The February meeting in Bangui of foreign ministers from the Great Lakes Region was to finalise arrangements for a Heads of State summit due to be held in Nairobi in September this year. This will be the second Heads of State summit since the inaugural one in Dar es Salaam in 2004. Bangui was the third ministerial-level GLR meeting after previous ones held in Kigali and Lusaka.
There have also been several other GLR-related meetings in cities across the region. Bangui's meeting was chaired by Tanzanian Foreign Minister Asha-Rose Migiro. Kenya was represented by Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Danson Mungatana.
The GLR initiative was initially established as a conflict-resolution mechanism in the wake of the turmoil in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Backing the initiative is a joint UN-African Union secretariat together with a so-called Group of Friends of donor countries represented by Canada and Netherlands.
The membership comprises Angola, Burundi, CAR, DRC, Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. The members have been working on a draft pact on security, stability and development which will be adopted at the upcoming Nairobi summit.
That the Central African Republic is not used to much high-level traffic by foreign official delegations is easy to tell. When the 3rd ministerial meeting of the International Conference for the Great Lakes Region convened in the CAR capital of Bangui on February 20-22, it rated top billing in the country.
Gen Francois Bozize, the President, presided over the opening ceremony, which was held at the National Assembly buildings although the meetings took place at the Oubangui Hotel, the capital's leading establishment.
Poor logistics and communications infrastructure, not to mention limited accommodation of a certain standard, preclude the CAR from being part of the lucrative international conferencing circuit, a point officials there humbly acknowledge.
That much was evident by the choice of Yaounde, in neighbouring Cameroon, to host an international donor conference on the CAR that was held coincidentally at the same time. Organised by the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the conference deliberated on a $46 million OCHA plea to assist CAR cope with a severe crisis of refugees and internally displaced persons.
It would have looked mean-spirited if the GLR conference had side-stepped the CAR. Like its giant southern neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the CAR is among the Great Lakes countries that have been devastated by conflict, and conflict resolution, after all, is the raison d'etre of the international conference.
One year after election
The meeting was being held exactly one year after the presidential elections of 2005, when the country hopefully marked the start of a new era. Gen. Bozize, for one, welcomed the conference as an encouraging prod in his country's efforts towards normalcy and stability. It is, indeed, going to be an uphill road.
Prominently displayed within the lobby of the Hotel d'Centre in Bangui is a photomontage of Gen Bozize alongside Nelson Mandela. The picture, like many things about the CAR, elicits a sad feeling. Explaining it in the familiar terms of a nondescript leader seeking to be equated with greatness misses the point.
CAR has never much attracted attention beyond its borders. Grafting itself onto Mandela allows the visitor to go home with a comforting image, somehow. For the locals, it lets them savour a feeling of being part of a bigger, more consequential world.
Frankly, the former French colony once known as Ubangi-Shari is of little strategic importance to the outside world. Located in the geographic centre of Africa, it is a landlocked country of approximately 3.5 million inhabitants, roughly the same as Nairobi. Having gained independence in 1960, CAR has had limited experience of democratic institutions, which is frequently punctuated by coups and mutinies. It has also experienced recurrent, and sometimes unwelcome, interventions by external powers, specifically France.
Gen Bozize, the current supremo, is as little-known as the country he leads. But from various accounts of visitors who have met him, including Kenya's Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs Danson Mungatana, he doesn't fit the cliche of brutality familiar with the soldiers-turned-politicians who have in the past run rampant in the CAR. Donors seem to agree, as the helping hand extended from the Yaounde conference indicated.
It is only now that CAR is struggling to reconstruct after a decade of civil and military unrest. The genesis of the crisis was a spate of army mutinies in 1996 that were sparked off by non-payment of salaries to soldiers who were not in the elite Presidential Guard. But underneath the unrest was a polarised political climate as well as simmering ethnic rivalries in the military that were getting out of control. The then President, Ange-Felix Patasse, a veteran populist with an unfortunate penchant for deep intrigue, added fuel to the fire by peremptorily sacking the army commander and replacing him with a junior officer from his tribe. As fate would have it, the sacked commander was none other than Gen Bozize, the present President.
