Op-Ed Contributor
Playing the Genocide Card
By ALEX DE WAAL
Published: December 18, 2013
When France decided to send soldiers to the Central African Republic
on Nov. 26, it did the right thing for the wrong reason.
France, the United Nations and the African Union dispatched some 4,000
troops soon after the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, warned
that the C.A.R. was `on the verge of genocide.’ Yet the country
doesn’t face genocide; it is experiencing state collapse and limited
intercommunal killings after a military takeover by a coalition of
undisciplined militiamen known as Seleka.
Last week, flying home from the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in
Johannesburg, President François Hollande of France stopped in Bangui,
C.A.R.’s capital, to visit the newly deployed French peacekeepers. The
stopover also served as an implicit act of contrition for events in
April 1994, when world leaders congratulated Mr. Mandela for presiding
over the peaceful end to apartheid, even as they were pulling their
peacekeepers out of Rwanda. Close to one million people died in the
genocide that unfolded over the following months.
Nineteen years later, French and African soldiers have fanned out
across Bangui and other towns largely unopposed, losing just two
soldiers so far. Over the last decade the C.A.R. had become a
battleground for sundry marauders, freebooters and proxy forces,
especially from Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony, on the run from Uganda, is
believed to be hiding out in its thick, lawless forests.
Even by its low standards, C.A.R. slid further into chaos this year at
the hands of two political contenders who are little more than
aspiring warlords set on plundering for personal gain. François
Bozizé, the country’s cruel military leader from 2003 until last
March, was eventually abandoned by his sponsors in Chad and Sudan
because of his nepotism and incompetence.
Michel Djotodia, who took control of Bangui in March with the support
of Seleka, an undisciplined coalition of militia from the C.A.R.’s
Muslim minorities, had no political agenda beyond seizing power. But
this was not a mere change of guard. The African Union warned that if
the Muslim rebels overran the capital there was a high risk of
intercommunal pogroms. Muslims constitute about 15 percent of C.A.R.’s
population and are concentrated in the northeast, at the borders with
Chad and Sudan. They are overrepresented among market traders, but
members of the Christian majority have long dominated politics.
Discrimination is such that Mr. Djotodia, a Muslim, had to take a
Christian name to enroll in school.
People from the country’s southern region, which borders Cameroon and
the Democratic Republic of Congo, frequently refer to people from the
remote and marginalized northeast as foreigners, regardless of their
actual citizenship.
Both France and the African Union already had troops in the country as
a result of previous peace-maintaining efforts. The African Union
urged the French to defend the capital from the Seleka rebels while
its own forces would control the northeast, from where Seleka was
launching its attacks. But France had no stomach for propping up a
discredited dictator who seemed intent on clinging to power solely to
enrich his family, and so it let Djotodia take the city.
The African Union’s warning was prescient. Longstanding religious
fault lines soon translated into ethnic killing. Communities have
armed themselves, and local vigilantes have turned on one another. At
least 500 people have been killed, and tens of thousands have been
displaced.
Yet neither C.A.R. specialists nor students of genocide would describe
this violence as genocide. There haven’t been large-scale and
systematic massacres, and the killings are driven by the contingencies
of fear, not a deeply nurtured intent to destroy another ethnic group.
France is legitimately worried that the implosion of the country might
bring chaos to neighbors like Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of
Congo, which are rich in natural resources and important members of
the global Francophone bloc. But the French authorities have been
concerned that they could not generate domestic support for a faraway
military adventure unless they dramatized the crisis, and so they used
the word `genocide.’
The overstatement has also allowed the French to obtain a United
Nations Security Council resolution that gives their troops the
authority to use `all necessary measures.’ The soldiers’ mission is to
disarm the militias and hand over security to the African-led
International Support Mission in the Central African Republic, which
the United Nations Security Council has charged with stabilizing the
country over the next 12 months.
This might seem like a fine outcome, but there are serious downsides
to treating situations like the current crisis in C.A.R. as a
genocide.
Misdiagnosing the problem can mean taking the wrong actions to resolve
it. The playbook for an international response operation to mass
atrocities calls for neutralizing perpetrators and protecting unarmed
civilians; it is not designed to manage a conflict among many armed
actors, each with a distinct civilian constituency.
One immediate question facing the French and African troops in C.A.R.
is, which forces should they disarm? Were their task to stop a
genocide from unfolding the answer would be obvious: the perpetrators
of violence. But in C.A.R., there are no clear villains and victims:
All parties are armed, and all can plausibly claim to be acting in
self-defense.
Most important, if the label `genocide’ is readily applied to any
situation of ethnic strife and governmental breakdown, it will lose
its analytic power and its special moral force. Soon enough it won’t
serve any purpose.
Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 19, 2013, in The
International New York Times.
From: Baghdasarian