Why Putin’s Private Army Ordered Soldiers to Torture Me

BÉLOKO, Central African Republic—They were all wearing military fatigues and armed with Kalashnikovs when they showed up suddenly at about 5 o’clock one Friday evening at the start of December. The four men were soldiers from the Central African Armed Forces (FACA) who drove right up to where I was interviewing about a dozen people hoping to get cross the border.

Among those I was interviewing were a couple of artisanal miners who had gathered in front of a security checkpoint in the Central African Republic (CAR) border town of Béloko. It is the country’s first customs checkpoint on the trade corridor linking the capital, Bangui, to the Cameroonian port city of Douala. A number of them had lost their homes following the fighting between rebels and Russian paramilitaries supported by FACA forces, and were hoping to find refuge in Cameroon.

Suddenly, four gun-wielding soldiers appeared from nowhere, rushed me, and started to drag me away. I began to scream for help but the civilians around, including those I was interviewing, were too scared to intervene. Two armed Russian paramilitaries, who came to the scene when they heard me screaming, encouraged the soldiers to assault me, telling the FACA officials to beat me up until I confessed to being a criminal. When one elderly man courageously asked the soldiers why they were dragging me away on a stony road, one of them replied: “He’s a terrorist.”

I didn’t resist their arrest, yet the soldiers manhandled me in such a brutal way that anyone watching would think I did not want to be apprehended. By the time we got to a nearby military outpost close to a customs checkpoint, there were bruises on my hands and legs.

FACA soldiers and Russian paramilitaries are very visible and active in Béloko. The town is the CAR’s main source of customs. About 80 percent of the country’s imports, including supplies from Russia, pass through here. A year ago, militants from the Coalition of Patriots for Change (CPC)—a fusion of major rebel groups in CAR— destroyed dozens of vehicles in Béloko, burned fuel stocks and razed the customs office. Two mercenaries from the Russian Wagner Group deployed to CAR and at least two other civilians were killed in the incident.

In September, three months before I arrived in Béloko, FACA soldiers and Russian paramilitaries repelled an armed attack against the town by CPC rebels. A civilian was shot and injured, and many houses were damaged during the incident. There were allegations that Russian paramilitaries, who continue to exert influence over the CAR’s security agencies, tortured a number of locals as they searched for the militants. It was also claimed that they were in the business of collecting bribes from drivers that transported goods from Cameroon. I was investigating the allegations when the soldiers seized me.

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When we arrived at the military outpost, soldiers flogged me with whips and accused me of spying on them. I denied that I had done that. The soldiers then seized my phone and camera and began to search the contents of the devices. They saw nothing in them. I had cleared and backed up the files before I arrived in Béloko and had not even started recording anyone at the customs checkpoint when I was arrested.

I had arrived in Béloko the previous day after a long road trip from Douala through the Cameroonian border town of Garoua-Boulaï to dig into Russian operations in the CAR following the death of Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin. My contacts advised me to go near the customs checkpoint in search of locals and transporters who may be willing to speak about their experiences with the Russians, who’ve been active in the CAR since the government turned to Moscow for help in securing arms and paramilitaries in 2017.

The CAR is a very dangerous place to be a journalist. In the last decade, a number of reporters have been killed while carrying out their work. The list includes local journalists Elisabeth Blanche Olofio, Désiré Luc Sayenga, and René Padou; French photojournalist Camille Lepage; and three Russian investigative reporters—Orkhan Dzhemal, Kirill Radchenko and Alexander Rastorguyev—who traveled to the country in 2018 to report on the presence of Wagner paramilitaries.

According to Reporters Without Borders, journalists are often subjected to pressure, threats, violence or cyber-harassment, and reporters who interview other parties to the country’s decade-long conflict are routinely treated as spies or as accomplices of the various armed groups. In recent years, there’s been a surge in disinformation, spread by trolls linked to Russia.

The soldiers who confiscated my equipment at the military outpost found nothing else on me. I had left my passport at the small guest house where I lodged, so they couldn’t tell that I was a foreigner, but they still wouldn’t let me go. I was in pain—bruises all over my body, a dislocated wrist and a swollen upper eyelid. I couldn’t answer or even comprehend the questions they asked me. It felt as if I was unconscious. That may have been my saving grace. Had the soldiers first interrogated me rather than manhandle me in the way they did, they would probably have known I was a foreign journalist, as I would likely have confessed out of fear.

I was detained in a very small room with a tiny window inside a cargo container throughout the night. The room had no electricity and soldiers offered me no food or water. I didn’t have the appetite for either. Very early in the morning, at about 6 a.m., the commercial motorcyclist who took me to the customs checkpoint the previous day and witnessed how I was treated arrived with a soldier—a close friend of his from a different military unit in Béloko—who successfully pleaded with his colleagues to release me.

