JACK LOSH | JOURNALIST

BANGUI, Central African Republic — Where the broken asphalt meets the deep-red earth along one of the main roads in the Central Africa Republic's capital city, a rusted billboard is patched with a colourful new poster.

"Central African Republic hand in hand with Russia", the sign declares alongside a picture of attack helicopters and a saluting soldier.

On the opposite side of the road is another huge poster showing French and Central African soldiers greeting each other in a macho hand shake, declaring: “With your army, for your future”.

Where a vicious civil war recently played out another battle is now underway. It's a battle for hearts and minds - and it's part of a wider propaganda war between Moscow and the West unfolding on the continent.

Past the rival billboards, Russian-sponsored radio stations, school classes, cartoons, film screenings and beauty contests are all jostling for locals' attention.

FULL STORY: The Sunday Telegraph (Sept 2019(

Late one morning at the height of the dry season, Henriette Idjara was heading home to her village when she spotted two boys slumped by a parched riverbed. Clothes torn, caked in dust, the teenagers were in dire need.

Henriette couldn't turn away. As a mother who had lost five of her own children, the 53-year-old felt a strong maternal instinct telling her to help.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

The brothers, Guy and Nelson, told her that rebel soldiers had raided their village and executed their father in cold blood, several months earlier. Their mother had left long ago. Living in fear of further attacks and unable to make ends meet, the boys eventually decided to leave, setting off on foot to find work. By the time Henriette found them, a week later, they had walked about 150 miles.

"They were trying to get to a gold mine," says Henriette. "I told them, 'Listen, that place is dangerous. There is much violence there.'" Instead, she took them back to her home.

It was a moment for which she and her husband, Jean-Philippe, were prepared. The couple have a son and three daughters, but five other children had succumbed to fatal bouts of malaria, meningitis and other diseases. In the wake of these tragic deaths, they had registered last year as foster parents and were waiting to be assigned children.

"This is our calling," says Jean-Philippe, a church deacon. "All children should be cared for, so they can grow up and build a better society than the one we have now."

FULL STORY: BBC News (September 2019)

The bakers of Bamingui have lost loved ones to war. Rebel soldiers drive past their roadside bread ovens daily. A spectre of violence remains.

Regardless, Yvette Abaka and her female baking collective make dough and roll with it.

In this impoverished, rebel-held corner of the Central African Republic (CAR), this group of mothers came together last year to better their lot. Since then, their loaves have become a hit in the wider community, promoting the women as their families’ breadwinners and promising further, quietly profound change.

“This bakery makes us more powerful than before,” says Abaka, the group’s leader and a 50-year-old mother of two. “My husband respects my work. Now I am his equal.”

In this turbulent country, scarred by years of conflict, Abaka’s bakers are not the only people hoping for something good to come out of the troubles. Following a major ceasefire brokered earlier this year between the government and 14 rebel militias, groups of women are coming together across the nation to reinforce the grand strategy for peace at a community level. They are rebuilding their country from the ground up, forging formidable sisterhoods in the ashes of a protracted conflict.

FULL STORY: The Guardian (August 2019)

Among the sprawling shantytowns and crumbling colonial façades of Bangui, armed UN peacekeepers patrol the streets. This is the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR), one of the poorest countries in the world. A small, landlocked nation, it has been blighted by a succession of vicious conflicts since gaining independence from France in 1960.

The 13,000 or so peacekeepers—many of whom come from elsewhere in Africa—are tasked with protecting civilians, who have endured anarchy, autocracy and ethnic cleansing in their lifetimes. But there is another man, one from just over the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), who has an even more demanding job than keeping the peace. In this tinderbox, Toussaint Muntazini Mukimapa believes that he can deliver justice.

Muntazini is the chief prosecutor of a unique court, tasked with holding to account those who have committed crimes against humanity in the CAR since 2003, when a coup unleashed a fresh wave of hostilities. The daring project—known as the Special Criminal Court (SCC)—is the first UN-backed tribunal to be set up in a country where hostilities are raging, with war criminals judged by their compatriots. It is an audacious attempt to disprove the old presumption that a society must have order before it can attempt justice.

