Since the 1970s, the Central African Republic (CAR), a former French colony which gained its independence in 1960, has been a state in freefall, ruled by despots who succeeded each other in successive coups d’Etat and often with the benediction of Paris.
Over the years the mineral-rich economy, including the diamond industry, has been reduced to tickover and infrastructures have collapsed, leaving swathes of the country inaccessible. Its borders are largely unchecked, to the benefit both of its powerful neighbours – Chad to the north, Sudan and South Sudan in the east, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of the Congo to the south and Cameroon in the west – and trans-national militia groups, like that of warlord Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army and wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for crimes against humanity.
In March 2013, President François Bozizé, the country’s sixth president who came to power in 2003, was overthrown by the mostly-Muslim rebel group Séléka, and within months the country had descended into strife and chaos, when escalating tensions between its minority Muslim and majority Christian populations led to widespread inter-religious killings, rape and looting.
In face of the threat of imminent mass genocide, the United Nations (UN) in December 2013 approved the sending of international peacekeepers to CAR, comprised of an African-led force and a 1,600-strong French contingent, whose mission was codenamed Operation Sangaris.
In the intervening period, during which the French contingent has risen to around 2,000 personnel and the UN has taken over command of the African Union operation, perhaps the most realistic assessment is that the situation in CAR has not worsened. For many in the international community, including the French government, that status quo appears to have been regarded as a relatively acceptable state of affairs. Against the backdrop of numerous high-stakes conflicts around the globe, the fate of CAR and its population of about 4.7 million retreated from international headlines.
But that torpor ended with a report by The Guardian published on April 29th, which revealed the existence of an internal UN report detailing evidence of sexual abuse of children as young as nine by French troops serving in CAR in 2014. Some of the children cited in the report were orphans.
“If the events are proven to be true, I will not contain my anger, because when a French soldier is on a mission, he is France,” said French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian in an interview with French weekly JDD published on May 2nd. “If it happens that just one amongst them has committed such acts, let him immediately come forward.”
But Le Drian’s reaction was somewhat oddly worded, and for good reason. The Guardian’s report exposed how Anders Kompass, a Geneva-based senior aid worker for the UN, had been suspended from his post after it was discovered he had passed the report of the sexual abuse on to the French authorities in frustration at the UN’s failure to take action over the evidence. When the French defence minister was interviewed by the JDD, not only had his ministry been aware of the report for some eight months, but investigations by the French judicial authorities and the army had left little doubt as to the veracity of the alleged events.
Numerous sources contacted by Mediapart in Paris, in the CAR capital Bangui, in New York and Geneva have confirmed that French soldiers in CAR committed acts of sexual abuse on children between December 2013 and June 2014, that their officers were aware of the events, and that there were more cases of abuse than those recorded in the UN report. Most of those sources agreed to be interviewed on condition their names were withheld. However, Mediapart publishes here those accounts which have been cross-checked and proved concordant with both available evidence and separate testimony.
Furthermore, there is evidence that incidents of child rape committed by the international contingents serving in CAR, and their sexual exploitation of minors who prostitute themselves, continue still to this day. According to Mediapart’s investigation, it appears possible that, against a backdrop of the questionable behaviour of Western representatives present in CAR, the UN report was deliberately shelved in order to keep secret other crimes.
The first accounts of the sexual abuse by French troops emerged in February and March 2014. That was when a number children living in a refugee camp of almost 100,000 people set up at Bangui’s M’Poko airport, alongside a French military base, began telling the staff of an NGO offering aid to homeless minors about their sexual exploitation by French peacekeepers. The children’s accounts eventually reached the attention of the local representation of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which began looking into the matter in April.
During May and June 2014, an official specialised in the protection of minors from the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic, which is more widely known under its French acronym MINUSCA, questioned six boys aged between 9 and 13 about the abuse allegations. In some of the interviews the official was accompanied by representatives the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The accounts given by the boys were detailed and concordant (click on the page image presented right for a pdf copy of the UN's summaries of the interviews). They include how, after asking for food from French troops stationed at a checkpoint at the entrance to their base, boys were taken to a nearby shelter where the soldiers demanded they performed fellatio. In another case, a soldier showed a child what he wanted him to do by using his mobile phone to play images of a porn video of a woman performing a fellatio on a man. Another child recounted how he was sodomised. In all cases the children were afterwards given military food rations and some money and were warned to stay silent about what happened.
