‘They turn our farms into rape centres’: Russian mercenaries accused of abuse in Central African Republic

The two sisters had just arrived at their family’s field when two Russian mercenaries showed up. They held the girls at gunpoint and took turns raping them. “We told them we were virgins and begged them not to touch us. But they wouldn’t listen,” says Koko*.

She was 17 when the attack happened on a Saturday morning last September in the family’s field of yams and cassava in Ngaguene village, near the Central African Republic (CAR) town of Bouar.

“Whenever we tried to scream for help, they used their hands to cover our mouths so that nobody could hear us,” she says.

It was her younger sister’s 15th birthday. She was pinned to the ground by one of the men, then slapped and punched in the face. “There were wounds all over her face,” says Koko. “She was beaten to a point where she could barely talk or even see clearly.”

Our daughters are no longer safe in their own farmlands

Félicité Padou

Allegations of rape by Russian mercenaries, who have a large presence in CAR’s restive north-west region, have escalated in recent months. Women and girls are avoiding going to the fields and markets, and food shortages are being reported as a result.

In and around Bouar, a market town lying on the main road from the country’s capital, Bangui, to the border with Cameroon, traders who buy crops directly from farmers say they have listened to numerous young women tell how they were raped in farms by “white soldiers”, as locals call the Russian mercenaries.

“Since September last year, more than 10 girls have described how they were raped by white soldiers in their farms,” says Félicité Padou, a 65-year-old trader at the busy market. “Our daughters are no longer safe in their own farmlands.”

Sexual violence is growing in CAR, a country blighted by years of conflict and instability . Last year, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), reported that between 2018 and 2022 it took care of more than 19,500 survivors of sexual abuse across the central African nation. During the same period, the UN documented close to 15,000 other cases of sexual violence in the country.

During 11 years of conflict, armed groups have used rape and sexual slavery as a tactic of war across the country. Now the Russian soldiers, a de facto unit of Moscow’s intelligence services, have become notorious for the abuse of CAR’s women and children.

The Russians are operating under a mercenary structure referred to as the Africa Corps , part of the Expeditionary Corps , the new umbrella entity into which the Wagner group, the Russian state-backed mercenaries, has been subsumed since the death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a plane crash almost a year ago.

CAR is one of the most dangerous places in the world for women. Every hour, two people in the poverty-stricken nation are subjected to gender-based violence, according to a UN report , which drew its statistics only from cases where the survivors allowed their information to be shared.

About 75% of CAR’s population, particularly women, work in agriculture, according to the World Bank . The International Fund for Agricultural Development, a UN agency, says the sector employs about 80% of rural people and generates half of the country’s GDP.

In Bouar, the country’s fifth-largest town with a population of about 40,000, the growing attacks in the farmlands are having an impact on food production as women stay away from the fields. As a result, some food prices have increased by 50% in the last eight months.

“Because many women are no longer farming, the prices of foodstuffs are increasing,” says Padou, who has been selling food at the Bouar market for more than two decades. “Everyone is suffering because some heartless white soldiers have turned farms into rape centres.”

Last December, Awa* and her grandmother were aware that two Russian mercenaries were behind them as they walked their usual three-mile journey to their fields on the outskirts of Bouar. Then the men caught up with them. One grabbed Awa while the other trained his gun on her grandmother.

“I was raped by the two men,” says Awa, who was not yet 15. “They ordered my grandmother to lie on the ground with her forehead touching the grass while they abused me.”

Like most women and girls, Awa did not alert the police. “The white soldiers are above the law,” says Sandrine*, Awa’s grandmother. “Nobody will punish them for what they did.”

Awa did not seek or receive any medical attention. Her mother and grandmother, like many women in CAR, feared the stigma that follows speaking up about sexual violence.

“If she goes to the hospital, she may meet someone who could judge her or even tell other people about what happened to her,” says Sandrine. “It wouldn’t be nice for her to be stigmatised.”

CAR remains one of the most impoverished nations on earth despite its rich natural resources. The country has been in turmoil since 2013, when the mainly Muslim Seleka rebels ousted President François Bozize and seized power. The mainly Christian anti-balaka movement took up arms against Muslims in retaliation, leading to an arms embargo imposed by the UN.

In 2017, barely a year after President Faustin-Archange Touadéra came to power, he turned to Russia for military assistance, securing arms and fighters drawn from the notorious Wagner group, which has since been exploiting CAR’s gold and diamond resources.

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Reports of rape in Bouar are not new. When rebels from the Coalition of Patriots for Change (CPC), an alliance of CAR’s armed groups formed to disrupt the country’s presidential election four years ago, captured the town in December 2020, they carried out a campaign of sexual assault, the UN says in a report . Russian mercenaries and CAR forces regained control of Bouar in February 2021.

A local community chief explains: “In the past, the few women who were bold enough to report that they were raped said the incident occurred at places where the white soldiers are stationed or when the white soldiers invaded their homes. Now we are hearing many young women say they were raped in their farms by white soldiers.”

Awa says she is so traumatised that she fears being alone or going outside. “Whenever I walk on the streets, I fear that someone will attack me,” she says.

No officials would respond to requests for comment on the rape allegations. Emails sent to the CAR government and to the defence ministry in Moscow, which supervises Russian mercenaries in CAR, went unanswered.

* Names have been changed to protect identities