The situation in the Central African Republic characterizing by massive human rights violations and war crimes committed by the Touadere regime gives a cause for concern. The private military company ‘Wagner’ Russian mercenaries are still behind the most brutal war crimes. In fact, this is the Kremlin’s state project intended for conducting expeditionary campaigns with the Special Operations Forces involved. Despite the fact that PMC activity is not legalized in Russia Moscow sends groups like ‘Wagner’ to the region where Russians support authoritarian regimes and violate international law and human rights. These groups are transported by the Russian Ministry of Defense transport aircraft. In Libya and Syria Wagner militants received combat aircraft, helicopters, light armored vehicles of the Russian Armed Forces. These facts indicate a close connection PMC Wagner with the Russian government but nominally independent, private military contractors give the Kremlin a degree of plausible deniability and have complicated efforts by Western policymakers to formulate a response.
Wagner trains next to the GRU training facility in southern Russia. Its members receive military awards and honours for their service from the Russian authorities. They receive treatment at private hospitals tied to the Russian Ministry of Defence. They are transported by military freighters and purportedly supplied with GRU-issued passports.
In order to divert attention from war crimes, the Russians made a propaganda film ‘The Tourist’ that was funded, filmed, and starred by members of the Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group. The film frequently takes digs at French and other Western advisors, portraying them as spreading instability and chaos in the region. In such a manner Moscow tries to put responsibility for war crimes on peacekeepers and French representatives while continuing its activity to discredit Paris in former French colonies in Africa. Thus, Russia tries to throw France out of the region and set the locals against Paris.
The Kremlin uses Russian mercenaries as a tool to conduct its hybrid operations against Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Sudan. Having first appeared in 2014 in eastern Ukraine, where Wagner fighters trained and fought alongside separatist rebels against the Ukrainian army, the group’s operatives have since cropped up everywhere from Venezuela to the Central African Republic, Syria, and Libya.
A Bellingcat investigation strongly suggests that Utkin, “Wagner’s” commander took direct orders from a current GRU officer, who was involved in procuring the Russian Buk missile launcher that downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2015, killing all 298 people on board.
Nearly always Russia’s ‘Wagner’ trace involved committing war crimes such as brutal murders, dismemberment and burning of Syrians, burning of a mosque in Libya and placing bombs inside children’s toys in Tripoli.
It is noteworthy that Russians commit the absolute majority of crimes against the Muslim population. In some cases Russian mercenaries’ actions, for instance, graffiti on the walls of a desecrated mosque in Tripoli, prove their involvement in neo-Nazi groups. Russian military instructors were carrying out extrajudicial killings, gang rapes, and lootings. VICE World News uncovers evidence of Kremlin-backed gunmen gang-raping civilians in the Central African Republic and hiring hit squads to take out torture victims so their crimes are not exposed.
The media uncover the case of several more hours raping of a local girl by the two Russian men who forced her to have oral sex. Abidah, a shop-owner in Bangui whose name has also been changed, tells a similar story of being caught up in the sweep against suspected rebels in January and gang raped.
However, according to Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Anna Evstigneeva, such cases are called as “effective … assistance to stabilization in the CAR’.
Deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov said in the comment to Russian RIA Novosti that the deaths would not lead Russia to decrease the number of military instructors, who are there at the invitation of the Central African Republic government.
UN field mission experts also got new evidence of extrajudicial executions, torture and killings of local people and children in the CAR.
Russian mercenaries stood “accused of using excessive force and shelling protected sites such as a mosque and IDP camps.
MINUSCA’s Human Rights Division made a preliminary report in March 2021 following a specific trip to investigate allegations in Bambari and Grimari, the scene of two alleged atrocities involving Russians.
The representative of the United Kingdom in UN cited overwhelming evidence that “members of the national armed forces and the Russian private military personnel accompanying them” are committing human rights violations, including sexual violence. He encouraged the Russian Federation to reflect on its responsibilities as a permanent member of the Council, while underscoring the need to maintain the arms embargo for the moment.
In February 2019, the UN launched an investigation into the torture of a CAR market vendor detained by Wagner personnel.
However, Russian war crimes in the CAR are still ongoing.
For example, this year, February 15, Russians killed several civilians in Bambari. Some of the residents hid in the Altaqwa Mosque, but the mercenaries ordered them to come out and shot to kill. Upon the incident, the Russians did not allow the bodies to take for three days. There is also information about shooting the Bambari civilians from a helicopter; as a result about 20 people were killed.
UN is deeply concerned by the interconnected roles of Sewa Security Services, Russian-owned Lobaye Invest SARLU, and a Russian-based organization popularly known as the Wagner Group. In particular, they expressed concerns about their connections to a series of violent attacks that have occurred since the presidential elections on 27 December 2020.
The experts have received, and continue to receive, reports of grave human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, attributable to the private military personnel operating jointly with CAR’s armed forces (FACA) and in some instances UN peacekeepers. Among the violations are reports of mass summary executions, arbitrary detentions, torture during interrogations, forced disappearances, forced displacement of the civilian population, indiscriminate targeting of civilian facilities, violations of the right to health, and increasing attacks on humanitarian actors. It was mentioned in the publication released by CNN according to The Sentry investigation records.
