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Chapter 60: Wagner VI: The Blood Diamonds of Berengo: Plunder, Terror, and the Russian Way of War

Before the Russians came, Adé’s world, though small, hard, and perpetually coated in a film of fine red dust, was his own. His life, and the life of his entire village, revolved around the artisanal gold mine at Ndassima. It was not a mine in the industrial sense, but a dizzying, hand-dug labyrinth of narrow, precarious shafts reinforced with scavenged wood, descending deep into the red earth like the burrows of giant insects. The work was brutally dangerous; the air grew thin and hot the deeper you went, and tunnel collapses were a constant, terrifying possibility. Every day was a gamble against suffocation and rockfall. But it was their gamble to take. The small, dull flecks of gold Adé carefully washed from the soil in a rusty pan bought his family millet from the market, medicine when his daughter had a fever, and a measure of dignity that came from providing for one's own. In the evenings, the men would return from the shafts, their bodies aching, and share stories and palm wine, their lives intertwined with the earth beneath their feet.

He remembers the day the earth was stolen from them. He was working at the surface when the sound came—not the familiar pop-pop of a hunter's rifle, but the deep, sustained rumble of heavy engines. A column of dusty, sand-colored technicals, pickups with heavy machine guns bolted to their beds, came over the rise and ground to a halt at the edge of the mine workings. The men who dismounted were giants, silent, heavily armed white men, their faces hidden behind dark glasses and thick beards, their movements economical and predatory. A local man, a collaborator from a nearby town, stepped forward with a megaphone. The mine, he announced in a flat, emotionless voice, was now the property of the state, under the exclusive protection of their Russian partners. Everyone had one hour to leave.

The village elder, a man with skin like wrinkled parchment, stepped forward, his hands open in a gesture of confused appeal. He tried to explain that this land had belonged to their ancestors, that the mine was their only livelihood. The Russian commander, a man with a chest like a barrel and cold, dead eyes, did not wait for the translation. He gave a curt, bored nod to one of his men. A moment later, there was a hollow thump, and a mortar round, fired from the back of a truck, arced through the sky and slammed directly into the mouth of the main mineshaft. The resulting explosion was a deep, guttural roar from the belly of the earth. The shaft collapsed in a cloud of red dust, burying at least a dozen men who were still working below. It was not an act of passion; it was a business decision, a terrifyingly clear and brutally efficient "no trespassing" sign. As the villagers scattered in panic, their screams drowned out by the laughter of the mercenaries, the message was understood. The land was no longer theirs.

A year later, his family starving, Adé made the long, perilous journey south to Berengo. The stories whispered on the roads were of work, of money, a desperate rumor that the Russians who had stolen the mines were now hiring laborers. The destination itself was a place of legend: the crumbling, ghost-haunted former palace of the notoriously brutal Emperor Bokassa, a place children whispered about in horror stories. When he arrived, he found it had been reborn as something even more monstrous. It was a bustling fortress in the middle of the jungle, a surreal hive of military activity and industrial plunder. Desperate, he was accepted as a day laborer.

His new life was a waking nightmare. The palace itself was a grotesque tableau: Bokassa's decaying, kitsch-filled audience chambers were now military barracks filled with Russian soldiers; the parade ground was a muddy training field where Russian instructors brutally drilled terrified C.A.R. army recruits; the elegant gardens were a junk-yard of wrecked vehicles and heavy machinery. Adé's days were spent under the relentless sun, his muscles screaming as he loaded rough-cut, illegally harvested lumber onto ancient Antonov cargo planes that landed on the adjacent airstrip. At night, he would see other laborers, men like him, being dragged into metal shipping containers near the edge of the compound, containers that had been converted into makeshift interrogation sheds. He would lie on his thin mat, trying to block out their screams, muffled but distinct, that would often go on for hours. He saw men taken into the bush who never came back. He witnessed the casual, bored cruelty of his Russian overseers, their sudden fits of rage, the way they treated the local workers not as humans, but as a slightly more versatile form of livestock. He learned to keep his head down, to make himself invisible, to be a ghost in his own enslaved land.