FULL STORY: Prospect Magazine (June 2019)

The Guardian: Africans who fought for Britain paid less than white soldiers

More than half a million black African soldiers who fought in the British Army during the Second World War were paid up to three times less than their white counterparts, a newly unearthed document has revealed, prompting calls for an investigation and the government to compensate surviving veterans The document, buried in Britain’s national archives, reveals how the government systematically discriminated against African soldiers, paying white personnel – even those living in African colonies and serving alongside African soldiers in British colonial units – far more than their black counterparts. The international development secretary, Penny Mordaunt, acknowledged that inequalities existed in the past.

The Guardian: Compensate African WWII veterans, Labour urges

Pressure is mounting on the government to compensate and apologise to Britain’s last surviving African veterans of the second world war after three shadow secretaries of state called on their Conservative counterparts to acknowledge the systematic discrimination of colonial-era troops. Labour’s Emily Thornberry, Nia Griffith and Dan Carden – the shadow foreign, defence and international development secretaries – demanded in a letter that Theresa May’s administration acknowledge the unfair treatment, launch an investigation into the matter, issue a formal apology and pay veterans compensation. Their intervention came after The Guardian published a document that revealed how Britain paid white soldiers – even those serving in British colonial units and living in African colonies – up to three times more than their black counterparts. The policy meant that a soldier’s skin colour and colonial origins determined pay much as his rank and length of service.

Foreign Policy: Britain’s Abandoned Black Soldiers (photo essay)

By the end of World War II, Eusebio Mbiuki had faced deadly combat in the jungles of Burma and survived fearful ocean crossings stalked by submarines. But even as the young Kenyan put his life on the line for Britain, he—and more than half a million other African soldiers drawn from the empire—faced harsh discrimination from his own side. Britain paid its soldiers not only according to their rank and length of service but also their ethnicity, a new documentary for Al Jazeera English has found, with black troops receiving a third of the pay of their white contemporaries of the same rank. Some Africans were forcibly and secretly conscripted, while others were beaten by their superiors. Many ended up in poverty. The revelations have led senior opposition politicians to call on the British government to make an official apology, to launch an investigation, and to compensate the last surviving veterans affected by this controversial policy. “There must be an urgent inquiry into Britain having paid its African and Asian soldiers according to the color of their skin,” said Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, following the revelations.

The Guardian: Ex-head of British army backs compensation for African WWII veterans

The former head of the British army has called on the government to pay compensation to African veterans of the second world war who were paid three times less than their white counterparts. General Lord Dannatt described the discriminatory policy, revealed by the Guardian and al-Jazeera, as “hugely inequitable and wrong”. He urged the defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, to meet surviving ex-servicemen in Africa and issue a retrospective apology. “It would be perfectly reasonable to ask the government to acknowledge it and, if they felt inclined, to make an apology,” Dannatt told the Guardian. “It is absolutely right to recognise the service of anyone of any colour and indeed nationality that was fighting for the crown in the cause of freedom in the second world war … If there have been abuses relating to their service, then it is absolutely right that they are identified and corrected where possible.”

New Statesman: Britain’s violent conscription of African soldiers is finally coming to light

More than seven decades on, Grace Mbithe still remembers the moment when a press gang abducted her husband from a Kenyan village and forced him into Britain’s armed forces at the height of World War Two. “It would just happen suddenly, one morning,” she said. “If you hid, they would just come back another day.” Grace, now a widow in her mid-90s, described a lorry driving into their highland village before soldiers jumped out and grabbed as many fit and able men as possible—under the supervision of a white officer. It would be several years before Grace saw her husband, Stanley, again. During this turbulent time, she was socially isolated and tormented by her in-laws who, believing Grace was infertile, tried to force her out of the family. “We cried a lot when we heard [Stanley] had been captured,” she said. “We were crying because we knew he would not come back. He would die. He left us with a lot of problems. I suffered so much.” Stanley was not the only man to suffer the injustice of enforced recruitment.

