{UAH} CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC GETS FEMALE PRESIDENT; THE THIRD IN AFRICA By Kimbugwe Muzaphal

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC GETS FEMALE PRESIDENT; THE THIRD IN AFRICA

By Kimbugwe Muzaphal

In Central African Republic, cheers broke out in the National Assembly building on Monday as representatives chose the mayor of Banguito serve as the interim president of the Central African Republic, a country in the grip of a sectarian civil war.

Catherine Samba-Panza, 58, will be the first woman to lead the nation, coming as the third woman to head an African Country, following in the footsteps of Ellen Johnston Sirleaf of Liberia who came first and Joyce Banda of Malawi who came second. She will probably serve for a little over a year, with the goal of leading Central African Republic to national elections. Her appointment came from an unusual assortment of unelected rebel sympathizers, politicians, artists and others who have filled in as a substitute parliament for a nation so fractured that it has suffered a total breakdown of the state in recent months.

Hopes are high that she can halt the country's precipitous "free fall," as the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, put it in a statement on Monday.

This appointment yet again sends are signal that perhaps women are better suited as leaders to restore sanity in insane and dilapidated nations. Her appointment was followed by singing and dancing in the streets of Bangui on Monday afternoon, and inside the cavernous chamber of the assembly, female spectators broke into joyful shouts, cheers and trilling. The consensus, in the chamber and on the street, was that men had inexorably led the country into a spiral of vicious violence, and that the only hope was for a woman to lead it out.

"Everything we have been through has been the fault of men," said Marie-Louise Yakemba, who heads a civil-society organization that brings together people of different faiths, and who cheered loudly when the speaker announced Ms. Samba-Panza's victory. "We think that with a woman, there is at least a ray of hope," she said.

Ms. Samba-Panza defeated seven other candidates, including the sons of two former presidents and a man whose claim to hold degrees that no other Central Africans possess drew hoots of derision in the assembly chamber on Monday. She was elected in a five-hour process involving two separate hand counts and the double reading-out of all 120-odd members of the assembly.

Beyond the task of reassembling the state and leading it to popular elections next year, she must first try to tamp down the animosity between Muslims and Christians that has resulted in well over 1,000 deaths in the last six weeks alone.

Ms. Samba-Panza, an insurance broker who led state-sponsored reconciliation efforts after a previous civil war, was said by supporters to be untainted by the nine-month reign of terror unleashed under the man she replaced, Michel Djotodia.

Mr. Djotodia, who installed himself as president after leading Muslim rebels in a coup in March, was forced to resign more than a week ago by regional and Western powers for allowing the sectarian bloodshed, which some in the United Nations warn could be the early stages of genocide. There are daily revenge attacks between Christian militias, known as anti-balaka, and the remnants of the Muslim rebels, called Seleka, with most of the violence now coming from the Christians.

The election came the same day that the European Union in Brussels agreed to send hundreds of troops to the troubled country for peacekeeping, a rare flexing of military muscle by a fractious 28-nation bloc that has no permanent army of its own and often prefers exhortation to robust action.

European foreign ministers meeting in Brussels endorsed the military deployment amid growing fears that the collapse of government authority and the spiraling violence could escalate into a repeat of the genocide that convulsed Rwanda in 1994. But before sending any troops, the European Union needs approval from the United Nations.

The European troops would eventually join the 1,600 French troops and 4,400 African Union soldiers trying to keep a jury-rigged peace. On Monday, troops from Rwanda and Burundi guarded the assembly chamber.

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