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Bangui — Gunmen killed about 15 people, including children, in an attack on a town in Central African Republic near the border with Chad, a local official and aid workers said yesterday. The raid in the town of Markounda on Friday was about 30 km from the site of an attack on a health clinic run by medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres last week which killed 16 people.
It coincided with a visit by UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous who is in the country for three days ahead of the deployment of a 12,000-strong mission in mid-September.
Despite the presence of French and African peacekeepers, thousands have died in inter-communal violence in the vast, former French colony and close to a million have been displaced.
Explosions were reported in eastern Markounda mid-afternoon and shortly afterwards a group of armed men wearing both military and civilian clothes entered the town and began looting and attacking residents, said the local official.
“We estimate at around 15 the number of people killed, including men, women and children. Markounda is now empty as the inhabitants have fled into the bush, the fields and neighbouring villages,” Lucien Mbaigoto, deputy prefect for the town, said on Friday.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attacks. Mbaigoto said the killers were speaking in Arabic and Fulani, the language of local herdsmen.
Peter Bouckaert, emergency director of Human Rights Watch, said on Twitter on Friday that 13 had been killed, including eight children.
The mainly Muslim Seleka forces seized the capital Bangui in March 2013, setting off a wave of killing and looting that prompted the Christian majority to form self-defence militia, known as “anti-balaka”.
The number of revenge attacks on Muslims has increased since January when Seleka was forced to step down under international pressure for failing to establish authority over the poor, landlocked country.
The northern region close to the border with Chad has received thousands of displaced Muslims from the south as part of a segregation policy that aid workers say is designed to protect them.
Earlier this week, a convoy carrying thousands of Muslims from Bangui to the north was ambushed and two people were killed.
Amy Martin, head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Bangui, said several armed groups were active in the border area including Seleka fighters who had formed alliances with armed Fulani herdsmen.
Meanwhile, the director of UN humanitarian operations says the mood in Central African Republic is turning to “resignation” amid ethnic cleansing and thousands of deaths, and he warns that the international community has not sent enough security forces or funding to change the situation.
John Ging told reporters at the UN on Thursday, “We have so far failed the people of CAR.”
Ging briefed on his first visit to the country in three months, and he says there has been a “very significant deterioration”, with 2,000 people killed in that time.
Central African Republic faces unprecedented sectarian violence, and Ging said people now blame Christians or Muslims instead of simply “armed groups” as before.
He said just 28 percent of an international funding appeal for the crisis has been met. — AP
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