The commune of Mandritsara was once a populous area in central Madagascar, featuring one of the best hospitals in the country. Now, after two years of civil war, the commune lies in absolute ruins. On December 5, 2007 months after Nathan Petrelli's announcement to the world about the Evolved, the Nation of Madagascar was driven into a panic. Eleven residents of the city of Mandritsara publicly came out to the local government about their Evolved state as an attempt to assuage fears about the Evolved in the country and the world. These eleven individuals were rounded up under orders of General Edmond Rasoul and executed at his estate. That following night, Rasoul organized a group of seven hundred soldiers to converge on the city of Mandritsara and raze it to the ground in fears that there were more than the eleven Evolved hiding out there.
Rasoul's fears were well grounded, as were his reasons for executing the eleven. Several of them were members of an underground resistance organization that was aware of the Vanguard's operations in the regions and were actively undermining their activities, unaware that Rasoul himself was their leader. They went to the General for safety, and instead found death.
After the city of Mandritsara was shelled into a pile of smoldering rubble, then Prime Minister Pascal Ramahatra ordered the borders of the nation closed to all foreign traffic in an attempt to control the flow of information out of the country about the massacre. Rasoul fed false intelligence to the Prime Minister about the Evolved, claiming they made an attempt on his life, and the attack was a necessary precaution for the people, and that there was a "conspiracy" among the "genetic aberrations" of Madagascar to wipe out the "lesser race" of men. This led to a genetic cleansing of the evolved and anyone accused of being Evolved in public executions and brutal violence.
During the Madagascar Liberation War the city was a horrible ruin littered with landmines and corpses buried beneath buildings. The Madagascar Liberation Front (which was born of the anti-vanguard militia operating in secret in Mandritsara) scavenged nearby abandoned communes for supplies and ambush Rasoul's militia for weaponry during the Madagascar Liberation War.
They were based out of a World War II bunker build beneath the ruins of the Mandritsara Hospital, a large concrete structure that is showing its age, slapped together with hodgepodge wiring and generators that constantly need repair. Roughly 25 resistance members were at the base at any one time.
The base had scant medical supplies (basics like first-aid supplies) and a handful of antibiotics and antivirals. They also had a supply of anti-malaria medication that in conjunction with the base's healer can provide remedy for the symptoms and over time cure.
After the end of the Madagascar Liberation War the city of Mandritsara was declared unfit for re-population, and a joint decision by the Malagasy Parliament and members of the Madagascar Liberation Front has turned the ruins of Mandritsara into a memorial to the thousands who lost their lives in the days leading up to the beginning of the civil war.
An eternal flame was constructed to burn in the central plaza of Mandritsara along with a bronze plaque which has been engraved to read, in the native Malagasy tongue, "The peoples of this world are united by their desires to live free and without fear. This flame burns in the memory of those who gave their lives to fight for this freedom and those who perished in the spark that ignited the rebellion."
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