The CAR problem actually dates back to an economic catastrophe that befell it when the regional CFA currency was severely devalued in 1994. An IMF stand-by programme was further withdrawn the following year over mismanagement and corruption. Petroca, the national oil company, was unable to pay its taxes to the state, depriving the government of a significant revenue resource. Defaults on public sector wage payments started becoming routine, and that's how the soldiers got involved.
There were three army mutinies in 1996 that followed each other in quick succession. The first was ignited when a regiment dominated by soldiers from the Yakoma tribe broke out of their Kassai camp near Bangui as the Presidential Guard, with French backing, struggled to restore calm. The standoff ignited wider civil disturbances, and Patasse, who had been elected President in 1993 when multipartism was legalised, made a bad situation worse by banning public demonstrations.
Subsequent problems with the soldiers followed with the controversial transfer of the armoury from the army's Camp Kassai base to the Presidential Guard's Camp de Roux base, and the denial of amnesty to the mutineers.
It was French intervention which saved Patasse's government. The intervention, through Legionnaires flown in from Gabon and Chad, may have been militarily critical, but it was costly politically. Rather than quell the public protests, it sparked more of them. The French venture was so unpopular that when Patasse faced another coup in 2001, he had to rely on Libyan troops and Congolese rebel forces to fight it back.
Something quite significant resulted from this imbroglio. Confronted by the hostile public sentiment in Bangui, and with a change of guard to the Socialist administration of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, France effected a major rethink of its CAR policy by closing down two long-standing French military bases in the CAR.
Proliferation of French troops
The present-day proliferation of French troops in Bangui suggests this French disengagement was temporary, though one supposes the heavy-handed mode of intervention of yester-years is out of the question today.
The echoes of conflict are everywhere: the bombed out and abandoned buildings in the capital city; the armed soldiers who crawl all over the place. Official visitors are advised, not without some insistence by the protocol office, on which hotel they will be booked (there are only three or so passable hotels in Bangui). Presumably, this is for the guests' own security. Soldiers and gendarmerie are stationed outside round the clock. They occasionally will stroll into the hotel front office, perhaps to verify that those on the hotel guest list are the ones who should be there.
The Hotel Oubangui, which goes as the classiest establishment in the capital, is a rather seedy and run-down place, far from top star-rating. Right behind the hotel at a river frontage is a military secured area. A sharp sign warns hotel guests not to stroll beyond that point. Armed soldiers saunter about.
Bangui city sits on the northern bank of the expansive Oubangui river, which forms the CAR's border with the DRC. From the city, the river suddenly bends and flows slowly southwards to drain into the giant River Congo, which is second in the world only to the Amazon in terms of the volume of water it pours into the sea. This is the fabled Congo rainforest ecosystem, covering many countries including the DRC, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Cameroon and CAR itself. It is a land of fabulous natural wealth where almost anything is to be found beneath and above the ground: gold, iron ore, uranium, manganese, tin, copper as well as valuable hardwoods like mahogany and ebony.
Being part of this ecosystem, CAR is not without natural resources; but you won't know it if you stick to the debilitating poverty its people suffer. There is the precious rainforest timber. And then there are the alluvial diamonds, so named because they can literally be plucked from river beds. These two form the CAR's main exports. All of which add up to a miserly per capita of $300.
Poverty amidst this sea of abundance
Bad governance, of course, is at the root of the country's poverty amidst this sea of abundance. Misplaced priorities, too, mean that the country is spending dearly on a spanking new sports stadium in Bangui rather than improve its transport network to Douala in Cameroon, CAR's vital export outlet. Or cheaper still, the Oubangui waterway can be developed to channel goods through the River Congo.
