By midafternoon, a hot breeze blows down empty corridors of the mostly vacant national assembly building here. Hundreds of grim soldiers, their uniforms looted or hidden away, mass in civilian clothes after going AWOL for months. Around abandoned university buildings, idle students loiter, their classes long cancelled.
The state no longer exists in the Central African Republic. Civil servants do not go to their offices, taxes are not collected and all the schools are closed. There is no budget, no army, no police force, no president, no Parliament, no judges or jails, and at least a fifth of the population has fled. After nine months of violence and well over a thousand dead since early December alone, Christians and Muslims fear and attack one another. Neighbour has turned against neighbour, and every night there are killings.
Now, an unlikely experiment in instant nation-building is underway: a vote for president. Inspired equally by desperation and pressure from abroad, a "national transition council" of 135 rebels, rivals, politicians and everyone in between is making a last-ditch lunge for order, hoping to choose a new leader for this fractured country within days.
"We represent hope," said Rose Yodoma Kondjia, a transition council member.
Without an agreement, the chaos continues; but even if the council members manage to overcome their ill will and agree on an interim president, will it be enough to persuade the warring parties to drop their arms and calm a nation on a knife-edge of sectarian tension?
"It's a critical vote," said Cyriaque Gonda, a former minister on the council. The winner "has got to restore state authority in every corner of the state, so that people can go back home."
Kondjia, an official in a leading political party, added, "The people are watching us."
Nearly a million people have fled their homes because of the violence, creating a humanitarian crisis that has been exacerbated by the collapse of the state. On Friday, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program said that about 40 aid trucks carrying rice were stuck at the border, unable to enter the country because of the absence of customs officials. By next week, she warned, cereal stocks will be exhausted here in the nation's capital.
Other officials have warned of the continued risk of mass atrocities. "It has all the elements that we have seen elsewhere, in places like Rwanda and Bosnia," John Ging, director of operations for the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters this week. "The elements are there, the seeds are there, for a genocide. There's no question about that."
On the streets, interest in the vote appears intense. For nearly a year, a rebel leader at the head of a brutal insurgent force known as the Seleka held sway here, with its fighters looting and killing extensively in the dense neighbourhoods. But he was forced to go into exile last week by regional leaders fed up with the abuses and worried about the looming anarchy on their borders.
Now there is nobody at the head of state.
"We want somebody who has suffered like us, who knows our suffering, so that we can get out of our situation," Janny Kpazan, 32, a roadside vendor with four children, said as a crowd gathered to listen. "We're stuck. There is no joy. We are hanging in the balance. People continue to flee. This is too painful."
Just up the road, hundreds of Muslim citizens were piling into a dusty 200-vehicle convoy for a perilous journey north to Chad. Many in the convoy said the prospect of staying here was even more frightening.
For now, the void they are leaving in their country is filled with daily sectarian reprisals in the capital and fragmentary reports of massacres and burned villages trickling in from the remote provinces.
"The whole machine has stopped; I've never seen this before," said one of the few Western diplomats still left in Bangui. The Americans fled their embassy here a year ago and have not come back.
"Everything has crumbled," the diplomat continued, expressing guarded hope for the presidential vote but cautioning that the various factions "have to make fear disappear."
Those factions are jockeying furiously for the position of interim president until a genuine popular vote can be held, perhaps next year, to elect a more permanent head of state. In the background, still partly armed, are the Seleka, the mostly Muslim rebels who took over last year. Opposing them are the Christian militia groups that sprang up against their reign, the so-called anti-balaka, or anti-machetes, that have committed abuses against civilians as well.
Both groups are trying to influence the vote. Hovering also are the politicians, widely detested for having reduced the country to its present ruinous state over 50 years of turbulent independence.
"No politicians!" Patricia Karawa, 37, cried out from the side of a road in the Gobongo neighbourhood.
Conscious of the mistrust, the national transition council members have been labouring to winnow out candidates who might anger either the militias, the street, the nation's former colonial master, France - whose 1,600 troops here are among the only guarantors of order - or powerful regional leaders like President Idriss Deby Itno of Chad. He was the one who summoned all 135 members to his capital, Ndjamena, last week, forcing them to get rid of the rebel leader, Michel Djotodia.
© 2014 The New York Times News Service