There was no apology or regret from the soldiers, rather they said I was lucky I hadn’t been killed. “No one who’s detained here gets out of here alive,” one soldier said.

To make matters worse, they refused to return my phone and camera to me, claiming that they couldn’t find where they were kept. I left without my most important equipment, but was incredibly grateful to be alive.

CAR forces, working closely with Russian paramilitaries, have a history of torturing and murdering civilians at checkpoints. In June 2021, FACA soldiers and Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group set up a roadblock in the northwestern town of Bossangoa, stopped a dozen men on motorbikes, beat and shot them dead, and then put at least eight of the bodies in a shallow hole next to the road, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Around the same period, FACA soldiers unlawfully detained 21 men they accused of being rebels in inhumane conditions in an open hole at a national army base in the southern town of Alindao, according to HRW. Witnesses told the organization that both national army and Russian-speaking forces beat five of the men and may have executed two who were rebel combatants.

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As soon as I returned to the guest house at the outskirts of Béloko, a local nurse was invited to treat the wounds I had sustained. He could only administer first aid treatment. It was the best medical care I could immediately get in a town with no standard hospital or easy access to prescription drugs. Still my dislocated wrist and swollen upper eyelid needed close examination, and only a long trip back to the Cameroon capital, Yaoundé, or Douala that could take at least two days on motorbikes and commercial vehicles along very bad roads would guarantee that.

I managed to get to Garoua-Boulaï the following day but began to feel feverish and so decided not to risk making the very long road trip to Douala. I felt better after taking a dose of aspirin the next morning, by which time, the wounds on my legs and hands had started to heal. I then made a decision to return to CAR to complete my investigation on Russian operations in the country since the death of Prigozhin. So I bought a new phone and camera and returned to the CAR to finish the work I had started.

The attack by Russian paramilitaries on locals in the northwestern CAR town of Koki in which at least 50 villagers were killed became an obsession for me, all the more because the victims were ordinary people who had done nothing wrong. I managed to interview 16 witnesses to the attack.

But I soon faced another hurdle. In mid-December, while departing the northwestern CAR village of Gallo where I had gone to interview a couple of witnesses to the Koki attack, the driver who transported me in a Volkswagen Passat vehicle sighted a group of armed men on the main road leading out of the village and was about to turn the car back to where we came from when the armed men started to shoot in the air. Fearing that the men could open fire at us if he continued in his attempt to avoid them, the driver stopped the vehicle. He then came out of the car with his hands raised as he walked up to the militants to explain to them who we were and why we visited Gallo.

But nothing the driver said to the militants, who accused me of being a foreign spy disguised as a journalist, was enough to let us go right away. We were held for about eight hours and only regained freedom after a higher-up militant arrived, listened to our story and was convinced I was a reporter on a mission to report on the attacks on Koki by Russian paramilitaries and not to spy on CAR rebels as his colleagues had thought.

It was close to midnight when the militants released us. We spent the night in Gallo and were able to travel out of the village the following day. I left the CAR for Cameroon two days after.

My trip to the CAR formed part of my work as Jim Hoge Reporting Fellow. Last April, when the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) asked me if I was interested in completing a three-month reporting project focused on a pressing global issue as part of its newly introduced Jim Hoge Fellowship, I knew straight away what I wanted to do.

I had spent nearly three years investigating and documenting dozens of human rights abuses—including gut-wrenching massacres—by mercenaries from the Russian Wagner Group active in the Central African Republic (CAR) and in Mali, despite threats in an incredibly risky context. In 2022, I became a target of the Wagner Group. Contacts told me that my photo had been circulating on chat groups used by locals recruited by Wagner, who have apparently denounced me as an obstacle “to fighting extremism” in CAR and claimed I’m an agent of the West who should be arrested or killed.

But there was still more to discover about Russia’s involvement in the CAR and no amount of intimidation was going to stop me from continuing my investigation.

Before my exclusive reporting on the Koki massacre, little was known about how Russian paramilitaries operated in the CAR following the demise of the Wagner boss. Who was coordinating Russian operations in the country? How many Russian paramilitaries were in the country? The government—as usual—was silent; Russian paramilitaries and CAR forces prevented journalists from traveling far to seek answers. Villagers were warned never to speak to reporters.

I was determined to overcome those obstacles and get the answers that I so desperately needed. Thankfully, that was achieved.

This story was supported by the International Center for Journalists through the Jim Hoge Fellowship