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GENEVA. — A senior UN humanitarian official warned yesterday of the risk of genocide in Central African Republic without a massive scaling up in the international response to the crisis.The country descended into chaos last year after a Muslim rebel coalition, Séléka, seized power, unleashing a wave of killings and looting that in turn sparked revenge attacks by the “anti-balaka” Christian militia.
“It has all the elements that we have seen elsewhere, in places like Rwanda and Bosnia. The elements are there, the seeds are there, for a genocide. There’s no question about that,” John Ging, director of operations for the UN Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told a news conference in Geneva.
Ging, just back from a five-day trip to the country, said the crisis was foreseen, avoidable and produced by the international community’s neglect over many years.
A UN human rights spokesman said earlier this week that inter-communal violence had risen to “extraordinary vicious levels”, but Ging said it was incorrect to describe the situation as inter-communal violence, although an extremely violent minority were intent on inciting a wider conflict.
“The communities are not in conflict with each other,” Ging said. “There are people from each of the communities who are conducting atrocities against people from the other community.
“And they are doing it in the name of their communities, but they’re not representing their communities.”
He said the population of 4.5 million was being polarised.
In the town of Bossangoa, some of the country’s 866 000 displaced people were living in camps within sight of their homes, but were “subsisting in squalor” because they were too scared to go home.
Ging said the country was now little more than a territory on a map, without the infrastructure of a state. The police and army have disintegrated, leaving 1 600 French and 4 000 African Union peace keepers to try to prevent violence.
The US military was to begin flying Rwandan troops into the Central African Republic, possibly starting yesterday, in its second such operation in support the African Union’s efforts to stem bloodshed there, an American official said on Wednesday.
The US official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the airlift operation could last just over a month and would involve two US military C-17 aircraft.
The airlift mission would be very similar to the one the United States carried out flying forces from Burundi into the Central African Republic late last year, the official said.
Rwanda’s foreign minister has been quoted telling local radio that the country would send around 800 troops. The US aircraft would fly out of Uganda into Rwanda’s capital Kigali, where they would load before proceeding onto Bangui in the Central African Republic, the official said.
France’s UN envoy said on Wednesday that the level of hatred in Central African Republic between Muslims and Christians had been underestimated and is creating a “nearly impossible” situation for African Union and French forces to combat.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to submit a report to the Security Council next month with recommendations for a possible UN peacekeeping force that would take over from the African troops. — Reuters.
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