The death tolls are huge and the individual incidents gruesome. One estimate says nearly 10,000 people have been killed in South Sudan in a month of warfare, while in the neighboring Central African Republic, combatants in Muslim-vs.-Christian battles have beheaded children.
Sub-Saharan Africa has seen a violent start to 2014, with raging conflicts in South Sudan and the Central African Republic, as well as continued violence in Congo, attacks in Somalia and Kenya and ongoing acts of terror by Islamic separatists in Nigeria.
The conflict that broke out in South Sudan on Dec. 15 saw violence radiate across the country as ethnic groups targeted each other. Shortly afterward, Uganda dispatched troops and military equipment to help South Sudan’s government fight breakaway units of its military.
Casie Copeland, South Sudan analyst for the International Crisis Group, said violence in African nations tends to overflow into neighboring countries and noted a “long history of regional involvement in African conflicts.”
That was the case in the Central African Republic, where rebel leader Michel Djotodia seized control in March 2013 with the help of mercenaries from Chad and Sudan. Under international pressure after failing to bring his forces under control, he agreed to resign as president Friday along with his prime minister.
While the majority Christian nation celebrated the departure of its first Muslim president, Djotodia’s resignation could leave an even greater power vacuum in a land where civilians have suffered terribly amid violence between the factions.
The rebels have been blamed for scores of atrocities, and inter-communal fighting exploded last month, leaving more than 1,000 dead in a matter of days. The U.N. children’s agency UNICEF cited an “unprecedented levels of violence” against the nation’s children, including two beheadings.
An estimated 935,000 people have been uprooted throughout the country. Thousands of French troops and regional African peacekeepers are trying to temper the mob violence even as a myriad of rebel groups continue to skirmish with government troops in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Elsewhere, the U.S. State Department last week broadened a travel alert, advising Americans to avoid an even wider swath of troubled northern Nigeria, where attacks by Boko Haram, an Islamic extremist group, have displaced tens of thousands of people. And al-Qaida-linked militants in Somalia, long one of the continent’s most violent countries, detonated two car bombs on New Year’s Day, killing at least a half dozen people.
Neighboring Kenya was hit with a grenade attack the next day on a coastal bar and nightclub, wounding 10 people.
Kenya has troops in Somalia, as does Uganda. But J. Peter Pham, director of the Washington-based Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, says Africa needs more international peacekeepers.
“Not only is there a dearth of political will and the lack of an adequate mandate, for all the talk of ‘African solutions to African problems,’ the fact remains that there are inadequate investments of the right kind in the security sector in Africa so that when crises erupt, one is left to rob Peter to pay Paul,” Pham said.
John Prendergast, co-founder of the Washington-based activist group the Enough Project, told a panel last week at the Brookings Institute that international and regional conflict management systems must stop addressing conflicts in isolation, but rather deal with them as part of an ongoing struggle throughout the region.
But Copeland said the U.N. Security Council on Friday “strongly discouraged external intervention that would exacerbate the military and political tensions.”
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