Earlier today, the President of France, Francois Hollande, announced that his country would launch a military operation to stabilize the Central African Republic. “Massacres are taking place at this very moment, even in hospitals,” Hollande warned. “Every day, women and children are being violently abused and thousands of people are being turned into refugees.”
The United Nations Security Council, not known for reaching consensus in helping countries as they disintegrate into madness and depravity, was able to find common ground and just today gave clearance to the French intervention.
Why now? Violence against civilians has escalated to the point that the international community can no longer sit idle. In the past twenty-four hours fighting broke out in the capital city of Bangui, leaving scores dead.
Since March, the resource rich but economically dysfunctional Central African Republic has been following a downward spiral when the predominantly Muslim Seleka rebels overthrew the country’s President, Francois Bozize. While political instability is not new to the country, the Seleka rebels have stoked tensions between the Christian majority and Muslim minority.
Prominent human rights organizations, including New York-based Human Rights Watch, have been documenting the human rights abuses committed by the Seleka rebels against ordinary civilians. Since early October even the United Nations has been warning the world that the country is at risk of a genocide.
This is the second time this year that France has intervened in Africa to stabilize a country as the United Nations and the African Union proved too slow to protect civilians and push back armed groups who have no qualms about using violence against innocent men, women and children. In January, Hollande gave the order to deploy troops to Mali, which has since proven to be a successful operation.
Nobody is sure of what will happen next. As France begins to intervene, no doubt its soldiers will be thinking of the fate of their South African counterparts who lost their lives at the hands of the rebels earlier this year.
But what is truly troubling is that the international system seems unable to respond in a timely manner to the threats non-state actors pose to weak and corrupt governments across all of Africa. This is the key lesson that we must address.
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