Central African Republic

Susanna Flood, Director of Media at Amnesty International, blogs from Bangui

Her voice began to choke and then the tears began to flow down her face as she calmly and steadily recounted the long list of names of all the women and children killed in her village when the anti-balaka struck a week ago.

Sitting in a darkened hospital ward at the Hôpital Communautaire, she gracefully removed her headscarf and revealed the stitches laced across her scalp where the machete had struck. Alongside her was her four-year-old daughter with a matching wound on her head, also the victim of machete attacks.

Nearly everyone in her village near Bangui, the Central African Republic’s capital city, had been wiped out in these early strikes by the anti-balaka militia who unleashed the carnage that has since been wrought on Bangui.  

We met her one week after she had suffered those attacks and she told us what happened in her village with amazing calm and dignity. In her ward were numerous women also recovering from the various machete and bullet wounds inflicted by unknown attackers in the violence that has run riot across Bangui and the nearby villages.

Susanna Flood, Amnesty International’s Director of Media, blogs from Bangui

There is hatred in their eyes as they spit their words out at you: “Djotodia doit partir”, Michel Djotodia, transitional President of the Central African Republic, “must go”.

These same words were emblazoned in graffiti on walls around a small unremarkable mosque near the Assemblée Nationale, on the Avenue de l’Independence – one of Bangui’s principal roads that is heavily patrolled by the French, African (members of the Multinational Force for Central Africa – FOMAC) and ex-Seleka troops, where a revenge mob had gathered.

They had burned the mosque, as well as the Imam’s house. And they were running riot, removing anything that could be taken from the building.

They pulled the corrugated iron from the roof and fled with their trophies into the neighbouring quarter of Fouh.

Others, men and women together, gathered in the dusty grounds, shouting encouragement to the mob, beating at the walls with whatever instruments they could find or writing their graffiti in large letters on the remaining walls, declaring their hatred of the president.