Darfur, Chad conflicts spread to neighbor

KALANDAO, Central African Republic — The Central African Republic — so important as a potential bulwark against the chaos and misery of its neighbors in Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan — is being dragged into the dangerous and ever-expanding conflict that has begun to engulf Central Africa.

So porous are its borders and ungoverned are parts of its territory that foreign rebels are using the Central African Republic as a staging ground to mount attacks over the border, spreading what the United Nations has already called the world's "gravest humanitarian crisis."

The situation is so bad in some places that 50,000 residents have fled the Central African Republic to find refuge in Chad, of all places, while starvation threatens hundreds of thousands who remain.

"This is the soft belly of Africa," said Jerome Chevallier, a World Bank official who is trying to help stabilize the Central African Republic. "It has little protection from whatever might strike it."

A visit to Kalandao underscores the point. The residents here had fled their country's own army, which has been burning villages to smoke out a homegrown rebel movement bent on overthrowing the government. Once the villagers realized the approaching vehicles were from the U.N. World Food Program, they trickled back to tell their story.

"We are living in the bush like animals," Leontine Makanzi said. "Our children are dying. We are eating nothing. We have no security."

Poverty-stricken nation

The Central African Republic, one of the poorest places on Earth, has suffered through four coups in the last decade and sits almost at the bottom of the U.N. development index. In few places do people live so short a lifespan, bury so many of their young children or succumb to more treatable disease.

But its vulnerability has only grown in recent months. On its northeast border with Sudan, Chadian rebels supported by the Sudanese government have built a base, according to government officials and diplomats, to bolster their bid to overthrow Chad's president, Idriss Deby.

Now the Central African Republic government says these foreign fighters have teamed up with local rebels to overthrow it as well, making it increasingly hard to separate one conflict in the region from another.

"The world must act now to prevent an even graver crisis here," said Jean-Charles Dei, country director for the U.N. World Food Program, which is feeding 250,000 people in the Central African Republic, one of just a handful of organizations offering any aid at all here.

To stem the tide of destruction in this morass of cross-border enmity, the United Nations is examining the possibility of placing international troops to protect the borders of Chad, Sudan and the Central African Republic.

The hope is to avoid a broad, multicountry conflict like the one that swept Congo, formerly Zaire, after the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko. That war, which followed the Rwandan genocide and pulled in fighters from Uganda, Angola and Rwanda, among others, killed 4 million people, mostly from hunger and disease, and its aftermath continues to kill 1,200 people a day.

"As long as the problem of Darfur is not solved, you will not have peace in N'Djamena or Bangui," said Lamine Cisse, the top U.N. official in Central African Republic, referring to the capitals of Chad and Central African Republic. "The conflicts are all linked, and solving one requires solving all."

The Central African Republic is a former French colony of 4 million people sprinkled in tiny villages across a tangle of jungle about the size of Texas.

Across generous swaths of fertile soil, villagers scrape together a living using techniques as old as the Bible — hoes, water cans, human muscle and bone.

The labor required for mere survival is so strenuous that the most common operation performed by doctors at a rural hospital in the northwest is for hernias.

On a continent where cellphone towers and fiber-optic cables are finally snaking their way across the land, much of life here is lived as though the last few centuries never happened — as though the march of history halted at its wild frontiers.

"It is as though the whole world has simply forgotten these people," said Sister Desiree, a Burundian nun working at a Roman Catholic mission in Ndim, a small provincial town in northwest Central African Republic.

People here refer only elliptically to the perpetual crises that have enveloped their nation. Its troubles are referred to as "les evenements," or the events.

The problems began even before independence, when the man who should have been the country's first president, Barthelemy Boganda, died in a mysterious plane crash in 1958. They continued with the rise of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, a ruthless military dictator whose excesses were rumored to include cannibalism. He declared himself emperor of this tiny country in 1976, crowning himself in a lavish ceremony that cost $20 million. He was overthrown in 1979.

Democracy arrived in the 1990s, with the election of Ange-Felix Patasse, but his rule was marked by corruption and mismanagement leading to his overthrow in 2002 by Gen. Francois Bozize, who eventually was elected president in 2005 in an election that was judged free and fair by international observers.

Allies of ex-president

The rebellion in the northeast is led by allies of Patasse, the former president, along with Chadian rebels, who seek to overthrow Chad's president Idriss Deby, a close ally of Bozize.

Like so many countries in Africa, the Central African Republic has the potential of vast wealth in its natural resources — diamonds, timber, hydroelectric power and commercial farming. But over the years its economy has shriveled.

A decade ago there were more than 200 private companies working here, according to the World Bank. Today, only about 20 remain. In the past decade, disease and hunger have slashed life expectancy by 10 years, to about 40.