Clashes in diamond hub shed light on C Africa’s ethnic tensions

BANGUI, Central African Republic: Bloodletting along ethnic lines in a key diamond town has highlighted the problems facing the Central African Republic in its struggle to dampen militia violence.

The clashes in Bria, northeastern CAR, left about 50 dead, according to the authorities -- the highest toll in the town since the government and 14 armed groups signed a peace pact last February 6, and aid workers there fear fighting will soon resume.

Bria is a flashpoint in a deeply poor and perennially unstable nation that has seen three civil wars in two decades. More than two-thirds of the country´s territory lies in the hands of militias that often fight over minerals and other resources. The fighting this time has exposed a split along ethnic lines within CAR´s largest armed group, the Popular Front for the Rebirth of Central Africa (FPRC). It has set members of the Runga ethnic group on one side against members of the Kara and Gula peoples on the other, reflecting newly emerging tensions in the region.

"We have pulled all our forces out of the district because we can´t tell who´s a friend and who´s an enemy," said "General" Hussein Dambtocha, a supporter of Abdoulaye Hissene, a Runga who is the FPRC´s military chief. Even in peacetime, Bria is a political and economic muddle that is hard to decipher, with five armed groups.

The town is coveted because of the region´s diamond-rich soil and its strategic location on trade routes to Sudan and South Sudan across the eastern border. Militias collect taxes and administer daily justice with scant regard for the official authorities, who consist of a mayor, a prefect and a few soldiers with minimal equipment.

In Bria, ethnic tensions are manipulated -- as elsewhere in the CAR -- to serve the economic and political interests of warlords. "The Gula control many mines around Bria," said a local diamond dealer But "in town, most of the diamond trading counters belong to the Runga.—