French intervention in CAR keeps China out - analyst
Press TV has conducted an interview with Douglas DeGroot, Executive Intelligence Review, Leesburg about what has become a religious cleansing of Muslims in CAR since France intervened in the country.
- Why is it that seemingly the killing of Muslims in the CAR is not considered a crime anymore and nothing is being done about what many call the genocide that’s occurring there?
- It seems to me to be a situation where conflicts are being created throughout Africa.
And as soon as this thing started several months ago, several African sources I spoke with became very concerned because this kind of situation can get out of control and be spread widely over much of Africa.
We know that French interests of course are concerned about an encroachment by China into Africa – what they call encroachment, which is Chinese collaboration.
So, this is one way to make it difficult for the other power to keep from interfering like the Asian powers from interfering in what has long been their base of operations.
So there appears to be some kind of a set up on this thing because there is no history of this kind of conflict in the Central African Republic at all. For years and years there’s never been anything like this.
A movement was started by the government a year or so ago that was mostly Muslim and it seems like some groups from Sudan and Chad, which did a lot of violent things and these Christian militias were organized to come in opposition to that and it’s just gone out of control.
You have all the Muslims in the western half of the country have already left. So it is a kind of ethnic cleansing operations that’s going on now.
The French of course are in and they’re asking for money so that their force and a bigger force can be paid for...
- Speaking of foreign forces, you spoke of French forces there. Just how effective or detrimental will the foreign military intervention be?
- If you get at the real causes and implement real economic development these kinds of problems could be eliminated fairly quickly. But when there’s no investment and improvement of people’s lives then it’s easy to manipulate and create and prolong these kinds of things.
So their presence there guarantees, that is the French-dominated presence there guarantees the ability of their companies to operate there – but they wouldn’t be necessarily protecting Chinese companies or something like this.
It could be done. All of Africa could be stabilized, but it would take a massive development program like what was done in the world after World War II for example - a big marital-plan-type of approach to Africa.
But that’s not in the books; the only thing that’s happening is looting. These kinds of crises make it impossible for nations to develop and the overall living standards and ability to govern goes down the drain.
Basically there is no functioning government now at this point in the Central African Republic.