President of the Central African Republic (CAR), Faustin-Archange Touadéra has blamed Western nations for deliberately keeping his country politically unstable, days after he met French President Emmanuel Macron.
Speaking at a UN conference of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) on Sunday in Qatar, Touadéra said “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.”
Soldiers from the Russian mercenary group Wagner, and CAR troops have been criticised for terrible human rights violations, leading to EU sanctions being imposed on some of the group’s senior operative mercenaries in the country.
President Touadéra added that the Central African Republic was a “victim of geostrategic aims linked to its natural resources”, and that “foreign interference” keeps his country and others like it in a state of “dependence, insecurity and instability”.
France maintained close economic and military ties to its former colony since independence before CAR recently switched to Russia.