Central African Republic urged the international community on Thursday to back words with action by sending peacekeeping troops to its remote northeast region bordering Sudan, where rebels have seized a major town.
The capture of Birao on Monday by an armed group Central African officials said came across the Sudanese border has increased fears of an escalation to neighbouring states of the long-running conflict in Sudan's western Darfur region.
Central African Republic President Francois Bozize on Wednesday cut short a trip to attend an Africa-China summit in Beijing to deal with the threat posed by the rebels, who are demanding he agrees to talks on power sharing.
"He's returned to take charge of the situation himself," presidency spokesman Cyriaque Gonda told Reuters. Central African Republic, a former French colony and one of the poorest nations on earth, has accused neighbour Sudan of arming and directing the rebel raiders. The Sudanese government on Wednesday rejected the accusation.
Gonda said Bozize had received messages of support from France and from regional allies like Chad, which has also accused Khartoum of backing rebel incursions from Darfur.
But he added Bozize's government wanted "concrete aid" from the international community. "Concretely, we want the positioning of (international peacekeeping) troops in the region," Gonda said.
Resisting intense international pressure, Sudan has so far refused to accept a United Nations take-over of a struggling African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Khartoum says a UN deployment would be equivalent to a Western invasion. But humanitarian agencies say a strong, international force is the only hope of halting the bloodshed in Darfur, where the three-year conflict pitting Sudan government forces and allied militias against local rebels has killed tens of thousands. Such a UN-led force would also seek to secure Sudan's porous border and prevent the fighting spilling over into Chad and Central African Republic.
Gonda said the rebels, who say they form an anti-Bozize coalition, the UFDR, were still holding Birao, located in a remote, rugged region of bush and marshland more than 800 km (500 miles) northeast of Bangui. He declined to say what action the government intended to take, saying this was a military secret.
Diplomats said they understood the rebels had vehicles and were well-armed.
Foreign military experts said they doubted the Central African Republic government, without foreign military help, had the capacity to take back the town by itself.
"You've got a situation where the army of the entire country is about 4,500 people and they are mostly stationed around the capital ... the capital is really the only area that the government actually controls," a US military official said.
The official from the US European Command (EUCOM), which covers most of Africa, told Reuters he was concerned the north of the Central African Republic was like a "hole in the wall" in terms of regional security. "Particularly the tri-border area (...) is a sort of a free-fire zone for all the rebels that are operating on both the Chad and the Sudanese side," he said, asking not to be named.
The United Nations on Wednesday launched a humanitarian air service in northern Central African Republic, ferrying UN and private emergency relief experts to an area where as many as 1 million people have been affected by rebel attacks.
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