By Roger Annis, A Socialist In Canada, Dec 24, 2022
The United Nations has maintained a military mission in the Central African Republic (CAR) since 2014, titled the ‘UN Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic’. It numbers some 15,000 soldiers, of which the top three participating countries are Rwanda, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
See further below for related readings on how the long history of Western military intervention and economic plundering of African countries compares to Chinese assistance, and the history of Western plunder and proxy wars against the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In 2017, the government of the Central African Republic (population 5 million) began welcoming Russian peacekeepers to the country.
The last of the discredited military occupation force of France, the former colonizer of the CAR, left the country in December 2022. It had dispatched an occupation force in 2012 in order to ‘stabilize’ the CAR in favour of Western imperialist economic interests. France’s departure from the CAR parallels a similar withdrawal of its discredited military from Mali. There, too, Russian peacekeepers have been invited to assist the government.
France invaded and occupied Mali in 2013, taking advantage of the chaos created by a coup staged by France-trained Mali military in April 2012. You can read a full dossier about Mali on this page of A Socialist In Canada website: Mali war and occupation. The political left in France failed to condemn the 2013 France intervention in Mali, naively expecting that it could be some kind of ‘salvation’ of the Mali people from the country’s political chaos. That chaos was and remains a product of decades and several centuries of European colonialism. The vast northern region of Mali is populated by Tuareg, Songhai and other pastoral and semi-nomadic peoples who have been forced into the colonial borders of present-day Mali. (See: Indigenous peoples in Mali.)
This same political left in France supported the coup in Haiti in 2004 against the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It went on to describe the military-fascist coup in Egypt of July 2013 as being part of a ‘popular rebellion’ against the elected government of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood party. (Morsi died, tragically, in prison in 2019 while being tried by Egypt’s military/fascist rulers.) You can read a full dossier about the 2013 military/fascist coup in Egypt and its aftermath on this page of A Socialist In Canada website: Egypt.
Apart from the above-cited news report by RT, there are no reliable reports easily available online in English or French that analyze the history and current situation in the Central African Republic. This stems, in part, from the massive ignorance and willful distortion by so many Western analysts of the role of French imperialism in Africa. Sadly, this applies not only to corproate media but also to ‘left wing’ and ‘not-so-alternative’ media in the West. The U.S. role in Africa has been well documented over the years by U.S. journalist Nick Turse.
The New York Times published a special report on the Central African Republic on December 24, 2022. It is a propaganda screed, conceived in order to distort and lie about the role of Russian peacekeepers in the country and the role by Russia in improving economic and social conditions. Yet despite that, here is a remarkable excerpt from the NYT report:
… Although feared [sic], the Russians are often welcomed as a more effective presence in keeping a fragile peace [in the Central African Republic] compared to the more than 14,500 blue-helmeted United Nations peacekeepers who have been in this war-torn country since 2014. As elsewhere in the developing world, the West has seemingly lost hearts and minds here. President Biden’s framework for this era — the battle between democracy and rising autocracy — comes across as too binary [sic] for a time of complex challenges. Despite the war in Ukraine, even because of it, Central Africans are intensely skeptical of lessons on Western “values”. Tired of Western hypocrisy and empty promises, stung by the shrug that war in Africa elicits in Western capitals as compared with war in Ukraine, many people I met were inclined to support Mr. Putin over their former colonizers in Paris…
The terrible confusion and default of much of the Western left over events in Mali and Egypt in 2012 and 2013 presaged even more serious defaults over events in Ukraine since 2013-14. Much of this stems from an inability, decades old now, to analyze and understand the workings of predatory, modern-day imperialism. That inability is due to the debilitating effects of foundational ultraleftism and the lure of imperialist democrccy. The foundational ultraleftism has degenerated into new and novel forms of right-wing socialism.
Related readings:
* The struggle for foreign-financed extraction of resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo intensifies, by Conor Gallagher, columnist, Naked Capitalism, Dec 26, 2022 read the repoort here in pdf format: The struggle for foreign-financed extraction of resources from the DRC
* ‘After two decades of war, the Congolese people are saying enough is enough’, article series by Tanupriya Singh, published in People’s Dispatch
Part one: Congolese researcher and activist Kambale Musavuli explains the history of proxy wars waged by the Western powers in the Democratic Repubilc of Congo, People’s Dispatch Dec 14, 2022
Part two: More on imperialism’s proxy war against the people of the Democratic Repubilc of Congo, People’s Dispatch, Dec 28, 2022
* Chinese aid is a blessing for Africa and a challenge to western donors, by Jon Lomey, published by the Christian Michelsen Institute (Bergen, Norway), April 2021 (Jon Lomøy is the former ambassador of Norway to Zambia (1996-2000) and Tanzania (2006-2010). He was Director of the OECD Development Co-operation Directorate (2010–2015) and Director-General of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (2015–2019).
* ‘The country that helps us is China,’ Africans say, by Nury Vittachi, published in Friday Everyday (Hong Kong) Aug 21, 2022
