PRESS BRIEFING ON CENTRALAFRICANREPUBLIC

 

Stressing the need to prevent the Central African Republic from sliding back into conflict, United Nations Resident Coordinator Stan Nkwain said at a Headquarters press briefing this afternoon that the State must urgently resume its normal functioning in terms of providing security, so that the population could be convinced to resume farming and other economic activities.

Mr. Nkwain, who is also the Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the landlocked country, warned that if that did not happen quickly enough, no good governance reforms would take place beyond the just-completed elections.  Strikes and mutinies would continue, as would insecurity, vulnerability and human suffering.  The real emergency there was not just the need for the quick funding of the Consolidated Appeal to enable the early delivery of medicines, food and non-food items.  Even if all those were delivered on a sustainable basis and the Consolidated Appeal received 100 per cent funding, the country would remain vulnerable to armed conflict.

Describing as “irrelevant” the need to label the crisis in the country, which had known conflict for the past 10 years, including a civil war, he pointed out that the Central African Republic had lost an average six months of life expectancy every year since 1988.  It had also lost 1.5 per cent of its per capita gross domestic product every year since 1995, and 70 per cent of its population lived on less than a dollar a day. 

He said that 41 months of non-payment of civil service and military salaries meant that even with the provision of equipment in broken-down health and education infrastructure, as well as adequate delivery of food, medicines and school materials, no personnel would be available to make those structures operational.  The country’s huge public-sector debt stood at about 85 per cent of gross domestic product.  Yet, the Bretton Woods institutions insisted that the Central African Republic must meet all the requirements to qualify for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, including the full resumption of debt servicing and the establishment of a track record of reforms.

He stressed that there was no way the country could meet its debt-servicing obligations, due to managerial and infrastructural constraints, as well as chronic corruption.  State revenues in 2005 were, for the first time, less than the total amount required to pay civil service salaries.  No meaningful track record of reforms could be expected in such a crisis environment and the best that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were prepared to offer was a second post-conflict programme, for much later this year, and some little quick-impact grants, in which case the pause in the Central African Republic conflict might not last very long.

The Government’s inability to pay civil service and military salaries was making it impossible to re-establish access to basic services and to deploy the forces of law and order to the most insecure parts of the country, he said.  Without such a deployment the rural population was not feeling secure enough to resume their farming activities, while doctors, nurses and teachers were unable to return to work on a sustainable basis in the most affected parts of the country.  In other words, without an immediate resumption of regular salary payments to the civil service and the military, the current lull in the Central African Republic’s conflict, achieved by a consensual political transition and a successful electoral assistance, would not last long.

However, there were opportunities in the bleak picture, he said, noting that the central Government had just completed a return to constitutional rule with elections judged to have been the most effective, transparent, effective and credible in the Central African subregion to date.  It had started to demonstrate its resolve to fight endemic corruption and to strengthen respect for human rights.  With the support of United Nations operational agencies on the ground, the Government was investing heavily and participating in the formulation on a poverty-reduction strategy focusing on good democratic governance, necessary macroeconomic reforms, conflict resolution, security, peace and reconciliation, on jump-starting economic activity.

He said the United Nations was supporting that process fully through its United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) process and the Government deserved a chance from partners and the international community in the form of emergency financial assistance to keep the State open for business and to start reversing the economic chaos it had inherited in March 2003.

Asked how the new Government had been formed, Mr. Nkwain said the country had been embroiled in a six-month civil war that had begun in 2002 and ended with a military coup in March 2003.  A consensus government had then been created, leading to a long transition.  With the support of several donors, a credible, long-year electoral process had begun, ending in June 2005 with the announcement of the election results.  There was now not only a return to peace, but also a political consensus that made it much easier for the new Government, which was accepted by everybody, including the international community, to undertake the necessary reforms.

If the present opportunity was lost, the country would slide back into crisis, he warned, reiterating that it shared a border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which had been involved in its civil conflict.  It also shared a border with Chad, which harboured Sudanese and Central African refugees, as well as with the Sudan.  A conflict there would certainly spill over into those other countries, which were already affected by crisis.

Asked what compromises had been negotiated to produce the consensus, he said that the negotiations during the two rounds of elections had been conducted mostly by President Omar Bongo of Gabon and the United Nations Peace-Building Office in the Central African Republic (BONUCA).

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