‘Russians Control Everything’
As an unmarked Russian armored truck came barreling toward us, sending mud flying, Yves Oueama, our driver, swerved sharply to the right. “The Wagner wagons never give way,” he said. “If you don’t get out of their path, you’re done.”
The road, a track really, traced a reddish line through the forest from Bria toward Bambari, 130 miles southwest. That journey takes two or three days, and Russia’s sprawling gold mine at Ndassima — whose reserves were described as “huge” by Western diplomats in Bangui — lies between the two towns.
“The Russians control everything,” said Abdoul Aziz Sali, a mining economist, noting that Wagner had set up companies to exploit the region for diamonds, gold and timber. “They are arrogant and violent. When they come to a meeting, they do not even sit down.”
Ibrahima Dosso, the head of the U.N. World Food Program office in Bria, oversees the vast camp where tens of thousands of people who have fled war are housed in makeshift shacks, reliant on the mission’s distribution of food and, once every two months, about $50 in cash. Electricity comes only from generators, water only from wells.
Along the road to Bambari, men trudged toward distant fields carrying machetes. Women in fabrics of blazing color bore baskets of plantain.
In this area, and in Bria itself, Wagner forces, who are based in the former offices of a diamond-buying authority, are an unpredictable presence.
Mr. Dosso rarely leaves his office, but on this day, accompanied by a Zambian MINUSCA unit providing protection, he headed out to a village called Ngoubi and invited me along. A truck carried beans, cooking oil and U.S.A.I.D. rice in 110-pound sacks emblazoned with the stars and stripes.
The people of the village gathered as the sacks were laid out on a blue tarpaulin. Before receiving their handouts, men signed a list by pressing their forefingers dipped in blue ink; women used red. Close to two-thirds of Central Africans are illiterate.
Lucienne Wapi, 48, a mother of 12, said it was a struggle to find enough to eat and hard to sleep. She held a grandson, whose stomach was bloated from hunger. I asked if there was peace in the area.
“Peace is not just the absence of war,” she said. “If I do not eat or sleep well, it means I am not at peace.”
The town of Bria tails off into a refugee camp that is a seething shantytown of one-room structures spread over the hills. Pigs feed on garbage as women tress the hair of their little ones.
Most of the people, still afraid to return to the land they fled, have been here several years.
Fidelia Nafara, 15, was carrying her 9-month-old baby. She lives with her parents and siblings, eight to a single room. They fled a village 70 miles away in 2014. The father of her child is Muslim, and he disappeared after her own father, who is Christian, threatened him.
Wandering around the miserable camp, with its crude latrines and stinking garbage, I thought of the millions of Ukrainians who have fled Russia’s unprovoked war into the arms of a wealthy European continent that thought war was behind it.
No place is immune to the war in Ukraine. But nor, in much of the world, does it take center stage as in the West.
When only 6 percent of rural homes have sanitation and less than half of children have a birth certificate, the suffering of others pales.
The war in Ukraine has changed many things, but not the fact that when people must think of their stomachs, they think of little else.
A French Withdrawal
The French Embassy in Bangui is set on sprawling grounds beside the Oubangui River. This is prime real estate, but behind coils of razor wire, the embassy is an embattled place. Last year, a mysterious fire broke out on the top floor, destroying an eighth of the building. This year, Jean-Marc Grosgurin, the French ambassador, canceled the traditional July 14 Bastille Day party because of threats from pro-Russia youth movements.
France this month completed the withdrawal of all of its forces from the Central African Republic. Six years ago, they numbered more than 1,600.
Asked about this decision, the French Ministry of the Armed Forces sent a statement blaming Central African authorities for choosing to work with a “nonstate actor, the Wagner Group, that regularly commits violence and abuses toward the civilian population and is a for-profit enterprise whose business model is based on the plundering of local resources.”
At Western embassies, there is intense concern that Mr. Touadéra will allow Wagner mercenaries to take control of the international airport, which had been protected by the last 130 French troops. For now, MINUSCA forces are guarding the airport.
