Religious Rhetoric as a Cover

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Louisa Lombard is a Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. She first visited the Central African Republic in 2003 and has been studying the country since.

April 20, 2014

The anti-balaka Christian militias that have arisen in the Central African Republic since late 2013 frequently express their grievances in a religious idiom. They have destroyed mosques and called for all Muslims to leave the country. Until he was ousted in 2013, former President François Bozizé politicized religion in a new way, giving it new importance as a criterion in who to trust.

But even as someone who has been following those developments and warned that conflict was likely to escalate, I have been taken aback by how seemingly easily people have slipped into this rhetoric and violence. This is more indicative of the way that mass violence seems always to exceed its targets, and how national wars provide opportunities for more localized score-settling, than it is of Central Africa being on the brink of a religious war.

In their explanations of why they are fighting and whom they are targeting, the anti-balaka fighters are not entirely coherent. They are firm that theirs are political grievances, not religious: they are targeting the foreigners, the men-in-arms from the Chad and the Darfur borderlands, who have looted and attacked their country in conjunction with the last two coups (in 2003 and 2013), and who happen to be Muslim. Anti-balaka fighters’ actions exceed this narrow category of target, however. All Muslims in the southern and western parts of the country have been persecuted, and only a few still remain in the capital, where they are trapped in two small peacekeeper-protected zones. To better understand this slippage – from a narrow category of enemy to a broad one, and back – it is necessary to delve into other aspects of the targets’ identities besides their religion. Doing so reveals a mosaic of jealousy and mistrust and a range of festering, localized conflicts in a context of socio-economic duress.

For historical and social reasons, Muslims control the commercial sector in the Central African Republic, both market trading and the purchase of commodities like diamonds. Christians, meanwhile, control the state and see themselves as its fullest citizens. Muslims frequently have family and social networks that transcend the country’s borders. As a result, they accumulate money in ways that non-Muslims find suspicious. Many then fear Muslims are robbing them, one way or another. That’s one of the major sources of tension that has contributed to the recent violence. At the same time, over the past decade the Chadian president has effectively controlled the Central African statehouse, and as a result Chadian nationals have enjoyed near total impunity, both in the capital and in border areas, where Chadian soldiers have attacked Central African villages. That intervention has translated into anger and is another major source of tension. A third source of tension is the simmering conflicts between farmers and herders, whose cows sometimes destroy crops. Much of the early anti-balaka violence (balaka means machete in the local Sango language) targeted Peulh herders. The Peulh are an incredibly diverse group, and they include some of the most vulnerable and some of the most dangerous people in the region. Clashes between Peulh and farmers had been ongoing in recent years, and the anti-balaka mobilization provided new grounds to intensify those fights.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/04/20/is-religious-extremism-and-terrorism-spreading-in-central-africa/religious-rhetoric-serves-as-a-cover-for-central-african-disputes