The children, who also recounted how they were asked to fetch prostitutes for the soldiers, provided a number of details about the soldiers in question. These included physical descriptions - skin colours and marks and tattoos - and in some cases names or nicknames, which included ‘Batman’, ‘Nico’ and ‘Jean’. One of the alleged aggressors was described as a sniper posted on the roof of an airport building.
“When this story was revealed, what surprised people in Bangui was that it involved young boys, whereas young girls who are raped is common,” said the director of one NGO working in CAR, whose name is withheld. We have recently had accounts from several young girls aged between 12 and 15 who say they were raped by European soldiers, without being able to say whether this concerns the French of those from [editor’s note: the European Union rapid reaction force] EUFOR.”
Another representative of a large NGO, whose name is also withheld, who has this year spent several months in Bangui said she believed it was young girls who make up the majority of victims of sexual abuse, adding that a third of females who contacted her organization to complain of sexual violence were minors. “It is unfortunately a classic case of ‘food for sex’ that we frequently see in these situations,” she said.
'The head of the soldier’s unit smashed his face in'
A French journalist who had visited the M’Poko camp on several occasions in the first half of 2014, said she saw children selling French military rations which she described as a “frequent” sight in such circumstances. “But there were persistent rumours, which I have never heard elsewhere, about the fact that the rations were bought,” she said. “It kept coming up in conversations.”
“The relations between French soldiers and the camp’s population deteriorated very quickly, in just a few weeks. There was of course the tense political context between the [mostly Muslim] Séléka [rebel group] and their [mostly Christian] anti-balaka [militias] opponents, whom the French were considered too close to, but also personal issues between the refugees and the French troops who were frequently called ‘diamond thieves’. The atmosphere was truly unhealthy.”
Mediapart has been told by UNICEF that it carried out interviews with only six children complaining of sexual abuse. But three sources, from the United Nations and NGOs operating in CAR, insist that there are other recorded cases of sexual abuse of minors. “There are more children concerned than those in the report,” said one of the sources, whose name is withheld. “Georgian soldiers from EUFOR are also implicated after they took over control of the checkpoint at the entrance to the base from the French.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
When The Guardian revealed the evidence against the French soldiers last April, doubt was thrown on the children’s accounts by both the French army and sections of the French media. But both the OHCHR and UNICEF are well aware of the potential dangers of the presentation of false accounts from ‘contaminated witnesses’ who repeat what they have heard and not what they have experienced. UNICEF insists that its officials who led the questioning of the six boys were well trained in the exercise. Two officials working in the international aid sector who know the OHCHR official who led the interviews alongside her UNICEF colleagues have spoken of her high level of professionalism (contacted by Mediapart she declined to talk about the case).
It appears unlikely that, during the period beginning with the first of the reported cases, in December 2013, leading to the first accounts recorded in February and March 2014 and up until the UN officials’ interviews with the children in May and June 2014, the French military command in CAR remained unaware of the situation.
Officially, the French authorities learnt of the abuse accusations during the summer of 2014 after Anders Kompass, director of field operations for the OHCHR, handed the UN report to the French ambassador to Switzerland. However, a human rights specialist with a French NGO who has worked in CAR on several occasions says he was aware of an incident involving a French soldier who had given food to a young boy in exchange for fellatios, and that on one occasion the child was hurt during the sex act, and told his mother of what had happened. “She beat him and then went to the NGOs to complain,” said the rights specialist, speaking on, condition his name was withheld. “The head of the soldier’s unit learnt about it and smashed his face in. It was so violent that the soldier had to be repatriated to France.”
That account is of course hearsay, but it carries similarities with the details of the case of ‘Interview 3’ in the UN report of the testimonies of the boys its officials interviewed in May and June.
Meanwhile, Mediapart has been told by two well-placed sources - one who works for an international institution in CAR, and another who works for the OHCHR in Geneva – that, purely on the basis of discussions with international aid workers, they are convinced the French military command in CAR was aware of the abuse allegations well before the UN report was established.
'French magistrates sought sex with underage girls'
In a rare move, the UN in June revealed other suspected cases of child abuse by its peacekeepers in CAR, of which some had led to pregnancies. The contingent in question was not named, while news agency AFP quoted a UN source as indicating the troops were from an African nation.
“If the allegations are substantiated, this would constitute a grave violation of UN principles and of the code of conduct of peacekeepers,” said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric. The “member-state will be requested to take swift and appropriate punitive action”, he added. Punishing cases of abuse is the responsibility of the authorities of the country whose troops are found to be involved.
