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Central African Republic: Widespread Violence Deepens Humanitarian Crisis
“In CAR you have to build an operation from scratch. And this leads to much deeper involvement
just to make people survive with the barest minimum.
The violence in really widespread in the country: intercommunal violence, neighbours shooting
on neighbours and killing neighbours from different religious origin or ethnic origin.
And then there’s also criminal violence, simple criminal violence.
Today, 80-90% of people coming to the surgery theatre in Bangui hospital are conflict victims.
Shots, grenades, machetes, wounds from direct impact of conflict.
We have 3 surgical teams working around the clock and operating. We are supporting mobile
medical clinics in the rural sides. We are also supporting other hospitals in the country
either with medical skills, nurses, and increasingly also
with expertise in *** violence which comes with that conflict very prominently.
I visited the IDP camp. It’s a desperate situation, one of those huge displacement
neighbourhoods where you see why people are desperate and hopeless and why it is so important
to act.
In the past year, roughly 700-800,000 people, which is basically 20-25% of the whole population
has been displaced. And they are not going to go back any time soon.
Security presence (is) highly important, to have a minimum of stability to be able to
work.
On the humanitarian side ICRC will I hope make the CAR one of the ten largest operations
in ICRC. And it will be about beefing up our health, food and water and sanitation work
as well as protection work in the CAR.”