The toughest part of an evacuation for an aid worker: the ones you leave behind'
“E
verything is devastated,” the security guards tell us. It’s Tuesday 29 September 2015 and they are explaining how our Action Against Hunger offices in Central African Republic (CAR) have been looted and destroyed. The team is quiet, tired – but not surprised.
I had arrived in the capital, Bangui, five days earlier. The Saturday before our office was attacked I was getting ready to visit the Bangui pediatric center with my colleague, a doctor who treats malnourished children. I was at the house gates when we received our first safety alert: “No movement allowed, everyone stay in the house”. That didn’t feel particularly unusual for Bangui though – the situation here has remained unstable, despite a great deal of work having been done to encourage social cohesion since the conflict was at its peak in early 2014.
We were no longer at a high level of emergency in Bangui: more than 23,000 internally displaced people have returned home since January, leaving camps because they finally felt safe, and they have been starting to rebuild their lives.
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However in the rest of the country, the violence continues. There are 338,000 people internally displaced within the provinces and 461,000 refugees remain in neighbouring countries. And as the country gets closer to the scheduled date of the elections, families are again living in fear.
On this Saturday tensions were particularly high. Clashes took place in Bangui after a motorcycle taxi driver was killed on Friday night, and violence was beginning to spread across the country.
I could sense the level of anxiety in the Action Against Hunger guesthouse. We later heard that several armed men had entered the paediatric centre that morning claiming to be “searching for someone”. So confined to our accommodation, we spent our time on the phone, collecting information from our Central African colleagues about the fighting going on around us.
The loss of important materials will make it difficult to keep up our activities across the country. Photograph: Action Against Hunger
I used this time to get to know my new colleagues. One of them taught me to recognise the sounds and the distance of gunshots. He also advised me to keep a bag ready, “just in case”.
On Sunday night during a team meeting, a colleague told us how she had been verbally harassed by a man in front of the office, just a few metres from the compound we called home. He was threatening her because of her link to the NGO. At this point I sensed that the situation was different from previous unrest. And it got worse.
Around midnight the gunshots became very intense, like fireworks, especially at the gendarmerie close to our compound. We were following the shootings on Twitter and by phone. One of my friends, working for another international humanitarian organisation who lived a few blocks away, told me several men armed with knives tried to enter their home but failed. The next morning I heard that they returned and looted the house, with the staff present.
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By noon on Monday several international NGOs, a UN agency and houses in our neighbourhood had been looted and some expatriates evacuated. A few of our neighbours called to inform us that we were next and to be careful.
Given the threats, we launched an evacuation plan on Monday afternoon but we learned that those who were supposed to evacuate us didn’t have the means. We were stuck. We prepared to stay another night in the fear of being looted, but were then told the evacuation could in fact go ahead. Waiting for it was terrible. There was not much talking, but still we were supporting each other. At around 8pm, we finally left the house.
Minutes after we left, our neighbours intervened when looters arrived there, preventing them from entering. But they were unable to stop them breaking into our offices, only a few meters away. Looters arrived there at around 11pm and stayed for four hours.
Earlier, we had managed to save essential medicine to supply the paediatric centre, which helped us to continue the care of young malnourished patients, though two-thirds of them had fled in fear. The rest of our medicine stocks were stolen. The cars, the furniture, our documents, even the water, sanitation and hygiene equipment were destroyed and left on the ground.
Without these materials it is difficult to keep up our activities across the country, especially with the current insecurity in some areas of Bangui and on the main roads hindering access to supplies.
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It’s probably the toughest part of an evacuation for an aid worker: the ones you leave behind. Evacuated to another country temporarily, I left other colleagues with the task of rebuilding our capacity to respond, while the humanitarian situation continued to deteriorate. I also left behind more than 42,000 newly displaced people lacking humanitarian assistance because humanitarian organisations don’t have access and are still being targeted. And I left behind at least 67 dead and hundreds of wounded people that even ambulances couldn’t pick up during the violence because access was too dangerous.
I have temporarily left CAR with one fear: that the country will once again become a forgotten crisis, where half of the population needs humanitarian assistance to survive and where men, women and children are not protected as they should be. That it becomes a protracted crisis where NGOs still have to call for a distinction between their activities and political action because they are targeted, and where the population is held hostage by armed groups and a lack of interest from the international community.
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