But a heavy tradition of silence runs deep. While the French authorities were made aware of the allegations against its troops in July 2014 at the latest, it took until The Guardian’s revelations in late April before Paris launched a criminal investigation into the matter. According to a source close to the French army’s high command, it has not been able to identify the some dozen soldiers implicated by the child witness accounts. One reason given for this is that some may have left active service. But another military source cast doubt on the suggestion. “The army keeps very precise records of who was manning the check point and when,” said the source. “It would suffice to take a careful study of all the names.”
More disturbingly, an official with an international organization in Bangui, whose name is withheld, claimed that “several French soldiers identified in the report remained in the central African Republic until the end of 2014”.
Operation Sangaris was mounted in a hurry, amid the urgency of preventing a potential genocide in CAR. “It is an operation of which the difficulties were underestimated by the operational leader in Paris, General Didier Castres,” said a defence source. “The officer placed at the head of the operation [in CAR], Francisco Soriano, is considered to be a good guy, but he became a general late on and he isn’t honed from what makes a chief-of-staff.”
Enlargement : Illustration 3
According to a number of journalists and aid workers who followed the deployment of the French forces in December 2013 and January 2014, the conditions were tough. This was true with the living conditions of troops (makeshift camps and cases of malaria), but also the order given to the troops that they were to engage combat only in self-defence. As a result, they were sometimes limited to firing into the air to try to quell incidents such as lynching.
“The French soldiers had no idea where they were,” recalled a French news photographer who followed the French army operations in the early months. “They disarmed the Séléka [Muslim rebel groups] leaving the way free for the anti-balaka [Christian militias] before realizing after a while that it was a mistake because the latter were making best of the situation.”
An aid worker who had accompanied French army missions in Bangui and the countryside said the troops were given “confusing orders” by a “wavering” chain of command. “The morale of the troops was very low, and their frustration was intense,” added the source. Another aid worker based in Bangui was more damning of the soldiers, describing them as “little gangsters without any respect for the local population”.
As of December 2013, the population at the refugee camp at M’Poko had rapidly swollen to a level that left aid organizations unable to cope properly. The French troops were caught in the tensions between displaced Muslims, suspected of being members of the séléka and the anti-balaka groups intent on hounding them. Another news photographer present there in the early months said there was widespread violence at the camp, with killings and criminal trafficking. The number of French soldiers who fell victim to post-traumatic stress after serving in CAR is one of the highest recorded in any recent French overseas military operation, affecting 12% of the some 2,000 troops present, according to the results of a French parliamentary enquiry made public earlier this year. That compared with 8% of those returning from France’s operation Pamir in Afghanistan.
The current French ambassador to CAR, Charles Malinas, was appointed to the post at the beginning of Operation Sangaris, in December 2013. It is his first post as ambassador, and his first mission in Africa. A former senior French foreign office source who has followed Malinas’ ascension through the diplomatic ranks gave a harsh, and clearly partial, description of him as “a bad guy” who began his career under former socialist foreign affairs minister (from 1988 to 1993) Roland Dumas “amid the worst of profiteering and twisted circles”.
The embassy’s second most ranking diplomat carries a reputation in Bangui for his overt relations with prostitutes, in whose company he is allegedly regularly seen around the capital. While there is no suggestion he is breaking local law, his alleged behaviour is viewed dimly by a number of French aid workers based in CAR.
Several months ago, the behaviour of a group of French magistrates sent on a mission to CAR moved a human rights specialist working at the time in Bangui to alert the French foreign affairs and justice ministries. “They sexually solicited numerous women, from the thirty-something white expatriate to the underage Central African kid,” said the rights worker. “In France, that would come under the terms of harassment or a sex crime, but in the Central African Republic they have a sense of total impunity. After I gave an oral report to the two ministries, they continued with their mission.”
The alleged incidents are reminiscent of colonial times but appear to still be regular practice in CAR, often resembling anything but a sovereign state. Two sources in CAR, one working for an ONG, the other in a intergovernmental organization, told Mediapart that they were convinced there was an attempt to cover up the scandal surrounding the French soldiers accused of sexually abusing children in order to prevent the exposure of other scandals involving foreigners in the country. They cited diamond trafficking, drug consumption and sex acts with minors.
Roland Marchal is a researcher with the international affairs research centre of the Paris School of Political Sciences (Sciences Po), CERI, and who is a specialist on CAR. “The international community has so integrated the fact that CAR is a catastrophe since a very long time that it believes it can no longer change anything,” he said. “It’s total fatalism.”
- Additional reporting by Agathe Duparc in Geneva and Lénaïg Bredoux in Paris.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse