Access to and Interpretation of Sources. Access to resources for the present research has been a challenge. As discussed above (section 1.4), studies on the military in Francophone Central Africa are few and far between. Material had to be extracted piecemeal in tangential fields such as area studies and recent policy work on SSR. Primary data for the countries chosen for this study were similarly scarce and difficult to access, given the sensitivity of the subject. Written and systematically ordered material on the colonial, the immediate post-independence period and, in some cases, even more recent times is only available in archives in France and Belgium, the former colonial powers who are still the key security partners of the respective countries. The Archives militaires in Château de Vincennes and the Foreign Ministry Archives in Brussels have been systematically exploited. Research in Cameroon yielded a few sources held by the National Archives and to the extent practical the University II in Yaoundé, but no additional official archives since the Cameroonian Ministry of Defence does not hold historic or organisational documentation – or at least the latter is not accessible.102 Neither Rwanda nor the DRC could provide significant official sources as, in the former, much of the archives were deliberately destroyed by the retreating governmental forces in 1994 and, in the latter, the two great lootings of 1991 and 1993 liquidated many of the few documents that had been collected, in a more or less systematic way, after 1960. In the three countries themselves, research therefore had to rely primarily on interviews with competent persons, many of them directly involved. For instance military or former military personnel or police officers, civilian authorities in security ministries, parliamentarians, Western and international 102 Officially there is one officer in charge of historic documentation, located in the MoD in Yaoundé, but nobody at the ministry could actually point out his whereabouts or contact details military and conflict advisors, and, to the extent possible, members of local communities. Other interviews were carried out with local academics in the three countries. Semi-structured interview techniques were used. All interviews were both a tool for oral information gathering and for the collection of unpublished written sources, some of them belonging to the grey literature not authenticated by the post-1994 regime, others being private papers, and still others official document...
