UN Security Council Approves Intervention in CAR, French Begin Military Action

Today, the United Nations
Security Council
unanimously adopted a resolution allowing French troops to join
an African Union peacekeeping mission in the Central African
Republic. The news comes amid reports of fresh violence in Bangui,
the nation’s capital.

From
The New York Times:

An official with Doctors Without Borders, the medical relief
organization, said that at least 50 people had been killed in the
fighting, with 100 others wounded.

The shooting began in the early hours Thursday, citizens said,
but by midmorning the attackers appeared to have been pushed back
from the neighborhood of the National Assembly, at the edge of an
area fiercely opposed to the ruling rebel coalition. The streets of
Bangui were deserted, and the situation remained confused, with
officials of the rebel government saying that their forces had
regained control, and others saying that the antigovernment
fighters appeared to have penetrated the capital’s outlying
neighborhoods.

French President Francois Hollande has said “I
have decided to act immediately, in other words, this
evening,” and that the mission in CAR will be different to the
one in Mali, where the French military was engaged in a
predominantly combat-oriented, not peacekeeping, operation.

The French will be boosting their military presence in CAR
despite the fact that French Foreign Minister
Laurent Fabius recently said that it was not France’s job to be
the policeman of Africa.

The British are reportedly discussing providing
logistical support for the French mission. The British assisted
the French with their intervention in Mali, sending hundreds of
military personnel to West Africa to help support the effort to
dislodge Islamic militants from their strongholds.

In a statement today U.S. United Nations Ambassador Samantha
Power said that the U.S. has already pledged $40 million to the
African Union peacekeeping force, which
The Guardian reports will grow from “about 2,500 to
3,500” troops.

The U.S. will not be contributing troops to the mission
authorized by the U.N. Security Council, but American forces

have supported Ugandan troops in CAR in their hunt for members
of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

During the French intervention in Mali the U.S. provided some

logistic and intelligence support and a
very small number of troops.