The Guardian: African war veterans paid less than white peers will not get UK payout

The government has quietly ruled out compensating black African veterans of the second world war who were paid a third as much as their white counterparts.

Following months of silence since the Guardian and al-Jazeera first revealed the discriminatory policy, the defence minister Tobias Ellwood has privately told MPs there were “no current plans to take forward any further investigations of this matter”.

Officials across three government ministries examined the issue after revelations that soldiers drawn from Britain’s African colonies were paid an end-of-war bonus that was calibrated not only to rank and length of service but also ethnicity. White soldiers from those colonies received a gratuity worth triple that offered to black troops.

Marie was fast asleep when the rebels came. “They wanted to kill all the men,” she says, “and to destroy our homes.”

Three militants burst into her room then moved to the next house, leaving her screaming in terror but unscathed. In a conflict zone where rape is routinely used as a weapon of war, other girls were less fortunate that night. She was just 12.

After fleeing into the forest, Marie and her relatives found their way several days later to Kaga-Bandoro, an impoverished town in wartorn Central African Republic (CAR) where a camp had been established for internally displaced people.

But Marie’s ordeal was not over.

One morning, she went to collect water just outside the camp. At the well, two gunmen cornered her. “They caught me and raped me. Afterwards, I had to see a doctor.” She pauses. “The rape had caused damage.”

Encircled by hostile militants on all sides, this besieged camp is a threatening place, especially for children. Aid workers run makeshift classrooms to nurture some kind of hope for the future and teachers push a curriculum of forgiveness and unity. Under dusty tarpaulins sit dozens of pupils, including former child soldiers and young survivors of rape. At rickety wooden desks, they count, read and sing, continuing an education against the odds.

FULL STORY: The Guardian (January 2019)

The prefab container is cool inside, its shelves packed with overpriced cans of Heineken, bags of tagliatelle, bottles of shampoo. A Kenyan cashier serves the customers – a Moroccan, a Rwandan and a Frenchman – just some of the nationalities living at this United Nations base, deployed deep in a rebel-held area of the Central African Republic (CAR). Taped to the door of this air-conditioned minimart is a poster, advertising a hotline to call if peacekeepers are suspected of raping or abusing civilians. NON! the poster reads. EXPLOITATION ET ABUS SEXUELS = CRIMES.

Full of expensive Western products, this small convenience store is only a hundred odd metres from a displaced persons camp that today houses some 55,000 people. For them, though, kept out by high walls and coils of concertina wire, the shop may as well be in Europe.

FULL STORY: Granta (November 2018)

It seemed that nothing could persuade Olga Rudenko to move; neither the collapse of communism, the outbreak of war, nor the shelling of her village.

She had lived in the Ukrainian hamlet since Leonid Brezhnev ruled from the Kremlin, riding out the collapse of the Soviet empire and the turmoil of its aftermath. Then, in 2014, after fighting erupted between government forces and Moscow-backed insurgents, she found herself just inside rebel-held territory, and on the front line.

Somehow, despite four years of artillery strikes, the falling shells missed her ramshackle smallholding. “We have a saying: ‘If you survive for three days, you become a guest of the war’,” she said when we met. That hospitality has now been withdrawn.

FULL STORY: The Times (October 2018)

It was not the hippo carcass that troubled the wildlife rangers the most. Nor were they especially surprised to uncover a cache of powerful assault rifles in this volatile region awash with uncontrolled arms.

The most unsettling find from their counter-poaching raid in Chinko, a vast wildlife reserve in the Central African Republic (CAR), was a handful of identity cards belonging to soldiers from Sudan's paramilitary forces – a discovery suggesting that Khartoum’s fighters are moonlighting as poachers hundreds of miles beyond its borders.

