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Aljazeera: Muslims return to CAR to find their homes are gone

There has been an extraordinary amount of violence perpetuated against Muslims in the Central African Republic. At one point all its Muslims had been ‘ethnically cleansed’ and all its mosques essentially destroyed. Ilisha series from a few years ago on CAR is a must read.

Now some of those who were driven out are returning “to nothing.”

Bangui, Central African Republic – M Babakir Ali cuts a lonely figure sitting on a plastic chair outside a rundown cafe in the PK5 district of Bangui.

Once the owner of five houses and 18,000 square metres of land in the Foulbe district of Pk13, on the outskirts of Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, Ali is now reduced to a pair of jeans and a short white sleeved shirt. The thin vertical stripes are faintly visible beyond the creases. He is a refugee in his own city.

“I left for Chad in January 2014 because of what happened on the streets of Bangui,” Ali says.

Ali says he watched as bodies of young Muslim men were dragged through the streets of the capital and then piled at a local mosque in what was to signal the changing fortunes for Muslims in the country.

He was right.

In early January, Muslims in the PK5, PK12, PK13 districts of Bangui were hunted down, mutilated, burned alive and left on the streets. Muslims in the towns of Bossangoa, Bozoum, Bouca, Yaloke, Mbaiki, Bossembele and others also fled, as Anti-balaka embarked on a reign of terror across the northwest and southwestern regions.

Ali gathered his family, and fled to neighbouring Chad, too.

With the unrest in Bangui lifting in 2016 as the country neared elections, he decided to come home.

But he knew he would face a new struggle on his return.

“I knew my houses and my land, that everything had been taken,” 45-year-old Ali says. “I knew I would be coming back to nothing.”

Ali speaks in short and abrupt sentences. The already battered plastic chair bends and shifts with his every gesture. There is a calm dissonance in his moist, jaundiced eyes even as he explains that his property was sold to a third party by a local chief.

“I am not the only one. So many from my district have returned, and have nowhere to go,” Ali says, looking away.

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    • B.D.S

      What part of my post was difficult for you.

    • Peter Davies

      ??

    • B.D.S

      “I find you guys (so including Illisha) to be hostile, heavily sarcastic”

      Lol. How do you expect for people white supremacy has been constantly subjugating and abusing both physically and physiologically for centuries-on to respond?

      When white supremacist colonial/imperial powers simultaneously bomb entire countries and a vast majority of white people keep on approving this policies by voting for them. Not only that, but keep justifying by embracing the excuses put forth by the architects of these racist imperialist policies – (I.e, *we* mass bomb for humanitarianism, *you* respond with terrorism). This is a level of fascism and racism one can only respond to either by hostility, or if you’re lucky enough to even be capable at producing sarcasm at this point.

      White supremacy demand complete submission. Challenge its physical violence and, you’re “terrorist”. Challenge its physiological abuses via multi millions $ propaganda industries and, you’re hostile.

    • B.D.S

      Just say, Muslims are/shouldB my subjects and go., fucking Nazi.

    • B.D.S

      Other than you Islamizing white supremacy imperialist problems.

    • B.D.S

      “critic of islam”. What is that?

    • Friend of Bosnia

      The truth is out there for those who want to know. Nobody should have the cheek of trying to convince me that the genocide against Bosniaks, Tutsi, Central African Muslims and Rohingya, didn’t happen or aren’t happening.

    • Friend of Bosnia

      Stop playing the victim already. Especially now as the “peaceful” Budhists of Rakhine State are committing on the Rohingya the same things the Serbs did to the Bosniaks! Mass murder and expulsion, in short, genocide, to dispossess them of the land they lived on for centuries. So then, when unfriendly strangers, or my own non-Muslim neighbors come my way with murderous intent, as they did in BiH in 1992-95, after having stated clearly that they will cleanse the country of an unwanted population to which i happen to belong, do you really expect of me to turn the other cheek and be led like a lamb to the slaughter? Do you really want of me to expect mercy from my enemies.

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