Toward the end of my stay, I drove about 50 miles southwest to the sprawling Berengo military camp, an estate with an airstrip that used to belong to the Bokassa family. The former president is buried there, but his grave cannot be visited by family members because Mr. Touadéra has handed the property to the Wagner Group. Small planes fly in and out, carrying Russian booty.
I stopped at the gate and asked a Central African guard if I might go in. He opened the gate. A Russian, his face masked to his pale eyes by a balaclava, stepped out brandishing an automatic rifle. When I inquired about the Bokassa grave, he used the rifle to motion me away angrily and ducked back inside.
The gate slammed. Russia does not want prying eyes on its unconventional invasions in Africa.
A Constitutional Referendum
The Russian attempt to overturn the Central African Constitution — in effect an attempt to reproduce in the Central African Republic what Mr. Putin has contrived for himself in Russia — gradually bore fruit after the meeting with Ms. Darlan in March. In late August, Mr. Touadéra announced he had formed a committee to draft a new Constitution because “so many people have raised their voices to demand it.”
But he had underestimated Ms. Darlan.
On Sept. 23, the Constitutional Court ruled unanimously that the presidential decrees creating the committee were “unconstitutional and invalid.” Mr. Touadéra could not disavow the words of his own oath of office in which he swore not to extend his presidency beyond the two-term limit. With no Senate sitting because of postponed elections, such a procedure was unlawful.
The ruling provoked fury against Ms. Darlan from Mr. Touadéra’s supporters who, through the Russian-controlled Radio Lengo Songo and various social media outlets, called protesters to the streets.
Ms. Darlan told me she had met with the president a week before the court’s ruling. “I asked him, ‘Why such precipitation when you still have more than three years in office?’ The president said he did not understand himself, but the people were in a great hurry. He looked at me and said, ‘How do you want me to stop this now?’”
The initiative was difficult to stop, of course, because Moscow had demanded it, Western diplomats and officials said.
The Russian Embassy, in a written statement transmitted through the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, confirmed that Mr. Migunov had met with Ms. Darlan in March. It said that “he never discussed the issue of presidential mandates with her,” but gave no indication as to why else he might have requested a meeting.
On Oct. 25, in what she called a “grotesque” maneuver, Ms. Darlan, whose term was to run to 2024, was ousted. The government argued that she was no longer qualified to head the Constitutional Court. Radio Bangui broadcast her dismissal as she arrived at her office.
Three days later, Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, issued a statement saying the United States “notes with deep concern” the “removal” of Ms. Darlan. “Judicial independence is a central tenet of democracy,” he said.
It was a rare intervention. The United States, which pays about 25 percent of MINUSCA’s operating costs, and for the bulk of the vast quantities of humanitarian aid that go to the Central African Republic, has taken a generally low-key approach to Wagner’s predations in the country, in line with the quiet realpolitik of much of the Biden administration’s foreign policy.
This month, two senators, Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, and Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, introduced a bill to designate Wagner a terrorist group, citing, among others things, the trafficking and raping of women in the Central African Republic. In response, Mr. Prigozhin issued a statement, saying, “We have never crossed the boundaries of what is permitted.”
Russia, through Wagner, is clearly determined to consolidate its power. Western diplomats say that the Wagner presence has shrunk since the Ukraine War — as some have been sent to fight — yet Russia’s grip on the country remains firm. Planning for the constitutional referendum is underway.
Mathias Moruba, the head of the National Elections Authority, and Charles Lemasset, the official responsible for the technology controlling the voting process, were invited to Russia for a week of instruction on electoral procedures in October.
“It is not very subtle,” said Ms. Darlan, who is being protected by U.N. peacekeepers after threats to her life.
When the referendum will be held is not clear, but its outcome seems as certain as the referendums held recently in the four Ukraine regions that Mr. Putin annexed. Elections yield only one result in the Putin-controlled world that Ukraine is fighting to defeat.
“Blood will flow,” Mr. Bokassa predicted.
“All this is dangerous,” Ms. Darlan said. “Because if you look at our history, adventures like this have never ended well.”
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