The Sudanese military and its auxiliaries are accused of committing war crimes that range from using scorched-earth tactics to attacking camps housing displaced civilians. The role of government-backed soldiers in the illicit wildlife trade, however, is less known. The evidence found deep in the Central African bush shines a light on the covert, cross-border poaching forays launched by Sudanese militiamen to profit from the demand for bush meat, ivory and traditional Chinese medicine.

FULL STORY: The National (October 2018)

Five days after she fell into a coma, Oksana Nezhalskaya came to. Dazed, she felt her body throb with pain. The room was hot. A doctor leaned in and told her she had been injured by an exploding landmine.

Nezhalskaya’s gaze shifted from the doctor’s eyes. She looked down her body, past her shrapnel-scarred arms. Only then did she notice that her right leg was missing.

Within four months, her left leg would be gone, too.

Since war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the vast quantities of landmines and unexploded ordnance that litter large tracts of the countryside have killed more than 600 people. At least 1,000 have suffered serious, life-altering injuries like Nezhalskaya.

No one really knows the extent of contamination, but the Ukrainian defense ministry has said it estimates around 16,000 square kilometers are strewn with land-mines, trip wires and booby traps. While some experts say this figure is excessive, all agree defusing the region poses an immense long-term challenge.

“There is no doubt that Ukraine is one of the most mine-affected countries in the world,” says Yuri Shahramanyan, program manager for HALO Trust de-miners in the region.

Even if fighting were to stop tomorrow, it would take decades to make the region safe again.

FULL STORY: Politico (September 2018)

At his fortified villa in the devastated, contested diamond-mining town of Bria, rebel commander Ibrahim Alawad is puffing cigarettes between sips of thick black coffee, eager to talk revolution and religion, and tell me about his education at Cambridge University, a world away from this land torn apart by civil war.

The Central African Republic (CAR) lies in a bad neighbourhood. To the north are the insurgency-prone desert states of Chad and Sudan. Nasty conflicts also blight other bordering countries – Cameroon, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since independence in 1960, a string of despots have misruled this sparsely populated former French colony, a landlocked territory three times bigger than the UK.

Despite its plentiful diamonds, CAR’s state coffers have been stripped to leave an economy smaller than the Isle of Wight’s. Five years ago, this backwater came to the world’s attention when it descended into a brutal civil war. An alliance of several Muslim-led groups calling themselves the Séléka staged a violent coup, ousting CAR’s ageing, corrupt leader François Bozizé. In response, Christian communities formed rival militias known as the Anti-Balaka, which carried out ethnic cleansing of Muslim communities, effectively partitioning CAR. The death toll ran into the thousands.

A ceasefire and international military intervention helped bring a lull and relatively peaceful elections followed in early 2016, with a new president sworn in, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, a former mathematics lecturer from the country’s Christian majority. Some even dared to hope of a fresh start.

But today CAR is again in a state of anarchy. Violence spread throughout the country as the Séléka coalition split into factions, terrorising civilian communities with impunity. More than half the population of 4.5 million depend on aid. But unrest is paralysing efforts to reach the most vulnerable.

FULL STORY: The Telegraph Magazine (August 2018)

There are new guests at the ruined palace where Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa once held court. During his rule over the Central African Republic in the 1970s, Bokassa used a year’s worth of development aid to stage an extravagant coronation, and he personally oversaw the torture of prisoners. He fed some to his pet crocodiles and lions.

But the French government that helped install Bokassa in 1966 ousted him in 1979, deploying paratroopers to prevent any countercoup. Now, four decades later, it is Russian soldiers who mill around this crumbling estate in Berengo—and the shifting power dynamic is raising concerns in the West. President Vladimir Putin is pushing into Africa, forging new partnerships and rekindling Cold War–era alliances. “There will be a battle for Africa,” says Evgeny Korendyasov, head of Russian-African studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, “and it will grow.”

