Just briefly, Independent columnist Johann Hari has written a fascinating report exposing “France’s secret war“.
A country most people have never heard of – the Central African Republic – has been brutalised for generations by French-backed despots, apparently with the intention of securing its rich natural assets for French companies.
Earlier this year, the French military bombed the remote city of Birao, in attacks which failed to attract any attention in Europe.
He writes: “To get here, you have to travel for eight hours on a solitary UN flight that leaves once a week, carrying eight passengers at most, and then ride on the back of a rusting flat-top truck for an hour along ravaged and broken roads. It is hard to know when you have arrived, because you are greeted by emptiness and silence. What has happened here?
“…As Mahmoud and Idris talk into the night, it is getting dark, and a suffocating blackness and silence falls on the city. There is no electricity and no moonlight. They explain in this blackness that the French-backed troops began firing and the French military began bombing in March for one reason: the desperate locals had begun to rise up against President Bozize, because he had done nothing for them. People here were tired of the fact “there are no schools, no hospitals, and no roads,” they explain. “We are completely isolated. When it rains, we are cut off from the world because the roads turn to mud. We have nothing. All the rebels were asking was for government help.”
Why is it that the bombing and exploitation of some countries attracts the attention of peace and human rights campaigners, yet other nations just don’t seem to register?
Is it because CAR is in Africa, and there are so many troubled countries on that continent that people subconsciously switch off? Is it because they are brown? or poor? or more disenfranchised than some other countries because they are so much less developed?
Who knows, but I’m troubled that I’ve only heard about what’s happening there so very late.