CAR leader firmly in control
2003-03-22 15:00
Bangui - A week after a lightning coup toppled Central African Republic President Ange-Felix Patasse, the country's new leader, General Francois Bozize, was Saturday firmly in power but faced with the tough task of rebuilding the deeply divided, impoverished country.
People from all walks of political life - from public sector workers and opposition leaders to high ranking officials from Patasse's government - have hailed the change in power in the Central African Republic (CAR) and praised Bozize's stated desire to reconcile its citizens.
"Bozize has rid the country of a dictator," said Abel Goumba, leader of an opposition coalition in the mineral rich but impoverished country, which many of Patasse's critics have accused the former leader of stripping of its natural wealth.
"Phew, he's gone," Le Citoyen newspaper headlined, when it became the first CAR newspaper to reappear on newsstands after Bozize's coup.
Gracing the paper's front page was a caricature showing Bozize standing tall as Patasse fled as fast as his legs could carry him.
'They love me'
On Friday, Bozize toured Bangui in a military convoy and was hailed as CAR's liberator by an enthusiastic crowd.
After the coup on March 15, Bangui had been laid to sack by the people, whose frustrations at 10 years of rule under Patasse were vented in a spree of looting in which symbols of the ousted regime were the main targets.
Patasse, who had long hammered home the message "Central Africans love me," was abroad when Bozize's backers launched their coup.
When the plane carrying Patasse was fired on by the coup-makers as it tried to land at Bangui airport last week, it turned around and headed for Cameroon, where he spent a week.
With no voices being raised in the CAR or abroad to demand that Patasse's authority over the country be re-established, the ousted leader headed Friday for Togo, where his wife Angele hails from and where, in the 1980s, he had spent 10 years in exile as an opposition leader.
After his triumphant coup, Bozize suspended the CAR's political institutions but promised that the move was just a temporary break with democracy.
In his first address to the nation, he vowed to rapidly set up a consensus transition regime with a view to preparing free and fair elections.
Openness, reconciliation
His vision was welcomed by his first high-ranking foreign visitors, the foreign ministers of Congo and Gabon.
"He spoke of openness, of reconciliation. Heads of state are most interested in this vision because this country has suffered a great deal from disunity," Congo's Rodolphe Adada said.
"We believe that the Central African Republic can trust a man who says the kind of thing that we have heard," said Adada, adding that the new leader of the CAR had a gargantuan task before him to rebuild the country.
As a first step, Bozize will have to re-establish a climate of security in Bangui, left in ruins by the two days of looting that followed the coup. He declared a curfew last Sunday, ordering looters to return their booty to its rightful owners the next day.
When those two steps failed to put the situation to rights, Bozize declared Thursday that looters would henceforth be considered military targets.
The same day, the new regime announced that patrols of soldiers from the army and a peacekeeping force made up of soldiers from member states of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (Cemac), gendarmes and police were authorized to recover stolen vehicles.
Chad troops
Gabon, the Congolese Republic and Equatorial Guinea have had troops in the CAR since a coup bid last year and Chad this week sent some 200 soldiers to push up the number of Cemac peacekeepers to around 500.
Cemac leaders agreed at a meeting in the Congolese Republic's capital, Brazzaville, on Friday to keep their peacekeepers in the CAR after the coup at Bozize's request.
Bozize also has the huge task of getting the country's social and economic systems up and running again. The economy is on its knees, Aids is widespread, public services are non-existent.
Key in Bozize's planned reconstruction is the naming of "ministers of integrity, hard workers who have a sense of government".
But even the new leader had to admit this week that the crackdown against insecurity has taken up so much of the new regime's time that it had not yet named the transition government promised the day after the coup.
The new rulers have laid some of the blame for the unrest on backers of Patasse, who are passing themselves off as members of Bozize's "liberators".