Ange-Félix Patassé
Ange-Félix Patassé was president of the Central African Republic from 1993 to 2003, the first elected in a free vote, the agronomist who had been Bokassa's prime minister in 1976-78 and imperial prime minister before he fell out with the emperor. He won the election of 1993 in the second round against the military president Kolingba's party and Dacko. He won that of 1999 in the first, on the votes of the north and the Sara-speaking peoples of his home region against the southern river peoples who had governed since independence. The ten years were the army mutinies of 1996 and 1997 over unpaid wages, three of them in eighteen months, in which the French garrison fought the mutineers in the streets of Bangui. Then, tired of it, it closed its bases in 1998 and handed the country to an African force and then a UN one. There were the Bangui agreements that were signed and broken, the civil service unpaid for months at a time, and the diamonds and timber that were the state's money and left through the family. There were the coup attempts of May 2001 by Kolingba's men and October 2002 by his own former army chief Bozizé. Against him he called in the Congolese rebel Bemba's militia from across the river and Gaddafi's soldiers, which held the capital for five months with rapes and looting that the International Criminal Court later tried Bemba for. In March 2003 Bozizé's column entered Bangui while Patassé was at a summit in Niger, and he flew to Togo. He was born in Paoua in 1937, the son of a Sara father and a Kaba mother, and studied agronomy in France. He was Bokassa's minister of agriculture, development and then transport from 1966, the longest-serving of the reign, and its prime minister. He founded the Movement for the Liberation of the Central African People in exile in 1979 as the party of the north. He lived in Lomé under Eyadéma's protection. He was tried in absentia in 2006 for embezzlement and sentenced to twenty years. He came home in 2009 under an amnesty and ran for president in January 2011 with twenty per cent against Bozizé. He died in Douala in April 2011 at seventy-four, of diabetes, having been refused an exit visa for treatment until the last week. The north's grievance that he had voiced became the Séléka rebellion of 2013 that removed Bozizé in turn.
- Lived: 1937 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Central African
- Roles: president, politician