Most of the CAR's foreign trade is with France and Belgian, and naturally companies from there are heavily involved in the extraction of the country's resources.
The infrastructure is a nightmare, and central to the problem of extending law and order is the problem of weak communication networks. Outside Bangui city, the tarmac all but ceases. Telephone communications are extremely spotty in the countryside. Internet cafes are a rarity, even in Bangui. To fly to the city you have to go via Douala, or N'Djamena in Chad. The only international airline that has regular flights there is Air France. It flies in once in a week.
Everybody speaks Sango, an indigenous tongue otherwise associated with the southern Sango tribe, which is the national lingua franca. French is the official language.
Politically, the CAR sits in a bad neighbourhood. With the exception of Cameroon, all its immediate neighbours - the DRC, Congo-Brazzaville, Sudan and Chad - have had violent convulsions of their own. As a result, impoverished CAR hosts over 30,000 refugees (many of them from south-west Sudan). A roughly equal number of CAR refugees are to be found in neighbouring countries, most of them in Chad. In addition, there are about 200,000 internally displaced persons in the country. For a country with only 3.5 million people, this is an uncomfortably high proportion indeed.
In the public imagination, CAR is invariably connected to one Jean-Bedel Bokassa, a one-time army sergeant with a debilitating Napoleonic complex. Being made famous because of the exploits of such a fellow is one of the things that forces the visitor to take pity on the CAR. The story of how Bokassa crowned himself "Emperor" in a ceremony that virtually bankrupted the destitute state is well remembered. Less known is how in the 70s he passed "gifts" (bribes in other words) of diamonds to certain French political worthies in what became a scandal that rocked the highest levels of France's political establishment.
Overthrew the 'Emperor'
Bokassa's undoing came when his gendarmerie shot into a crowd of demonstrating school-children. It was France that soon after organised the coup - in 1979 - that overthrew the "Emperor," and it was France that airlifted to Bangui a recycled President, David Dacko, a cousin of Bokassa.
French intrigues in CAR were indeed a wonder to behold. Dacko led the CAR into independence after the death by natural causes of the country's beloved nationalist leader, Barthelemy Boganda. A coup in 1966 that had French backing overthrew this same Dacko and brought in Bokassa.
One of the sights in Bangui is Bokassa's empty palace. It sits on a hill overlooking the river Oubangui, abandoned and derelict.
Dacko's second spell in power was short-lived; in 1981 he was overthrown in a bloodless coup by Gen Andre Kolingba. The new strongman sought to transform himself into a civilian president, launching a political party and a new constitution in 1986. In 1991, mounting public pressure forced Kolingba to agree to a multi-party system.
The multi-party elections called in 1992 were cancelled due to serious irregularities, but in a repeat of the polls the following year, Patasse won a decisive victory, which he repeated in 1999. The rivalry (and hatred) between two men - Kolingba and Patasse - defined CAR politics throughout the 90s. Both of them now live in exile.
Despite Patasse coming to power through a democratic process, he soon turned out to be a divisive and vengeful figure, as his subsequent problems with the army and civilian groups attested. In 2001, pro-Kolingba rebel forces in the military staged a coup attempt, but it was put down with Libyan and Congolese help.
At around this time, Kolingba and Bozize, whom Patasse had sacked as army Chief of Staff, had reached an alliance of convenience. When the coup was crushed, Bozize fled to Chad.
In 2003, Bozize finally succeeded where Kolingba had failed and overthrew Patasse. He declared himself president of a transitional government, giving priority to national reconciliation, economic reconstruction, and the holding of multi-party elections. The latter were held in February last year, and with tight restrictions put on Patasse's party and other contenders, Bozize was confirmed in power.
The country faces huge problems, including lawless pockets in the countryside where arms got filtered to civilians during the years of army mutinies and general unrest.
Gitau Warigi is a columnist with the 'Sunday Nation' in Nairobi
Africa Insight is an initiative of the Nation Media Group's Africa Media Network