World Day of Humanitarian Aid - Dramatic situation in the Central African Republic

On the occasion of the World Day of Humanitarian Aid, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) demands better protection for aid workers who provide help for civilians in armed conflicts. In addition, the human rights organization demanded that attacks on unarmed aid workers must be punished as crimes against humanity.

“Anyone who attacks aid workers of tries to systematically obstruct humanitarian aid is fueling hunger catastrophes – potentially causing the deaths of thousands of people, since aid workers have to suspend their work if the overall situation is not safe enough,” explained Ulrich Delius, the STP’s director, in Göttingen on Thursday. “The situation of the aid workers in the Central African Republic is especially dramatic. Apparently, there have been 202 attacks on members of aid organizations since January 2017. These acts of violence are an acute threat to about 2.4 million people who are dependent on international disaster relief.” In 2016, there were 137 attacks on aid workers in the country.

Most recently, on August 5, 2017, six Red Cross employees were murdered by the Seleka militia during a massacre of the civilian population of the village Gambo in the southeast of the republic. The helpers had stopped by at the hospital of Gambo to conduct a training course. A total number of 50 villagers – among them women and children – were strangled or shot.

The security situation in the Central African Republic has deteriorated dramatically during the last few years. The civil war has been going on since 2013. No one is safe, not even in the hospitals. In Zemio and Bangassou in the southeast of the country, armed fighters entered hospitals to kidnap patients. Their bodies were found later. Houses of worship don’t offer effective protection either: 2,000 Muslims who sought refuge in the Cathedral of Bangassou are now living in fear that the church will be attacked by hostile militiamen.

Two-thirds of the Central African Republic are no longer controlled by the regular army, but by armed militias – and the civilian population is regularly subjected to arbitrary violence as these groups tend to switch alliances quite often. In the past six months, 215,000 people have left their villages and cities. The number of internally displaced persons has reached a total of 440,000 people, and a further 480,000 people have sought refuge in the neighboring countries. Currently, about 20 percent of the five million inhabitants of Central Africa are on the run.

Header Photo: Julien Harneis via Flickr