Thousands of refugees had crowded the Cathedral of St. Joseph, which sat on a hill above town. A few weeks later, a group of Seleka pushed their way in and started shooting, massacring at least twenty people, mostly women and children. As in similar incidents around the country, French troops arrived after most of the killing had taken place and then limited their actions to setting up a defensive perimeter around the mission. Kasper Agger, a field researcher for the Enough Project, an N.G.O. that monitors human rights in the region, said, “We’ve heard the same thing again and again. Even though they are deployed close to incidents that take place, the French rarely intervene. It seems that they are scared of taking casualties.”

One afternoon in Bangui, I met Ambassador Malinas next to the pool at the Hotel Ledger Plaza, the city’s only luxury hotel. He rejected the idea that the French supported the antibalaka. “People here, they very often blame everything on outsiders,” he said. But he took a historical view of France’s culpability. “Forty years ago, this was a rich country,” he said. “They actually exported tobacco to Cuba, and they harvested palm oil and had a wood industry, as well as gold, diamonds, and all of it was very organized. It was Bokassa’s time, and it is horrible to say, maybe, but before he went a little mad he did some decent things here. And since him, all the governments have done is to take money.” Malinas added ruefully, “We didn’t manage the independence here very well. We left them French managers to run things, when what they needed was to build up a generation of their own leaders.”

Indeed, little has happened in recent months to suggest that the country’s leaders were able to manage a political settlement, even with international help. In May, the government held talks with the Seleka, under the auspices of the French and the African Union, but militants on both sides remained dug into their own neighborhoods, emerging periodically to fight. At a reconciliation soccer game between young Muslims and Christians, antibalaka gruesomely murdered three Muslim players. In retribution, armed Muslims attacked a church in a Christian neighborhood. Rumors spread that they decapitated the priest, jihadi style.

Before dawn the next day, a protest raised a great commotion: gunfire, clanging, people shouting. Smoke billowed from fires set on the pavement, and a French military helicopter circled over the city. Most of the protesters were armed with only pots and pans, to make noise, but some had guns. In the Muslim stronghold of PK5, a few people were shot to death outside the peacekeepers’ headquarters. The crowds, mostly Christian, were angry at the African Union, at the French, and at white foreigners generally, for not having disarmed the Seleka. They were demanding that the Muslims be stripped of their arms and that the peacekeepers who had failed to stop the fighting be removed from the country.

During the protests, Jean Serge Bokassa, the Emperor’s son, emerged as a leader of the anti-Seleka contingent, and on the third day I found him at his apartment downtown. He came to the door in flip-flops and pointed to his feet, which were swollen and blistered. “From the marching,” he explained, with a smile. “I thought it was important to show solidarity with the people, especially since we’ve seen that, after these incidents, there is never any reaction by the government. What’s happening is that people are now questioning the measures that have been taken to end the conflict. There have been so many funds allocated, and international forces have been given a mandate, but we seem still to be in the same predicament.”

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As the demonstrations continued, Samba-Panza called for a period of national mourning for the victims of the church massacre and promised to punish those responsible. Although she asked all of the city’s militias to give up their arms, Muslims felt that she was favoring the Christians. A trader named Haroun told me, “For there to be reconciliation, they need to recognize what they did to us, and we need equal treatment with the rest of the population.” He began to shout. “They have killed my wife, my brothers. We are not going to stay here with these cannibal people.”

Samba-Panza accused “enemies of peace” of “shamelessly exploiting inter-communal hatred,” but her government seemed no less afflicted by sectarian anger. One morning, I went to see the minister of national reconciliation, Antoinette Montaigne. A tall, stylish woman in a Prussian-blue jacket and a black skirt, she had recently returned from France, where she worked as a lawyer. In her office, she spoke bitterly about the Seleka’s talks with the government. (She has since left her position, but still advises the President.) “They come here and say they want to reconcile, but the minute they leave they show just the opposite,” she said. She was vexed by the weakness of the government, in which some posts were occupied by former Seleka officials. “They have tapped my telephone, because they control the telecommunications,” she said. “They also control the media in this government. The higher-ups in the government don’t see the problem, but I do.” The protesters in Bangui were taking justice into their own hands, she said, because they knew that the government would not provide it.

Looking around, she apologized for the bareness of the surroundings. Her staff had arrived that morning and found that the office had been burglarized. She had met the Seleka’s liaison officer there the day before, and, she confided, “I suspect him of doing it.” She gestured angrily at empty desks where computers had been. As soon as she had a new computer, she told me, she would send out her plan for reconciliation, so that the “parallel state of the Seleka and the little bandits of the antibalaka can be put to an end.”

On July 23rd, the government’s efforts produced a tentative result, as commanders for the Seleka and the antibalaka signed a peace agreement. Almost immediately, leaders of rival factions rejected the deal, and new violence broke out around the country. Soon afterward, Samba-Panza tried another approach: she forced her cabinet to resign, and appointed a Muslim prime minister, the country’s first, who was allowed to name a few Seleka officials as ministers. The leaders of the main Seleka army in the north responded by expelling the officials from its movement.

In a speech to French Ambassadors on August 28th, François Hollande congratulated his peacekeeping troops. “Last December, we intervened in the Central African Republic,” he said. “We prevented the worst, and I mean the worst.” Most people I talked to agreed that the international forces had averted a genocide. Kasper Agger, of the Enough Project, said, “Their presence helped keep the killing from spiralling out of control. It probably was a game changer.” But no one thought that tamping down the violence was enough to turn the Central African Republic into a cohesive state. Many pointed out that the fighting had subsided largely because the country was effectively partitioned, with the peacekeepers’ help, into Christian and Muslim regions.

During the worst of the conflict, the United States did little more than help to airlift in African troops. Samantha Power, the American Ambassador to the U.N., was among those who argued for greater action. When I spoke to her recently, she said that the intervention was inadequate but suggested that it was unrealistic to hope for more. The peacekeepers had neutralized the fighters’ “eliminationist tendencies,” she said. “What we haven’t done yet is stop the suffering of the people of the Central African Republic, or succeed in being everywhere—which means that, on any given day, people are still being targeted for nothing more than their religious identity. Given the amount of killing and displacement and suffering that has gone on, it’s difficult to call the international effort a great success. But all one has to do is talk to an antibalaka or a Seleka to know what it would have looked like if there had not been an international presence.”

In September, the U.N. deployed a peacekeeping mission, called MINUSCA, for the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic. When Samba-Panza visited New York a few weeks ago, I asked how, after so many failed interventions, the international community could make a difference. She implied that it was largely a matter of scale: the U.N. planned to increase the number of peacekeepers to twelve thousand. “There will be more troops on the ground to deal with the violence that arises,” she said. The political work, though, would be much harder. With each militia splintered into factions, the reconciliation effort would entail many separate peace treaties. She suggested that the impetus would have to come from outside the country. “It’s very important that the U.N. help us in our reconciliation,” she said. “Without each citizen having a feeling of belonging, we will never find peace.” Privately, most of the relief officials, political analysts, and diplomats who work there express doubt that the U.N. can provide a lasting solution. David Smith, a South Africa-based analyst who has studied the country closely since the nineteen-eighties, told me, “There’s always been an international construct with an acronym here. Right now it’s MINUSCA. It’s unlikely to work. When it leaves, the country will just fall apart like it always does.” The newly deployed peacekeepers were greeted by the most intense fighting the country had seen for months. In Bangui last week, an attack on a U.N. vehicle killed one peacekeeper and injured eight others. Across the city, roadblocks went up, and the streets stood empty.