Etienne Guinot picks up a blue plastic bag, pulls out a dead snake, and holds it up in the air. “If it bites, it will kill you,” he warns, rubbing its rough, spotted skin between his fingers.
In Fondo, a Bangui neighbourhood, the snakes are everywhere these days: hanging in the trees, crawling in the grass, and hiding in large piles of dust and rubble where people’s homes once stood.
They began to arrive shortly after Guinot and his neighbours were forced to flee the Central African Republic capital on 5 December 2013. On that day, large-scale killings of Christians and Muslims were under way. Those communities are now returning to their abandoned homes with trepidation.
The slaughter was carried out by the Séléka – a predominantly Muslim coalition of rebel groups that took control of the country nine months earlier in a coup – and the rival anti-balaka, a loose network of largely Christian self-defence militias that emerged in response.
Along with his family, Guinot, a Christian, sought refuge at Bangui M’Poko airport, where he lived for four years under the protection of French soldiers and the United Nations.
The camp, which catered for more than 100,000 people at its peak, became the defining image of the CAR crisis, with internally displaced people (IDPs) living in squalor beside the runway of an international airport.
Since December last year, the government has been in the process of closing it. While few IDPs interviewed by IRIN say they will miss living in M’Poko, the decision has left thousands of vulnerable people unsure where to go and what to do.
Like Guinot, many of M’Poko’s residents are Christians who used to live in and around Bangui’s third district, which also contains the city’s last remaining Muslim neighbourhood, PK5.
When violence swept through Bangui in 2013, displaced Muslims moved into PK5, and the majority of Christians left. In subsequent weeks, fighters from the Séléka set about destroying thousands of Christian homes in the surrounding area using grenades, steel poles, and their own feet.
Before the conflict, Guinot owned three homes: one for his daughter, one for his son, and one for himself. In 2013, all of them were destroyed.
Since he returned on 29 January, his family has lived together in an abandoned house next door, with no roof, no windows, and no front door. At night, four share a foam mattress with chunks missing in a 2x2 meter room covered by a UNHCR (UN refugee agency) tarpaulin: the rest sleep outside.
“It’s very difficult,” says Guinot. “We have no house and no food to eat. My grandson, my children: we can’t support them.”
"We think the security situation has improved and we want people to go home"
Compared to CAR’s provinces, which are largely controlled by armed groups, some semblance of normality has returned to Bangui over the past year. Elections in February 2016 passed off peacefully and a large UN peacekeeping force – the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) – remains in place.
“After the election, we think the security situation has improved and we want people to go home and do their best to bring stability and peace,” says Juliana Yodiam, head of humanitarian action at CAR’s Ministry for Social Affairs.
But Muslim and Christian communities have not lived together in significant numbers in Bangui since the conflict began, and nobody seems to know whether they are ready to now.
Since 2014, Arsene Djamba Gassy has been working on social cohesion projects in the third district with the English NGO Conciliation Resources. He says people are generally “tired of violence” and have no “fundamental problems” with each other, but argues that previous approaches to social cohesion failed to tackle underlying grievances by focusing on pre-packaged solutions over community-lead projects.
“For example, one activity would be bringing young Christians and Muslims together for a football match,” says Gassy. “After that, everyone would go home. For a father that has lost his son, has he got a solution through this football match? This is what was done for the past two years.”
While leaders of various Séléka factions left PK5 for the bush in August last year, citing frustration with the country’s programme for disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR), armed “self-defence” groups remain active in the area.
“They are less organised,” says François Hericher, deputy country director for French NGO ACTED, but “more prone to criminality”.
Who’s in control?
Down a dusty side street in PK5, Matar Anemeri, alias “Force”, sits around a table in camouflage fatigues with a pistol tied to a thick red rope around his neck.
His eyes are bloodshot and his voice is deep and gruff. The 36-year-old, who was once a member of the Central African Armed Forces (FACA), became a rebel in 2003 when former president François Bozizé took power in a coup. Later, he joined the Séléka, and today he leads a self-defence group based in the south and southwestern part of PK5.
Despite drinking heavily, Anemeri says he wants peace and access to the government’s DDR programme.
