Death, Diamonds and Russia's Africa Project
By Leonid Bershidsky
August 4, 2018, 9:00 AM EDT
The murder of three Russian journalists last week in a remote area of the Central African Republic, the world’s poorest country according to the World Bank, has turned a spotlight on what looks like a big Kremlin play for influence and resources in Africa. Where China has spent decades and billions of dollars trying to entrench itself there, Russia is offering its brute force and strong appetite for risk. It’s already making headway.
The three journalists, Orkhan Dzhemal, Alexander Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko, were in the Central African Republic working on an investigative film about the Wagner private military company. That's a secretive Russian contractor linked by news reports to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg catering entrepreneur close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin is also one of 12 people indicted in the U.S. along with the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm he funded that has been caught up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Wagner has provided mercenaries to fight in the eastern Ukraine and Syria, and it’s probably also present in the Central African Republic and neighboring Sudan.
... Africa Intelligence, a Paris-based investigative and research outfit, reported in July that the government of the Central African Republic had begun extracting diamonds on an alluvial site not far from the capital, Bangui, with the help of a company called Lobaye Invest. The company, according to Africa Intelligence, is a subsidiary of the St. Petersburg firm M Invest, founded by Prigozhin. Africa Intelligence reported that Wagner fighters were delivering mining equipment to the site in armored trucks. At the same time, Touadera’s Russian advisers are helping the president negotiate a truce with various groups that used to be part of the Muslim rebel movement, Seleka ...
the three Russian reporters died while trying to drive out to a gold mine, apparently to check on Russian presence there. The circumstances of their death are still unclear: The driver of their vehicle, who survived, keeps changing his testimony. But even though the journalists didn’t live to tell their story, they were known well enough in Russia to turn attention to Wagner. Dzhemal was one of Russia’s top war reporters, known for his intrepid coverage of the Russian operation against Georgia in 2008 and the Libyan conflict of 2011, in which he nearly lost a leg. Rastorguev was a documentary filmmaker known for his bold experiments, which often included giving a camera to subjects to record their daily lives. He was one of the two creators of The Term, the essential documentary depiction of the 2011-2012 political protests in Russia ...
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-04/russia-in-africa-death-diamonds-and-intrigue
