Christian and Muslim leaders in the Central African Republic (CAR), speaking ahead of a visit by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, have urged the UN to overhaul its strategy for the strife-torn country.
Guterres was expected yesterday, ahead of a requested renewal next month of the UN force in CAR, called MINUSCA, which has been accused by some of passivity.
“If they’re just television spectators of the conflict, that won’t do,” Cardinal Dieudonne Nzapalainga, the Catholic archbishop of Bangui, said in a joint interview on Saturday alongside the country’s Muslim and Protestant leaders.
“A revision of strategy” has to go hand-in-hand with a mandate for UN troop renewal, Protestant leader Nicolas Guerekoyamene-Gbangou said.
Poor, but mineral-rich, CAR has become a byword for conflict and misery.
Thousands have lost their lives and 500,000 people have been displaced, according to the UN, out of a population of about 4.5 million.
In their interview with reporters, the religious leaders pleaded with the world not to see the conflict as a matter of religion, but of gangs who often exploited faith to further their own goals.
In 2013, then-CAR president Francois Bozize, a Christian former army chief, was overthrown by a pro-Muslim Seleka rebel coalition.
Militias known as “anti-balaka” launched a counteroffensive in the name of defending the Christian majority population.
“The religious stance has been used only for political ends, for looting and for making off with the [mineral] riches beneath the soil,” Islamic Council president imam Omar Kobine Layama said. “This is not a religious conflict.”
In the southeastern town of Bangassou, where anti-balaka forces unleashed a new wave of violence in May, MINUSCA troops “made all the Muslims come to the mosque and abandoned them,” Layama said. “If the cardinal and the bishop hadn’t come to protect them, what would have become of them. Who would have been responsible?”
“Christians and Muslims are now together at the displaced persons’ site. If this was really a war of religions, would they be in the same place?” Layama added.
Those who kill in the name of Christianity are beyond the pale, Guerekoyame-Gbangou said.
At Kembe in the southeast, the anti-balaka this month attacked “a place that’s a sanctuary in usual times, a mosque,” he said. “They can’t say they’re Christians and go on to kill. All those with such ideas in their heads are outside their faith.”
In 2013, the three leaders set up a “platform of religious confessions” in a show of inter-faith unity and to act as a mediator in the conflict.
The platform earned the UN Human Rights Prize in 2015, but at some personal cost to their founders. Kobine has been forced to move house and Guerekoyame-Gbangou’s relatives were killed in 2015.
Guterres’ four-day stay in CAR is to be his first visit since taking office on Jan. 1, although he regularly visited the country as former head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
He is to go to Bangui and Bangassou, and also meet victims of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers as part of his effort to address damaging allegations that have hit the blue helmets in several missions.
The UN secretary-general’s visit comes at a time when the UN faces a precarious financial situation as the US pushes for cost-cutting measures in peacekeeping.
The international body has maintained about 12,500 troops and police on the ground in CAR since September 2014 to help protect civilians and support the government of Faustin-Archange Touadera, who was elected last year.
On Wednesday last week, Guterres urged the UN Security Council to add 900 troops, to enable the force “to shape and influence security situations, rather than react to them.”
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