The chapter closes with Adé standing at the edge of the sprawling compound at dusk, waiting to be paid his pitiful wage. In the center of the dusty parade ground, a formal ceremony is taking place. He watches as the mercenaries, standing at attention, hoist a flag up a newly erected pole. It is not the green, white, yellow, and blue flag of his country. He had not seen a C.A.R. flag anywhere on the compound, not once. Instead, as the evening breeze catches the fabric, he sees the white, blue, and red horizontal stripes of the Russian tricolor. He looks at the flag, he listens to the faint but unmistakable sound of a man screaming from one of the containers, he thinks of the gold being loaded onto the planes, and he understands, with a clarity that offers no hope, that this flag is not the symbol of a distant, proud nation. It is the corporate logo of a brutal, criminal enterprise that has consumed his country whole.

The Discourse 60: The Business of Terror

60.1 The Campaign of Terror
While Wagner’s presence in the Central African Republic (C.A.R.) is often framed in the geopolitical context of great power competition, the reality on the ground is one of a brutal, systematic campaign of terror waged against the civilian population. This is not simply a case of ill-disciplined mercenaries; it is a deliberate and central element of their business model. Wagner's extreme violence is not random; it is a calculated strategy of market control, designed to terrorize local populations into abandoning valuable mining regions and to eliminate any perceived dissent or opposition to their industrial-scale plunder. This campaign of terror has been extensively documented by the UN Panel of Experts for the C.A.R., Human Rights Watch, and numerous other non-governmental organizations. Their reports have catalogued a horrifying litany of war crimes and crimes against humanity attributed to Wagner operatives, often working alongside the C.A.R. army (FACA). This includes specific, named massacres in towns like Bambari (February 2021) and the village of Boyo (December 2021), where dozens of unarmed civilians were summarily executed. See [citation 1]. Further reports document a widespread pattern of torture, gang rape, and the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons and incendiary munitions in civilian areas. See [citation 2].

60.2 The Business of Terror: An Integrated Model
Crucially, the terror and the plunder are not separate activities; they are two sides of the same coin in a single, integrated business model. The massacres are not an unfortunate byproduct of the conflict; they are a prerequisite for Wagner’s economic success. The timeline of events repeatedly shows that Wagner’s most brutal "counter-insurgency" operations take place in and around areas with the richest gold and diamond deposits. After a village is "cleared" through a campaign of terror, driving out the local population and artisanal miners, Wagner-controlled front companies, like Lobaye Invest, move in to begin their industrial mining and extraction operations with impunity. See [citation 3]. This brutal nexus of violence and profit is the horrifying genius of the Wagner model: they are not just a mercenary group and a mining corporation; they are a vertically integrated enterprise where one division (the military wing) violently seizes assets that the other division (the corporate wing) then loots.

60.3 Mapping the Empire of Plunder
The scale of this looting represents a complete, colonial-style economic takeover of the C.A.R.'s most valuable resources. Beyond the headline-grabbing gold and diamond mines like Ndassima, investigative reports from organizations like The Sentry and the Blood Gold Report have mapped a diversified corporate empire that has penetrated nearly every profitable sector of the Central African economy. This includes front companies established to control the lucrative timber trade (such as Bois Rouge), the export of coffee, and even the domestic alcohol market. In a move of brazen vertical integration, Wagner launched its own beer ("Africa Ti L'Or") and vodka ("Wa Na Wa") brands, produced by a front company called the First Industrial Company, specifically to compete with and displace the long-dominant French-owned brand, Castel. See [citation 4]. This demonstrates a sophisticated strategy to capture revenue at every level of the economy, from raw resource extraction to the sale of consumer goods.

60.4 Berengo: The Heart of Darkness
The former palace of the notoriously brutal dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa at Berengo serves as the ultimate, chilling symbol of the entire Wagner enterprise. Under Wagner's control, this site of past atrocities was repurposed and became the operational heart of their neocolonial project. Berengo functioned simultaneously as a major military barracks for Wagner troops and their FACA proxies, a training center for new recruits, a notorious interrogation and torture facility documented by human rights groups, and the corporate headquarters for a vast, illicit, multi-billion-dollar resource extraction operation. The adjacent airstrip served as a key logistical hub, allowing military cargo planes to fly in weapons and fly out gold, diamonds, and timber, bypassing any customs or state oversight. See [citation 2]. The Berengo palace is the physical manifestation of the Wagner model: a place where extreme violence and immense profit are co-located and inextricably linked. It is the chilling blueprint for what Russia's "multipolar world" looks like in practice on the ground: a network of captured, lawless, and ruthlessly exploited corporate-states, run from the shadows for the sole benefit of the Kremlin and its clients, all under the veneer of "fighting terrorism" and "promoting stability."