For years, anyone landing in the capital of the Central Africa Republic was greeted by the sight of tens of thousands of people living in old aeroplanes and tattered tents in a refugee camp that had taken over the city’s airport.

With at least 100,000 residents at its peak, this city within a city became a defining image of the prolonged sectarian conflict in CAR, a war largely ignored by outsiders.

Almost half of Bangui’s 800,000 residents fled to informal camps in 2013 after fighting erupted between Muslim and Christian militias, and president François Bozizé escaped the country in 2013.

At first the new arrivals at M’Poko international airport thought they would stay for just a few days. Three years later, it had become their home, and had developed a semi-formal city-like structure.



Divided into 13 districts, the camp was run by community leaders; it had restaurants, running water, a makeshift school, shops and a gym assembled from rubble. In three years, 5,807 babies were born there.

But in December 2016, the government razed the camp. Ruling that an adequate level of peace had been restored across the city, residents were given between 50,000-100,000 Central African francs (CFA) – between £67 and £133 – to return to their homes.

Although life on the edges of the runway was unsanitary and dangerous at times – armed gangs patrolled nightly; malarial mosquitoes were rife – some former residents say the conditions were better than than those back in Bangui.

Children at M’Poko airport camp – some 5,800 babies were born there during the three years it was open. Photograph: Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images

Gisele Bedani, a 52-year-old Christian, arrived at M’Poko in 2013 after murderous gangs descended on her neighbourhood.

“I knew the killers – they lived in the area. But I thought to myself, these are people I know, they won’t hurt me,” she recalls. But the next morning, Aja, her Muslim neighbour, told her: “If you hear the prayer at 12.45, use that time to run.”

Now everyone is dispersed. It is a catastrophe all over again Gisele Bedani

Bedani took her advice and fled to the airport with her children. “People were afraid, they were so hungry, they were crying. Everyone was in a panic,” she said.

Shortly after arriving at the camp she set up a restaurant selling local food. As time went on it became popular, and helped her to support the seven children in her care – four of her own, and three of her former neighbour’s children.

But Bedani has struggled to survive since M’Poko’s destruction. She found that her home in Boulata, in the city’s third arrondissement, was almost unliveable, and was forced to move her family to a rented shack, for which she pays £30 a month. She does not know how much longer she will be able to afford it.

The city was ranked the second to worst city in the world for quality of life, after Baghdad, according to a 2017 global survey. Many of M’Poko’s residents returned to find their homes destroyed and hospitals out of reach – their makeshift community had disappeared overnight.

Gisele Bedani in the courtyard of her former home. It is now uninhabitable. Photograph: Inna Lazareva

Alpha Bedan, 27, was another of the camp’s entrepreneurs. In 2013 he set up a cinema there, screening films on a projector in a tent. With an entrance fee of 50 CFA (5p) and a different film screening every two hours, the fun and escapism it offered proved popular. Now, Bedan lives in a tent pitched outside his former house, selling groceries from a stall.

With little assistance from the stretched city authorities, NGOs are stepping in to help ease the transition following the camp’s closure. The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has agreed to build 600 houses in Bangui, while the French aid agency Première Urgence Internationale have pledged to build 900 shelters for internally displaced people in the city in the next year.

But more than just homes are needed. Much of the city lives without electricity, and a quarter of residents don’t have access to clean water. In Bangui’s Fondo neighbourhood, young women stand over a muddy sewage ditch holding empty plastic containers to collect water from a burst pipe. “We left here three years ago to go to the M’Poko site,” says Michel Dambeti, the local chief, watching them fill their cans. “Now we’re back and it’s even worse. It’s raining, there are no homes, there’s nothing to do, there’s no food, there are health problems … imagine living in this.”

During the height of the crisis, when more than 1,000 people were killed in one week, some of the water wells were stuffed with corpses – a solution chosen over hastily burying the bodies, which could rise up from their shallow graves in heavy rains. Isidore Ngueuleu, who works for Oxfam in the city, estimates that “almost 18% of the available wells in the [Bangui] neighbourhoods are polluted by dead bodies”.

Boniface Kamara, who is in his 30s, lives next to one of these water wells. No one knows how many bodies are inside, he said, only that once it was 10 metres deep, and today it’s almost full. Kamara says he doesn’t mind living so close to the well, but for others it’s a permanent reminder of the murder and destruction. “On this path, here, a young man was killed,” says cheif Dambeti, pointing ahead. “And behind my house, a pastor from the church was killed in front of his children.”

“M’poko was a bit like a prison,” adds Bedani. “The conditions were difficult. But there were so many of us – we did gardening, we had our businesses, people were able to sell, to buy. Now everyone is dispersed. It is a catastrophe all over again.”

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