment, helicopters..."
In the tiny Christian village of Nzakoun, where the
only sounds after dark are of crickets and the occasional mango dropping on a
rooftop, the roar of vehicles woke up 13-year-old Maximin Lassananyant in the
dead of night in early February. Soon the gunshots rang out. The Seleka had
come.
The rebels set ablaze more than two dozen houses.
Then they went door-to-door, killing villagers and stealing everything they
hadn't destroyed.
Maximin stumbled out of the hut where he slept with
his mother and two siblings into the darkness, with only the moon to light his
path. He hid for two days in the bush, petrified. He prayed that his family was
just hiding someplace else.
Then the other survivors from the village found him.
They told him it was time to come home and bury his family. The stones of his
home still reeked of blood, caked on the ground and the walls inside.
A village chief has hand-printed the names of 22
buried victims on a weathered piece of paper from a classroom notebook.
Maximin's mother, Rachel, is No. 11 on the list of females, and his 5-year-old
sister Fani is No. 13. His 7-year-old brother Boris is on the list of males. A
separate list details the homes destroyed, the people missing.
The sound of an unknown vehicle passing in Nzakoun
still sends families fleeing back into the forest.
It
was only a matter of time — sometimes just hours — before the Christians took
revenge.
Soon after dawn one morning, Christian fighters
stormed the outskirts of Guen, a town with a sizeable Muslim population because
of the diamond mining nearby. They attacked the brick homes of Muslims,
identifiable by fences traditionally put up all around them, and killed men in
front of their children.
"We have suffered under the Seleka and now it
is your turn," they screamed at the Muslims.
Within hours, 23 people were dead.
Several days later, the Christian fighters stormed a
house in town where dozens of Muslim men and boys had sought refuge. A few
escaped. The rest were herded at gunpoint to a shady lawn beneath two large
mango trees, recalls a survivor.
In the end, 43 people were slain under the mango
trees, including two 11-year-old boys.
A 10-year-old and a 13-year-old survived only by
lying still amid the bloody corpses until darkness fell. Then they ran for
their lives to a nearby town, according to other survivors, including the
mother of one of the boys.
The lives of three Muslims in town were spared: They
were the ones who transported the bludgeoned bodies to two mass graves on a
wooden stretcher, still stained with blood months later.
A villager named Abakar lost four of his sons that
day, all between the ages of 11 and 16. The thought of his boys awaiting
certain death has him sobbing so hard he cannot speak. Even now he will only
give his first name because he is so afraid that the militants will hunt him
down.
Two community leaders — both Christians — pleaded
for the lives of the boys and men that day in Guen. They were told they too
would be slain if they did not leave. They could not eat or sleep for days.
"What more could we do?" they now say to each other, over and over.
Edmond Beina, the local leader of a Christian
militia, is unrepentant. Everyone killed that day was a Seleka Muslim rebel, he
says. Even the children.
Today, pages from holy Qurans blow through the grass
at the house where the boys tried to hide. They are the only reminder of those
who died.
The violence is now bubbling up in previously stable
corners, hitting both Christians and Muslims. In Bambari, northeast of the
capital, at least 149 people were killed in June and July alone, according to
witnesses, including about 17 Christians sheltering at a Catholic church
compound. And in the Mbres area in the north, Muslim rebels left at least 34
people dead in August.
About 20,000 Muslims are trapped in isolated
communities across the nation, despite a mass exodus earlier this year,
according to a U.N. report in August. Among them is Saidou Bouba, who waits
outside the mayor's office in the town of Boda.
Bouba had spent his entire life in this diamond town
south of the capital. But when the Christian militia fighters burned his house
down in early February, the 46-year-old herder knew it was time to leave.
So he and his family joined a group of 34 Muslim
refugees heading for Cameroon. They took with them all their savings — some 300
cattle — to start a new life.
About 37 miles outside town, they stopped to rest
beneath a tree. There, a group of heavily armed men on foot, wearing
traditional Muslim clothing, opened fire on the crowd.
But they were not Muslims. They were Christian
fighters wearing the clothes of their last victims. "Lie down, dogs!"
the men shouted.
The last thing Bouba remembers is being knocked
unconscious with a machete blow to the head.
When he awoke, he was surrounded by the bodies of
his two wives and five children. Mama and Abdoulaye, both just 3 years old, Nafissa
and Rassida, 6, and Mariam, 8, were all dead, their tiny heads bashed in with
machetes.
Only Bouba and one other man survived. They sat
among the 32 bodies for an entire day in shock before making their way back to
town.
There are grieving fathers everywhere in this tiny
enclave: Abakar Hissein has lost two sons, both shot to death, Ahmat earlier
this year in Bangui and Ali on Aug. 20 in Boda. Hissein carried Ali's body back
in his own arms. His wife has been missing for five months — he thinks she has
made it to neighboring Chad — and does not know yet another son is dead.
Even in death, there is no peace for the victims.
Earlier this summer, a Muslim man was buried at a
cemetery in Boda, just a mile away from the zone where Muslims are barricaded.
Later that evening, after the sun set, his body was
dug up from the ground and set on fire.
