Top UN officials said on Thursday that the Central African Republic is in desperate need of a peacekeeping mission, as CAR’s foreign minister broke down during an emotional plea to the UN Security Council to help stop the deadly conflict.
Widespread violence in the former French colony has claimed thousands of lives since Seleka rebels, a coalition of mostly Muslim groups from the north, seized power a year ago. Attacks intensified in December when "anti-Balaka" militias drawn from the majority Christian population stepped up reprisals on Muslims.
Most Muslims have now been driven out of the western half of the country, the UN high commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, said on Thursday.
"Since early December we have effectively witnessed a 'cleansing' of the majority of the Muslim population in western CAR," Guterres told a meeting of the 15-nation UN Security Council.
Guterres – who recently travelled to the country – told the council he does “not remember any visit in my eight-year tenure that caused me more anguish”.
“I was deeply shocked by the barbarity, brutality and inhumanity that have characterised the violence in this country,” he said.
‘Too much emotion’
The bleak warning came as CAR’s interim foreign minister pleaded with the UN Security Council to urgently approve a UN peacekeeping force.
CAR needs a UN peacekeeping force “for survival,” Toussaint Kongo-Doudou said.
Switching to English from French at the end of his address, Kongo-Doudou made an emotional final plea to the council. “Please, we need your help,” he said. “Think about the kids, the girls being raped, the people being killed. Too much emotion…I’m sorry.”
UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, who has also recently travelled to CAR, said that “the violence has led to the total breakdown of the state, locally and nationally”.
Amos told the council that there are more than 650,000 people internally displaced in CAR due to the conflict, over 232,000 in the capital Bangui alone, and that the government “has no capacity to stop the spiral of violence”.
‘Very high risk’
The council is considering a UN proposal for a nearly 12,000-strong peacekeeping force, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Despite funding concerns from the US and UK, the council is expected to approve the deployment – backed by a report by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon – in a vote sponsored by France by the end of the month. But the UN force would likely not be operational before late summer.
"Just last week, there were about 15,000 people trapped in 18 locations in western CAR, surrounded by anti-Balaka elements and at very high risk of attack," Guterres said.
"International forces are present in some of these sites, but if more security is not made available immediately, many of these civilians risk being killed right before our eyes."
‘Demon of religious cleansing’
Guterres said that until last year CAR "was largely a stranger to religious conflict". But the worsening bloodshed has enabled armed groups to use religion as a pretext for violence."The demon of religious cleansing must be stopped – now," he said.
UN peacekeeping chief Hervé Ladsous called for urgently sending "rapid and generous financial support" to MISCA – the 6,000-strong African Union force already in Central Africa.
"The state has virtually no capacity to manage the massive array of threats it is facing," Ladsous said. "There is no national army and the remnants of the police and gendarmerie lack the basic equipment and means to exercise their duties, while state administration is largely absent."
There are also some 2,000 French soldiers there. Most of the future UN force is expected to come from the current ranks of MISCA.
Aid efforts are also dramatically underfunded, officials said, with just 16 percent of the $551 million the UN has requested.
