Welcome to Bangui the capital of the Central African Republic, for the past two years the country has been torn apart by a violent religious conflict that has seen the Muslim Séléka and Christian Anti-balaka militias pitted against each other. The Séléka is a coalition of predominantly Muslim armed groups from the North-East who seized power back in March of 2013, they committed mass atrocities against the population indiscriminate of religion.
As a result of this Christians took up arms in order to form self defence groups called the Anti-balaka and began carrying out revenge killings against Muslims. Regional superstition and animist rituals are a big element of the Anti-balakas identity. They believe that through the use of black magic they can not only stop bullets but defy death in combat.
Despite the presence of a UN peace keeping mission and a French military operation the transitional government hasn’t yet been able to gain control of the country outside of Bangui. Vice News return to the region to try and understand the roots of this ongoing and brutal conflict.
It’s horrifying how quickly these conflicts escalate, especially when religion gets weaponized. Makes you wonder how much of it is truly about faith and how much is just a power grab exploiting existing tensions. On a related note, when I was working on a paper about conflict zones, I needed to properly reference several reports on the CAR. Thank goodness for that APA citation generator – saved me a ton of time!
It’s horrifying how quickly conflicts like the one in CAR can become cycles of revenge. The way religion and tribal beliefs get twisted to justify violence is especially disturbing. Speaking of dealing with different image formats online, I recently needed to convert some images I found documenting the conflict, and I found a WebP to PNG converter super handy for compatibility.