Russia’s economy is in long-term decline, and its reach has diminished since the Soviet era. So the Kremlin is using ­diplomatic, economic and military tools to prospect for political influence and new markets in Africa—signing multibillion-dollar arms deals, bidding for big construction projects, boosting space communications, exploiting hydrocarbon reserves and launching publicized military interventions, alongside more clandestine operations.

“The Russians want to implant themselves in the Central African Republic so they have an axis of influence through Sudan in the north and southwards into Angola,” says a senior United Nations security official in Bangui, CAR’s capital, who requested anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to speak with the media. “The French are hated as the old colonial power. American troops have left. It’s a free country for the taking.”

FULL STORY: Newsweek (August 2018)

Deep in the heart of Africa, a dedicated group of rangers patrol the Chinko nature reserve. In baking equatorial heat, they are weighed down with body armour and camouflage fatigues. Beads of sweat run down their faces; mosquitos whine. The men keep watch over a vast patchwork of savanna and rainforest in the Central African Republic – a country mired in civil strife and one of the many frontlines of a poaching war that spans the continent and reaches across the globe.

Chinko’s rangers are the guardians of an ecosystem that is home to a rich variety of species. These include buffalos, chimpanzees, forest elephants, leopards, lions and the icon of this park, the giant eland – an imposing antelope.

With no permanent human settlement, the land around the Chinko river basin offers one of the largest intact wildernesses in central Africa. But these rangers face an array of dangers: poachers, rebel militants, cattle herders, diamond miners. All of these intruders are well-armed and determined to rip out the resources from this remote sanctuary.

FULL STORY: The Guardian (August 2018)

Five years ago, when Hassan was 11, militiamen killed his father not far from his home in Kaga Bandoro, a small, cattle-trading town in the Central African Republic, he says. Full of sadness and anger, the boy, a member of the country’s disenfranchised Muslim minority, didn’t believe the courts would deliver justice. The only thing he trusted, he says, was a Kalashnikov.

So, not long after his father’s death, Hassan (identified with a pseudonym for security concerns) joined the Séléka alliance of rebels, a coalition of local and foreign fighters in the civil war, he says. The largely Muslim group seized large swaths of the country in 2013, triggering reprisals from mostly Christian militias called the anti-balaka.

His first job: working as a bodyguard for a commander whose armed group was terrorizing towns across this Texas-sized country, sandwiched between Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Three months later, Hassan says, he was promoted to lieutenant and put in charge of about 50 people, including 10 other children. “At the beginning, I was scared,” he says. “But later, I lost this fear. I got used to holding a gun.”

The rebels also tasked him with recruiting more children, offering him sporadic and meager rewards. “I liked my work,” he says. “On special holidays, I would be given cigarettes and money.”

But as the war raged on, supplies dwindled, and the death toll mounted on both sides. Most nights, he and his platoon slept in the bush. While on guard duty, he says, he shot civilians if they didn’t listen to his commands and stop. “I saw a lot of blood,” he says. “I would be happy after attacking a town. But this feeling went away, and I became scared when I realized that my enemy would come back.”

Today, that bloodshed continues. After a tentative lull in early 2016, the civil war began raging again later that year. The rebel alliance has fragmented into rival factions that fight over mineral resources and trade routes across the Central African Republic. Militias are bolstering their ranks with more kids, as a United Nations–led task force struggles to help thousands of former child soldiers reintegrate into society…

FULL STORY: Newsweek (June 2018)

Politico: Ukraine’s invisible scars (April 2018)

VICE Magazine: Eden Under Siege (April 2018)

Politico: Double exile of Dr Anton (Dec 2017)

The Washington Post: Landmines (November 2017)

Newsweek: Rape of Ukraine (November 2017)

Politico: Ukraine’s fishermen (October 2017)

The Independent: Putin’s Peacekeepers (September 2017)

Politico: Trauma in Ukraine (September 2017)

Witness: Solitude (September 2017)

BBC World Service: I was tortured (July 2017)

