Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
A young man tried to help a friend who was badly injured by Chadian troops during a protest outside an airport in Bangui, Central African Republic.
BANGUI, Central African Republic — When the killing began, Archbishop Dieudonné Nzapalainga did what many would have expected of him: He opened his church to hundreds of Christian families fleeing the Muslim militias hunting them.
But he also provided refuge to an unusual friend and partner: the most senior Muslim cleric here, Imam Oumar Kobine Layama, who was under threat himself from vengeful Christians.
For months, the two religious leaders, along with the leading Protestant cleric, tried to head off the brewing sectarian tensions, traveling across the country to instill the message, "We are brothers."
But instead of reconciliation, Central African Republic is now awash in fear and distrust. In a country that has suffered from decades of coups and internal conflict since its independence in 1960, the violence has taken a religious turn, with Christians and Muslims killing one another and whole communities taking up arms.
Hundreds have died this month alone. Tens of thousands more have fled their homes. The nation is so precariously divided that diplomats the world over have warned of mass atrocities, even genocide, and sent thousands of international troops to the streets in the hope of preventing them.
"We have to leave this cycle of hate, or the state will fail," Archbishop Nzapalainga said.
The conflict ripping the country apart revolves around the oldest of motives: a struggle for power. Mostly Muslim rebel forces known as Seleka, or Alliance, overthrew the government in March, ousting President François Bozizé and putting in power the country's first Muslim president, Michel Djotodia. Since then, Christian militias backed by Mr. Bozizé have tried to overthrow the Muslim alliance.
But the crisis had been building for years, and the religious leaders said the mutual animosity leading Christians and Muslims to attack one another was, at its roots, a manufactured one, deliberately stoked for political ends. Now, they fear it has taken on a life of its own.
"We saw this danger" being created, Imam Layama said. "It was all put in place for a Christian and Muslim conflict."
As Mr. Bozizé felt his power threatened by the rebels, the religious leaders said, he tried to rally the majority Christian population against them by any means.
"Bozizé started to turn the people against Muslims," the imam said. "He said the Seleka were Arabs, that they would come to enforce Islam and change your schools into Quranic schools. He told the people, 'Take up your knives and axes and machetes,' and he identified Muslim neighborhoods by name. So the spirit was created."
Archbishop Nzapalainga agreed: "The problem was the politicians who used religion."
The Christian majority would have accepted a Muslim leader who governed justly, the archbishop said. Many, in fact, welcomed the overthrow of Mr. Bozizé. "It is a question of competence," he said. "People will accept a leader who is competent."
But the actions of the Seleka ruined any hope of that. The undisciplined troops who seized the country this year carried out such lawless killing and pillaging during their nine months in power that the suspicions conjured by the previous government were reinforced, both religious leaders said.
"They did much harm," Imam Layama said of the Muslim rebels. "The former government has profited from the misbehavior of the Seleka. They have been able to use that, since the people suffered so much under the Seleka."
Spillover from conflicts farther north has added fuel to the fire. Arabic-speaking Muslim fighters from Chad and Sudan who joined the Seleka rebels were particularly ruthless and beyond the control of the government, worsening the religious divisions, the imam said.
The violence has started to look like the broader sectarian conflict that he and the archbishop feared. When Christian fighters tried to seize control of the capital, Bangui, on Dec. 5, the Seleka fighters in the city repulsed them and then unleashed a wave of killings of Christians whom they accused of being collaborators. Christian mobs retaliated, lynching Muslim civilians and attacking several mosques.
Tens of thousands of Christians have fled their homes and say they dare not return — not only for fear of the militias, but also for fear of their Muslim neighbors, who they say are all armed.
Likewise, people living in Muslim neighborhoods, who are a minority in the capital and in the country as a whole, fear being overrun by the Christian militias and slaughtered in revenge for the atrocities committed by the Seleka.
"It is the balance of fear: Each side fears the other," said a Western security consultant working in Bangui, who requested anonymity for security reasons.
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