Full time never called on these little wars

The attention of the world’s leaders is suddenly focused back on Iraq where the new kid on the block, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant army are closing in on Bagdad and about to put a new twist on President George W. Bush’s famous line about missions being accomplished.

Meanwhile, for a good number of the planet’s citizenry who are not paid to worry about such matters, the World Cup of football will be the only show in town for the next month.

Around the world, the perpetrators of nasty little wars and massacres are not taking time off to watch the games, their actions slipping further below the radar to be monitored only by a few over-stretched and increasingly threatened non-government organisations.

One such drama is continuing its record run in the Central African Republic, a country which has known peace only sporadically since independence from France in 1960, a playground for dictators, armed thugs and casual rapists; perhaps the world capital of misery.

Many people haven’t even heard of the Central African Republic or CAR, fewer could point to it on the map. As the name suggests it is a land-locked nation situated in the heart of what used to be called the Dark Continent and may well earn that name again, for very different reasons.   

There was what might reasonably be described as a free and fair election once – back in 1957 before the French left, but within two years of independence the wearying cycle of coups and counter coups, all with their accompanying round of killings and mutilations, began.

Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa mounted a coup in 1965, declared himself President for Life, and not satisfied with that announced he was the Emperor Bokassa I of the Central African Empire, crowning himself at a lavish ceremony and creating a court that would have done Napoleon (one of his heroes) proud. France had had enough and intervened to remove him, and the cycle of coups and military mutinies began all over again.

Since 2004 a war has been raging between various factions; the government has changed hands several times and despite regular attempts to broker ceasefires, pleas from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the presence of 8000 African Union and French troops, the fighting continues to this day.

The Government in Bangui, currently led by Catherine Samba-Panza, seems powerless. Its only move in recent weeks has been to ban the sending of text messages in the lead-up to a general strike in protest at her inaction. An estimated 70 per cent of the roughly five million population have been displaced by the decade of violence, now mostly between Christian and Muslim militias who plunder, rape and murder at will.

Amnesty International has highlighted just one instance - a Muslim woman handing her seven-month old baby to a fellow Christian passenger as the bus she was travelling in was stopped at a Christian militia roadblock.

The Christian woman pretended the baby was hers while the mother and her other children were taken off the bus, robbed, stripped and eventually hacked to death with machetes.

It is natural for us in the West to put our trust in governments to fix things and if they do not it is through their own incompetence or inaction and we can get rid of them at the next polling day. In large parts of the world we are increasingly seeing this is not the case.

It is a worrying development, but sadly one that is not getting the attention it needs, especially when the world is fixated on the series of football matches in Brazil.