The Washington Post: Hundreds missing (June 2017)

The Sunday Times Magazine: POWs (June 2017)

The Washington Post:: Soviet TV (June 2017)

Witness: Rising risks in journalism (June 2017)

Newsweek: Hearts and Binds (April 2017)

The Guardian: Frontline dentists (Feb 2017)

The Washington Post: Right Sector (Feb 2017)

The Independent: Trauma (Jan 2017)

The Telegraph: Winter in Donbas (Dec 2016)

Coda Story: War of words. viral videos (Dec 2016) 

The Telegraph: Organ harvesting (Nov 2016)

Guardian Weekend: Rebel world cup (Oct 2016)

Foreign Policy: Donbas warlords (Oct 2016)

Slate + Roads and Kingdoms: Carpathians (Oct 2016)

The Telegraph: Motorola (Oct 2016)

Washington Post: Black market (Oct 2016)

Washington Post: New purge (Oct 2016)

The Telegraph: Back to school (Sept 2016)

The Times: LNR purge (Sept 2016)

The Times: Zaitseve (Aug 2016)

Washington Post: Independence Day (Aug 2016)

Washington Post: Opera singer killed (July 2016)

The Independent: Alt World Cup (June 2016)

Washington Post: Environmental disaster June 2016)

VICE News: Avdiivka (April 2016)

The Times: Prom Zone (April 2016)

NPR: Landmines (April 2016)

The Guardian: Landmines (April 2016)

VICE News: Savchenko jailed (March 2016)

VICE News: Palaces of Propaganda (March 2016)

VICE News: Smugglers (Feb 2016)

PRI: Night Wolves radio interview (Feb 2015)

VICE News: Paranoia and Purges (Feb 2016)

The Guardian Weekend Magazine: The Night Wolves (Jan 2016)

The Guardian Documentary: The Night Wolves (Jan 2016)

The Times: 'Putin reinforces rebels' (Dec 2015)

Indy on Sunday: Soviet nostalgia (Dec 2015)

VICE News: ISIS goes shopping? (Dec 2015)

Indy on Sunday: UN lifeline runs out (Nov 2015)

VICE News: Ukraine’s Forgotten War (Nov 2015)

The Times: Defections (Nov 2015)

VICE News: Crimea goes dark (Nov 2015)

The Times: Underfed, under attack (Nov 2015)

The Times: Clashes at airport (Nov 2015)

The Times : Fighting erupts along front (Nov 2015)

The Guardian: Rebels grow restless (Nov 2015)

VICE News: Ammo dump dispatch (Oct 2015)

The Guardian: Ammo dump explosion (Oct 2015)

VICE News: Fraud & Chewie's arrest mar elections (Oct 2015) 

Indy on Sunday: Corruption fears cloud elections (Oct 2015)

The Guardian: Ukraine rebels expel MSF (Oct 2015)

The Independent: Maidan poster girl to clean up Odessa (Oct 2015)

The Independent: Ukraine: the battle for the truth (August 2015)

Indy on Sunday: Red tape of war (August 2015)

VICE News: Independence Day (August 2015)

The Independent: Both sides hiding weapons (August 2015) 

VICE News: Ukraine's mystery battle (August 2015)

The Guardian: Rebels overhaul education (August 2015)

VICE News: The Chechen battling Russia (August 2015)

The Times: From Our Correspondent (August 2015)

The Guardian: United by separatist derby (August 2015)

The Times: Militia ‘breaching ceasefire’ (August 2015)

VICE News: The Holdouts (July 2015)

The Independent: MH17 (2) (July 2015)

The Independent: MH17 (1) (July 2015)

VICE News: The Cossacks (July 2015)

The Times: Rebels beg Russia for more guns (July 2015)

VICE News: Textbooks and assault rifles (July 2015)

Mail Online: Haunted by MH17 victim (July 2015)

The Times: Rebels rewrite history books (July 2015)

VICE News: Blokpost (July 2015)