President Faustin-Archange Touadéra of the Central African Republic (CAR) has accused Western nations of deliberately keeping his country political unstable, days after he met French President Emmanuel Macron.
“The Central African Republic has been subjected since its independence to systematic looting facilitated by the political instability maintained by certain Western countries or their companies which finance armed terrorist groups whose main leaders are foreign mercenaries,” he said at a UN conference of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) on Sunday.
CAR troops and soldiers from the Russian mercenary group Wagner have been accused of appalling rights violations, leading to EU sanctions being imposed on some of the group’s senior operative mercenaries in the country.
At the UN conference in Qatar, President Touadéra said the Central African Republic was a “victim of geostrategic aims linked to its natural resources”, and that “foreign interference” keeps his nation and others like it in a state of “dependence, insecurity and instability”.
For many years after independence, France maintained close economic and military ties to its former colony, before CAR switched to Russia.
