CAR rebels vow to resist, will allow relief mission
Nov 4, 2006 (DAKAR) — Rebels who are holding a remote town in northeast Central African Republic vowed on Saturday to resist any government counter-attack, but said they would allow humanitarian workers to travel to the zone.
Central African Republic’s government says the armed raiders who seized Birao in the Vakaga prefecture on Monday crossed from neighbouring Sudan’s violence-torn Darfur region and included Sudanese and Chadian fighters as well as Central Africans.
President Francois Bozize’s administration has protested to Khartoum and is calling for international peacekeepers to be deployed in the border zone to help contain what it portrays as a dangerous spillover from the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur.
In media interviews since Monday, a group calling itself the Union of Democratic Forces for Unity (UFDR by its French initials), which describes itself as a coalition of three anti-Bozize forces, has claimed the capture of Birao.
Its leaders told Reuters they had asked West and Central African presidents to persuade Bozize to negotiate a political settlement with them in Central African Republic, a former French colony which is one of the world’s poorest nations.
But they said UFDR fighters would resist any move by his army to expel them from Birao, which lies more than 800 km (500 miles) northeast of Bangui in a remote area of bush and marshland which at the moment can only be reached by air.
“Like any rebellion, our objective is to obtain power … We consider Mr. Bozize is not in a condition to run the Central African Republic,” said UFDR’s president, Michel Djotodia, speaking by telephone from the West African state of Benin.
UFDR spokesmen accuse Bozize, a former army chief who seized power in 2003 and then won 2005 elections, of ruling Central African Republic like a personal fiefdom, favouring his family and Gbaya ethnic group to the detriment of other citizens.
Bozize’s government has not responded to the rebels’ call for talks, but has asked former colonial power France and regional allies like Chad for military assistance.
FRANCE URGED TO SUPPORT REGIME
The Central African Republic’s parliament has called on the international community and France in particular to aid it against rebels who have seized a northern town.
“We the elected representatives of the nation condemn with force this repreated violation of the integrity of the Central African territory,” parliamentarian Christophe Ndouba, speaking on behalf of the assembly, said in a radio address Saturday.
The assembly called on the world and especially on “France, our traditional partner, to support the CAR in its search for peace and and its territorial integrity.”
HUMANITARIAN NEEDS
Another UFDR spokesman, Capt. Abakar Sabone, a former comrade in arms of Bozize, said government forces were gathering at Bambari, northeast of Bangui, to launch a counterattack.
“If there’s a military solution, we’re ready,” Djotodia said, adding the UFDR had vehicles and weapons.
Foreign military experts doubt the government’s small 4,500-strong army can retake Birao without outside help. But they add the town’s remoteness means the rebels do not appear able to seriously threaten the capital Bangui in the south.
Sabone and Djotodia said the UFDR was willing to allow international humanitarian organisations to send a mission to Birao to assess the needs of its 30,000 population.
“What is most urgently needed is medical supplies,” Sabone said, adding people had enough food. He denied government accusations that they had killed and harmed civilians.
The rebel spokesmen said the previously-unknown UFDR was formed in September in the Rwandan capital Kigali.
Sudan’s government, which is resisting the deployment of a U.N. force in Darfur, has rejected charges by Bozize that it armed and sent the UFDR rebels to Birao.
(Reuters/agencies)