Central African Republic Civil War

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

President Francois Bozize had governed the Central African Republic since seizing power in a 2003 coup when, in December 2012, a coalition of mostly Muslim rebel factions from the country's neglected north and northeast, calling itself the Seleka, launched an offensive accusing Bozize of failing to honor an earlier peace agreement. The Seleka advanced largely unopposed by a hollowed-out national army, seized the capital Bangui in March 2013, and installed its leader Michel Djotodia as president, the country's first Muslim head of state, in a Christian-majority country where Muslims make up roughly fifteen percent of the population.

Seleka fighters, drawn heavily from outside the areas they now occupied and only loosely under central command, carried out widespread killing and looting of civilians as they consolidated control, which the United Nations and Human Rights Watch documented in detail. Christian and animist communities responded from mid-2013 by organizing self-defense militias known as anti-balaka, which by the time Djotodia resigned under international pressure in January 2014 had turned to organized reprisal attacks against Muslim civilians and the Seleka alike.

The reprisals that followed displaced most of the Muslim population from western and central Central African Republic within months, and a United Nations peacekeeping mission, MINUSCA, deployed later in 2014 to a country where sporadic fighting between armed groups, now more fragmented than the original two coalitions, continued for years afterward despite repeated peace agreements.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

News coverage of the Central African Republic's conflict settled early on a shorthand description: a religious war between the country's Muslim minority and Christian majority. The label fit the visible pattern of violence, Seleka forces overwhelmingly Muslim, anti-balaka militias organized in the name of Christian and animist communities, mosques and churches deliberately targeted, and international organizations including Amnesty International repeated the framing in their own reporting.

Scholars who have studied the conflict closely argue the religious label explains less than it seems to. Ludovic Lado, an Africa Program research scholar at the Wilson Center, has written that religious identity became a marker of political and factional loyalty during the fighting rather than the fighting's actual cause, since Christian-Muslim relations in the Central African Republic carried no significant history of conflict before the Seleka's 2013 offensive. Louisa Lombard, a Yale anthropologist who conducted years of fieldwork in the country, makes the same case at length in her study of the war, arguing that a genuinely political struggle for control of the state and its resources, fought by factions recruiting along whatever lines of solidarity were available to them, hardened into intercommunal violence that then looked, and increasingly became, religious in the way it was carried out, even though it did not begin that way.

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry's own 2014 report reached a similar conclusion: religious tension had not previously divided the country in any serious way, and it was the cycle of Seleka and anti-balaka atrocities itself that manufactured the religious character later observers took for a cause.