To prove his point, he has invited Judicael Moganazou, a former fighter and current spokesperson of Maxim Mokom, a leading member of the anti-balaka, to the table for a joint interview. Previously, that would have been an unthinkable gesture in a country where ex-Séléka factions and anti-balaka groups continue to clash on an almost daily basis.
Asked about the communities returning home, Anemeri says he sends out patrol cars at night to protect “Christians against bad people among us”, something Moganazou nods along to enthusiastically. Shakedowns by armed men on Muslim traders in PK5 don’t bode well, however. And, in a moment of humility, Anemeri admits he cannot control the 500 armed men he says work for him (a recent report by the UN Panel of Experts monitoring CAR indicates that number is far less).
Anemeri admits he cannot control the 500 armed men he says work for him.
“It doesn’t matter if you have 500 people under you or 1,000 people,” he says. “If you don’t have money to pay them, how can you control them? If they feel hungry, you don’t know what they can do.”
Fear of PK5’s armed groups grips many returnees interviewed by IRIN. After three years living in M’Poko, Benedithe Ngoimon, also from Fondo, says she is nervous about being home. Having a house built with rusty, corrugated metal and a worn-out plastic sheet certainly doesn’t help.
“Yesterday night, I heard a gunshot nearby,” she says. “I thought that maybe we will have to return to the camp.”
Before IDPs left M’Poko, NGOs said they wanted to see significant investment in the neighbourhoods of return. The population of PK5, for example, had already grown significantly during the crisis with the arrival of displaced Muslims from elsewhere.
With new communities now returning in a context of material scarcity – there are huge gaps in water provision, waste treatment, healthcare, and education – some say conditions for conflict are already present.
“The government [is] making sure people leave the site but [it has] no strategy for what happens next,” says one NGO worker, who asks not to be named but has been involved in months of negotiations with the government over M’Poko. “If there is no increase in social services, it could create tensions within the population.”
How many IDPs actually return to the third district given this situation remains to be seen. According to Sahdia Khan, emergency coordinator at the International Organization for Migration, experience suggests many will go elsewhere.
“A lot of people had left [M’Poko] before, but they return to areas that are safe,” she says.
The number of IDPs returning on this occasion is far larger, with 15 of 30 other IDP camps in the capital also having closed. Even if many pick other sites in Bangui, Khan accepts “this is a new situation”.
Nothing is constant
To help IDPs leave M’Poko, the government has given individuals and families between 80 and 160 euros. But administrative problems, including officials writing names down incorrectly, had prevented dozens of IDPs interviewed by IRIN from receiving anything.
Those that did get their money also say it is too little. Guinot’s neighbour, 48-year-old Melanie Ouagram, returned to Fondo on 26 January with 80 euros in her pocket. A week later, she has nothing. The money has all gone on paying off debts and buying bricks and food.
With no husband to help bring in money – he was shot and killed by ex-Séléka fighters on 5 December – Ouagram can only afford school fees for two of her six children.
“If someone gives you only this money, it means you have been abandoned,” she says.
Help is on hand from some NGOs. To date, ACTED has helped reconstruct 1,300 homes through a system that allows IDPs to buy materials worth around $200 and build for themselves.
“The objective of the project is to give IDPs autonomy so that when they come back, their house hasn’t been built by an NGO,” says Hericher, while taking IRIN on a tour of Boeing, a neighbourhood just outside the third district.
“We give them [training], tools, and explain how the house is built, so that when we leave they will be able to continue building.”
But Bangui remains a fragile place, Hericher admits. In 2015, ACTED helped reconstruct almost 900 houses for displaced people. When violence erupted again that September following the murder of a 17-year-old Muslim taxi driver, all 900 were destroyed.
“It’s a good reminder,” underlines Hericher, pointing towards an entire neighbourhood of gutted buildings in the distance. “Everything can change from one day to the next”.
The once-fertile fields of South Africa’s Western Cape region are filled with scorched patches of earth, dying plants, and wasted crops.
The scene is now common throughout eastern and southern Africa, as droughts for three consecutive years have decimated crops and caused widespread hunger. New research indicates that it is partly due to climate change driven by human action, which has worsened the El Niño weather phenomenon.
“This is about as bad as it has ever been,” said Chris Harvey, as he walked to his farm´s irrigation dam, where the water level has fallen six metres in 10 months.
