PK5 (5 km from downtown Bangui)
The sound of machine guns and RPGs cracks in the air at the break of noon and goes on no stop well into the pitch-black night. It looks like Mogadishu at the high of the civil war, with barricades of burning tires and charred vehicles cutting the roads, mad-max militiamen hunting down people in the streets with machetes and AK47s, congolese and burundese soldiers firing at random, choppers flying overhead, french troops on armoured APCs on guard at the airport, starving refugees in the camps, begging children, TB patients dying in the rundown general hospital and corpses piling up at the morgue.
Over the weekend hundreds of amulets-laden “anti-balaka” christian militias have tried to enter the besieged muslim enclave at the PK5 district: they want to get rid of them, slaughter them all. They were twice repelled, but they’ll come again.
The only way to verify the rumors is to go on the site. Yesterday I counted five victims among the muslims: I was at the funeral of three of them, hastily buried after a short street prayer in the yard of a house (no way to bring them to the cemetery: outside the ghetto every muslim is a dead man and the ambulances don’t dare to travel into the fight); one was at the morgue; another inside the Ali Baboro mosque.
A mistery surrounds the death toll among the anti-balaka. The MSF and Emergency hospitals are receiving the wounded (30 today) but I only saw very few christian bodies, mostly policemen. No numbers from the Red Cross. Sebastian, the anti-balaka commander of the Boeing district, tells me they suffered several losses but my request to see the corpses is denied for security reasons: “The boys” he says “are extremely nervous”. This means they are likely to shoot.
A couple of hours ago I went back to PK5 to meet Haj Yahya Waziri, the imam of the Ali Baboro mosque, where all the muslims are taken before burial. “Since last december this is our morgue” he tells me. “Today we have washed and put to rest seven boys”.
There is anger in the air. And fresh signs on the walls: “Non a la France”, “Chiens d’Europe”. It won’t be long before “les blancs” will be targeted here.
As the night falls “fake anti-balaka” gangs roam the streets. High on beers, marijuana and pills, they loot and spread fear.
A methodical ethnic and religious cleansing is under way. Here in Bangui, the decaying capital of the Central African Republic, the vast majority of the muslim population has been forced to flee: some islamic pockets, supposedly protected by soldiers of the Misca, the african stabilization mission, survive in PK5 (at the Grand Mosque and nearby streets) and PK12, where families camp out in grass and mud under the constant threat of grenades: convoys that try to get out must run the gauntlet of taunting Christian mobs.
Meanwhile 60,000 mostly christian refugees squat under filmsy tents at the M’poko camp at the airport: they don’t get any food, not even plastic sheets to seek shelter from the coming rains. Others who lost their houses are camping in churches.
There is no end in sight. After the mainly muslim Seleka militias ousted president François Bozizé last April, members of the armed forces and the presidential guard joined the anti-balaka in their fight against the “islamic invaders”. The usual bloody tribal game to grab the power and plunder the country (abysmally poor but rich in gold and diamonds) has swiftly turned into a brutal exercise in vengeance. The anti-balaka leaders I’ve met now freely admit it’s an eye for an eye: they will not stop until they have cleaned the country of muslims.
