France to send additional troops to CAR

France said on Friday it plans to send another 400 troops to help combat a crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR) as United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon pleaded for more swift, robust international help to stop the “dark clouds of mass atrocities and sectarian cleansing” looming over the country.

French President Francois Hollande's office urged other countries to show "increased solidarity" and called on the U.N. Security Council to approve the creation of a peacekeeping force in the landlocked former French colony.

Some 838,000 people have been displaced since the mostly Muslim Seleka rebel group seized power in March last year in the majority Christian country. At least 2,000 people have been killed since December in what a U.N. official described as a wave of "ethnic-religious cleansing.”

"We cannot claim to care about mass atrocity crimes and then shrink from what it means to actually prevent them," Ban told a U.N. Security Council meeting on cooperation between the world body and the European Union Friday. "Our commitment to protect civilians is only as meaningful as the political, military and financial muscle deployed to defend them."

“Public lynchings, mutilations, and other horrendous acts of violence are spreading mayhem and fear. All Central Africans have been victims, Muslims and Christians alike,” he said.

The additional troops will bring France's deployment to 2,000. France previously sent 1,600 troops in December to help an African Union force of 6,000 peacekeepers, while the EU has agreed to send around 500 troops.

Hollande's office said that some of the additional 400 French troops would be later transferred to the European force.

"It's essential that this European force can be swiftly deployed and that member states of the EU can mobilize to contribute towards this," French U.N. Ambassador Gerard Araud told the Security Council.

"We are at a crucial stage in managing the Central African crisis. We avoided the worst but still we need to put an end to the cycle of ethnic and religious violence, and avoid the country falling back into chaos," he said.

Elsewhere in the war-torn nation, Amnesty International reported on the grisly details involving a lone girl survivor of a massacre in a village near Bangui – the capital – that took place days earlier, underscoring the sectarian nature that has ensnared the country.

“The traumatized girl had been in hiding since the brutal killing of her parents and neighbors," said a spokesperson for Amnesty International. “The horrific scene we found in the village of Bouguere is illustrative of the horrors tens of thousands of Muslims are experiencing across the Central African Republic.”

The revelation of the village massacre came after Amnesty said Wednesday that the exodus of tens of thousands of Muslims from the CAR amounted to "ethnic cleansing."

That came after Ban warned earlier in the week that the country faced a "distinct risk" of splitting into Muslim and Christian regions due to the ongoing violence. 

At a "force generation" conference in Brussels on Thursday, six EU states offered "substantial" contributions of soldiers or police for the CAR, diplomats said, but those countries were not named.

"We have more than 500 troops. The force generation conference ... is, as my understanding, looking at double that number," European foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton told reporters after the Security Council meeting in New York. "I trust that the force will be on the ground very, very soon."

Canada, Georgia, Norway, Serbia, Turkey and the United States, all non-EU countries, took part in Thursday's conference, diplomats said.

Ban is due to report to the U.N. Security Council shortly on options for transforming the current African Union peacekeeping force into a U.N. operation. He told the council in November that a U.N. force of up to 9,000 troops and 1,700 police could be needed for the CAR.

Al Jazeera and Reuters. With additional reporting by Tom Kutsch.