“We might not be able to grow any vegetables next year,” his wife Sue added.
Dams in the area are drying out, symptomatic of the continent´s battle with years of poor rainfall. The droughts in eastern and southern Africa beginning in 2015 have affected tens of millions of people. The latest numbers from the UN suggest that 24 million people are facing food insecurity in eastern Africa alone, not counting millions of people in the southern region.
According to a new study published by the American Meteorological Society, such conditions will become increasingly normal as climate change takes its toll.
“We are advising governments to expect yearly disasters, droughts, floods, and also now diseases,” David Phiri, the UN´s food and agriculture coordinator in Southern Africa, told IRIN.
No surprise
In South Africa, dams are down to 37 percent capacity, according to the government. Farmers say that actually means 27 percent in practical terms.
“The last 10 percent are unusable,” said Harvey. “It´s been lying too long on the bottom.”
Researchers associated with the United States Geological Survey found that man-made climate change contributed to the 2015/2016 droughts and most likely to the reduced “short rains”, a second rainy season that usually occurs at this time of year in southern Africa.
Their research, published in the American Meteorological Society’s December bulletin, explains how man-made climate change worsened El Niño.
The phenomenon occurs naturally every several years as a patch of warm water appears in the Pacific Ocean, which can lead to weather fluctuations including unseasonably dry periods. It is often followed by La Niña, which is associated with below average ocean temperatures and can lead to weather impacts that are opposite to El Niño.
Lead researcher Chris Funk, a professor at University of Santa Barbara, described in an interview how the oceans warm due to climate change, and very warm surface temperatures develop in pockets of the sea. These warm patches often increase the impact of natural climate variations that accompany El Niño, which can intensify droughts in food insecure areas.
For Africa, increases of about 0.9 degrees in both sea temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and air temperatures in eastern and southern Africa have meant reduced rainfall.
“Our research shows that man-made climate change is making the impacts of both El Niño and La Niña climate variations stronger in Africa – meaning what we´ve seen in the last 18 months,” said Funk.
Although climate change alone did not cause the drought, it certainly made it stronger, according to Funk.
The study has yet to be reviewed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the leading expert body on climate change and does not comment on research until it is reviewed.
Richard Washington, a climate science professor at Oxford University, said he agreed with the findings overall, although he cautioned that they were based on “linear” research. “One limitation is for example: how does the Indian Ocean influence climate El Niño?”
Peter Lykke Lind/IRIN
Chris Harvey says the river came up to the top of the stick only 10 months ago. His irrigation dam now sits six metres below normal level.
Worst drought in decades
The UN has labelled it “the worst drought in 35 years” in southern Africa. . Almost 580,000 children are in need of treatment for severe acute malnutrition, and more than three million children have reduced access to safe drinking water.
“We estimate that more than 40 million people will be affected by food insecurity until March,” said Phiri, the UN food and agriculture coordinator. “Crops from last year are gone, and no new crops are ready.”
The UN is targeting 13.8 million people in southern Africa alone for humanitarian assistance during the peak of the lean season, which lasts until April. The worst-hit countries – Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe – are being specifically targeted by the World Food Programme.
David Orr, a spokesman for the WFP in southern Africa, sees positive short-term signs, as rainfalls have started again. But he still expects more frequent and more intense extreme weather events in the near future. Those include “drought and flooding as a result of upsets in the global weather system”, he said.
“If extended weather events of this kind, covering several cropping seasons, become more frequent, they’ll have devastating consequences for millions of poor and vulnerable people,” said Orr.
The situation on Harvey’s farm indicates the extent of the crisis.
“We have got 10 weeks, then we run out of water,” said Harvey. “Hopefully it will rain in at Easter, but if it does not, then we have a serious problem. There will not be enough water for the crops.”
As he walked up the dry bank of his shrinking dam, looking hopefully at the cloudless sky, he emphasised how this not only concerns the individual farmer: “What is on the line here, are thousands and thousands of jobs. It is a lot of people´s livelihoods we are talking about here, not just a few people and their crops.”
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(TOP PHOTO: Fields in the Western Cape region are parched. CREDIT: Peter Lind/IRIN)
