11/16/2017
Central African Republic needs more help to rebuild the country
UN Security Council wants to send more blue helmets – more protection for the civilian population needed (Press Release)
It is indeed an important signal that, on Wednesday evening, the UN Security Council decided to reinforce the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSCA and to deploy 900 additional blue helmets. However, the total number of 11,650 UN security forces will not be enough to keep the civilian population in the rural areas safe. Photo: UN Photo via Flickr
According to the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), there must be better protection for the civilian population of the Central African Republic. “It is indeed an important signal that, on Wednesday evening, the UN Security Council decided to reinforce the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSCA and to deploy 900 additional blue helmets. However, the total number of 11,650 UN security forces will not be enough to keep the civilian population in the rural areas safe. The country is almost twice the size of Germany, and the army and police forces are unable to effectively protect the civilians from attacks by militias in the struggle for power and for access to natural resources,” warned Ulrich Delius, the STP’s director, in Göttingen on Thursday. In the first quarter of 2017, a total number of 215,000 people had fled from the violence. About 1.1 of the country’s five million inhabitants are on the run.
The STP demanded more measures to rebuild the country, and more humanitarian aid for the civilian population of the Central African Republic. With 2.4 million people, nearly half of the population is dependent on international food aid. The country is considered the poorest in the world, but only 37 percent of the necessary funds for the aid organizations for 2017 have so far been covered by the donor countries.
The militias continue to misuse religious issues to fuel tensions between the Christians and the Muslims. In the city of Bangassou, for example, a group of 2,000 Muslim refugees who fled to a Christian seminary are now besieged by allegedly Christian-oriented militias – and similar things can happen to Christians in Muslim-dominated regions.
On Tuesday, the Catholic Cardinal Dieudonné Nzapalaïnga and Imam Kobine Layama had called for peace after seven people got killed and 20 were injured in a terrorist attack on a music group in a café in the capital city Bangui last Saturday. Six of the musicians – who have been working towards peace and understanding for years – were injured in the attack, in which incendiary devices were used. Ozaguin, the prominent singer of the music group, is in deep shock. With his concert, he had wanted to set a sign for peace in a predominantly Muslim-inhabited neighborhood.
Header Photo: UN Photo via Flickr
