WHEN the rebels came to the Central African Republic city of Bangassou, the area’s top official Pierrette Benguere was forced to hole up in a UN base for a month.
Now Bangassou, formerly home to around 30,000 people, is a ghost town, its plight symbolic not only of the recent rebellion but also of a long-running struggle to reassert the presence of the state in a country where most of the territory is lawless.
For Benguere to speak to the people of Bangassou, the capital of the Mbomou prefecture of which she is the top representative, she went not to the city, but the forest that surrounds it.
Thousands of families who fled the violence have dug in there, cutting branches to weave shelters in the forest around 700 kilometres (435 miles) east of the capital Bangui.
They are among the 200,000 people displaced after six of the 14 armed
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