Its medals gleaming under the baking Bangui sunshine, the African Union International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA) has just said its official au revoir to CAR, as the new UN mission takes over the national security mandate. On Saturday 13 September, almost nine months to the day since MISCA was launched with 6,000 troops from seven regional African nations, its closing ceremony was a military parade attended by national bigwigs, a handful of international VIPs, and CAR President Catherine Samba-Panza. It was also the warm-up to Monday's launch of the UN MINUSCA mission, which marks the official deployment of UN peacekeepers in CAR. MINUSCA (the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic) is scheduled to be at full capacity of 12,000 peacekeepers by February 2015. This, it's worth reiterating, will be the eighth peacekeeping mission to be deployed in CAR since 1979 (including short-term bridging missions, like the 850 EUFOR troops currently patrolling Bangui's Muslim quarters). This single fact exposes the abject failure of previous peacekeeping missions to stabilize, or harmonize, this economically crippled and ethnically diverse landlocked country of just 5 million people. Will MINUSCA be any different? The physical make-up of [...]
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