The UN’s humanitarian chief, Valerie Amos, warned the UN Security Council last week that the Central African Republic (CAR) was in danger of becoming a failed state if swift action was not taken soon to restore security.
That must have been a case of typical British understatement. No doubt “failed state” is a relative term. But CAR was by any reasonable measure a huge failure as a state before Seleka rebels overran the country in March, ousting President François Bozizé – and killing 13 South African soldiers.
Since then, as the UN Security Council put it, there has been a complete breakdown in law and order and widespread human rights violations – mostly by Seleka rebels.
They are raping, plundering and murdering civilians with complete impunity.
The violence has become even uglier as the largely Muslim Seleka rebels from the north-east of the country are also burning churches in the mostly Christian south-west.
The self-proclaimed president, Seleka leader Michel Djotodia, is unwilling or unable to control his men and is at odds with Prime Minister Nicolas Tiangaye, who is supposed to be guiding the country through a transition back to democracy and order.
The International Crisis Group has warned that the widening instability is turning the country into an ungoverned space at the heart of the continent.
That security vacuum is providing an ever-safer haven for political or just criminal groups from the entire region.
The International Crisis Group said the nasty Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony, which had operated in the CAR for years, was expanding its operations.
It warned that because of Seleka’s Muslim character, the CAR could become a convenient rear base for regional Muslim extremists.
No one is doing anything effective to restore order.
After the Seleka takeover, the Economic Community of Central African States (Eccas) held several emergency summits and decided a larger regional force was needed to restore order to allow the transitional process, which had begun before Seleka ousted Bozizé, to go ahead.
The AU’s Peace and Security Council authorised a larger force, the African-led International Support Mission in the Central African Republic, to replace Eccas’s peacekeeping force, which failed to stop Seleka seizing the country.
But central African experts believe the new mission is “a typical AU fiction” and is likely to remain so for a long time.
They say only Burundi – which is always trying to export its soldiers to keep them out of mischief at home – has volunteered troops and there is little appetite in the international community to provide the necessary funding, not least because of its preoccupation with Mali.
The South African government was raring to go back into the CAR after its humiliating retreat when Seleka rebels killed 13 of our soldiers as they moved in to topple Bozizé in March (two soldiers died of their injuries later).
President Jacob Zuma’s office said then that Eccas leaders had asked South Africa to participate in the new peacekeeping force it was contemplating for the CAR and that the government would consider this request favourably if and when it was made formally.
But now it is not so clear that South Africa would want to participate as it has just deployed more than 1 000 personnel in the potentially hazardous intervention brigade that is tasked to pacify the armed rebels in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
The International Crisis Group is concerned that now that the drama of the March coup and revolution has passed, Africa and the world are once again forgetting the CAR. Crisis group researchers Thibaud Lesueur and Thierry Vircoulon have written in an article that the regional steering committee, led by Republic of Congo president, Sassou Nguesso, and is supposed to be guiding the CAR transition, has not met.
They called on the CAR’s squabbling leaders, the region, the AU and the international community to refocus their attention on the CAR before this vortex at the heart of the continent spiralled out of control.