Twitter users around the globe promoted awareness of the rising levels of sectarian violence in the Central African Republic during an inaugural Twitter discussion hosted by the Georgetown Conflict Resolution Program on Nov. 20.
“A goal of ours was to get more people involved to learn about the CAR. [For] most people, it’s not really on their radar,” Conflict Resolution program member Briana Mawby (GRD ’15) said.
Participants were invited to follow @TheProjectCAR and tweet questions with the accompanying hashtag #CARaware. The program convened a panel of experts to answer questions on displacement, regional effects, village security and child soldiers.
John Rudolph Beaton, manager of the Lord’s Resistance Army Crisis Tracker, Mike Jobbins, Search for Common Ground Senior Program Manager, Resolve Director of Policy Paul Ronan and Louisa Lombard, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Natural Resource Economics in geography department at the University of California at Berkeley all shared their opinions.
“There’s not much news coming out of [the] CAR, but there is a huge amount of violence coming out right now,” Mawby said.
The primary groups involved in the conflict in the CAR are the African Union, the Anti-Balaka, the Seleka and the LRA. Both the Seleka and the LRA use child soldiers in their armies. The Seleka, a largely Muslim group, has been fighting the Christian Anti-Balaka group on and off for decades.
“Christians and Muslims have largely lived together peacefully. #armedgroups incited violence,” Beaton tweeted, using a hashtag to enumerate the prevelance of armed groups in the CAR.
Violence in the CAR is often carried out by groups reinforced with child soldiers, and according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, there are more than 3,000 child soldiers in the CAR alone, and over 300,000 worldwide.
“Child soldier recruitment is inseparable from insecurity in general,” Jobbins tweeted.
The massacres carried out by child soldiers as well as bands of armed groups in the Central African Republic are on the verge of genocidal levels, as sectarian violence steadily increases with little hope for a broader peace. To combat the rise in violence, France is advocating for the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers to the CAR in support of the African Union forces.
In response to the killings, some villages have created their own militias; however, some of these groups have been known to incite violence as well.
The discussion attracted an international pool of participants, including residents of America, France and the CAR.
“I think it [the discussion] was quite successful, and not just raising issues, but also engaging people from actually all over the world,” program member Giorgia Nicatore said (GRD ’15).
Jean-Baptiste Koba, president of the Movement for the Social Evolution of Black Africa in the CAR, joined the discussion and expressed his appreciation that they were spreading international awareness about the CAR.
“We were really surprised by the huge amount of people and the different groups of people that participated,” Mawby said. “I thought it was an interesting way to look at social media as well as educating people and bringing an academic discussion to a broader audience.”