"When looking for solutions to the horrors here, one is tempted to say that any ideas that don’t start or end with genocide qualify as good ones. International peacekeepers could freeze the conflict into a stare-down, which would be precarious but bloodless. Another plan would be for the remaining Muslims to flee to other countries or to Muslim-majority areas of CAR. Among the partisans of this option are many of the Muslims themselves, whose principal demand when I visited was for safe passage to the Chadian and Cameroonian borders.
Augustin Migabo, the impassive, moon-faced Rwandan officer, said he didn’t like this solution, because in the long run, it wasn’t one. When I told him that the Muslims just wanted to leave, he sucked his tongue and shook his head. “If these people go, the war will be over,” he said. That sounded like a positive development, at least in the short term, and I told him so. But it ran counter to the model of reconciliation the Rwandans themselves had pursued, or claimed to, in the 20 years since their civil war. He suggested that A.U. peacekeepers attempt a strategy neither the Anti-Balaka nor the Muslims want: They should protect those last Muslims from all attacks and force the two warring groups to live together.
If the Muslims don’t stay put, Migabo said, there will be an even greater cataclysm down the line. “The Muslims in the north will come back,” he said, and they will start “a terror war.” Already there are elements of the Séléka near the Chadian border who are resisting disarmament and quite possibly preparing to return to Bangui. The worst-case scenario, he said, was a postponed doomsday, more like Rwanda in 1994 than the comparatively mild Bangui of today. Hundreds of thousands of dead versus tens of thousands.
Most experts seem to think the soundest, or at least the least-worst, option is the one that should have been pursued long ago: an international peacekeeping force that vigorously defends all vulnerable people, under a unified mandate. And on April 10, the U.N. Security Council approved a peacekeeping mission of 11,800 soldiers. Now CAR will just have to wait until September for delivery and try not to destroy itself in the interim.
[...]
In this lair, she [interim Pres. Samba-Panza] lamented the fatal rhythms of Central African history, how the uprising of poor and neglected populations in the north and east transmogrified so quickly into a fight between religions. “Up to that point, it was all political, and had nothing to do with religion,” she said. “Now, the non-Muslim population has reacted. It’s not because the people don’t like Muslims. It’s because the politicians used religion to arrive at their goals.”
.. it looks an excellent analysis of Graeme Wood's ..
whether Seleka or Anti-Balaka, i guess, the technique is similar .. thanks, to Wood and his photographer, Michael Christopher Brown, gutsy effort by the people covering these wars ..
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