WASHINGTON - Every day brings reports of new atrocities in the Central African Republic (CAR), where fighting between Muslims and Christians has left at least two thousand dead and displaced more than 800-thousand others.
The crisis began in March 2012 when the Seleka, a loose, untrained coalition of Muslim rebels from the northeast, Bangui and installed their leader as president.
Now, as Muslims are being targeted in retaliation in what has been described as “relentless wave of coordinated violence,” there are fears that the violence unleashed by Seleka rebels two years ago may lead to years of regional instability.
Seleka simply means “alliance” in Sango, the language most widely spoken in the CAR. It is what the has termed a “consortium of malcontents,” disparate rebel factions from the northeast of the country, some of which date back to earlier insurgencies against the earlier government of Jean-Bedel Bokassa.
The Seleka had a laundry list of what many say were legitimate complaints against self-proclaimed “Emperor” François Bozizé and other governments before his, including corruption, nepotism and political marginalization.
“Their grievances are that they are not considered part of the country,” says a cultural anthropologist and post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley’s Department Geography. Lombard says the grievances include “that they’ve been totally ignored and neglected, and that the government has attacked them on a few specific occasions.”
Lombard says there is widespread discrimination against minority Muslims in the country’s northeast “who are seen as foreigners, regardless of where they were born,” and thus they don’t receive “a lot of largesse from the central government.”
The northeast has an industrial-grade diamond industry, control of which has been somewhat of a factor for the rebels, says Lombard, but the greater issue has been access to the central government.
Additionally, the Seleka accused Bozize of failing to honor a 2007 peace deal which promised aid and jobs for rebels if they would lay down their arms.
At the time they announced their coalition in September 2012, the Seleka numbered only about 1,000-2,000, but they were joined rebel fighters from the and even Uganda.
In December, they set off on a three month march to Bangui, which fell in March 2013. Bozizé fled to Cameroon, and Seleka leader Michel Djotodia assumed the presidency. The coup was seemingly effortless for three important reasons:
Weapons aren't hard to get in the CAR.
Aby the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International and Development estimated that more than 50,000 weapons were circulating in the country, outside of government control—weapons which made their way over porous borders by indirect transfers by defeated or demobilized forces from Chad, Sudan or the DRC.
Weapons were also stolen from military stores during coup attempts, for example, or during anti-poaching operations and weapons were shipped from France, Chad, Libya and other countries to boost various past regimes, or brought in by refugees from neighboring conflicts.
Some analysts have as a religious war, part of a greater struggle for Islamist domination of the continent, especially in light of reprisals by Christians against the Muslim population of the CAR.
But most analysts disagree with this view.
, a Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), stresses that this did not begin as a religious conflict.
“It started essentially as a rivalry between two warlords vying for political power [Bozizé and Djotodia], and particularly for possession of the city of Bangui. They, in turn, appealed to religious identities and also ethnic identities in order to bolster their political ambitions, something that in the end becomes very, very hard to stop,” Campbell said.
The Seleka turned against the Christian population that had marginalized them, burning churches, torturing, killing, and looting, in part because they weren’t a paid army. Subsequently, the Christian population created militias of their own--the anti-, or “anti-machete,” staging equally bloody attacks on Muslims.
on January 10 of this year. Ten days later, parliament elected businesswoman, lawyer and Bangui mayor .
Samba-Panza has signaled her intention to re-unify the country and end the violence, appointing both Seleka and anti- members and charging to protect both Muslims and Christians. But she will need help.