French sends troops to Central African Republic Half a million people have been made homeless amid reports of murder, rape and looting, and a quarter of the country's 4.6 million people need food aid. The crisis will top the agenda at a two-day summit starting on Friday on French-African relations called by François Hollande, France's president, who has been pushing for action in the Central African Republic since September. Separately, the United Nations will this week vote on a French-drafted resolution to further strengthen international efforts to contain the growing conflict. Some Seleka forces have already started retreating from Bangui ahead of the French troops' arrival. But there are concerns that they may regroup in the forested hinterland and prove hard to dislodge, which risks complicating and extending the French operation. Mr Hollande and his government have stressed that their troops' mission in the Central African Republic is not to go on the offensive against the Seleka, but instead to act as "policemen" to help bring order for the civilian population. The mission follows a pattern of increasing recent military French involvement in Africa, especially in its former colonies in the continent's west and centre. Mr Hollande sent close to 3,000 troops to Mali in January with an aggressive mandate to battle Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaeda. Two years earlier, the French air force opened the international bombing campaign against Muammar Gaddafi's regime in Libya. A month after that, French helicopter gunships opened fire on the residence of Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of Ivory Coast who started a war to stay in power after losing an election. Days later, he surrendered. There are 12,000 French troops permanently based in Africa, to protect the 240,000 French citizens living on the continent, and to secure French interests including supplies of uranium for its domestic nuclear power production. But there are questions whether Paris is returning to its interventionist approach to Africa of the late twentieth century, when it was accused of cosying up to dictators and failing to act, most notoriously at the start of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. It is "tempting to drag out old clichés," said Paul Melly, a specialist on Franco-African relations at the Chatham House thinktank in London. But this is very different. The closest parallel is the British intervention in Sierra Leone, where there is a ghastly mess and a very vulnerable civilian population, and neighbouring countries are doing what they can but it's not enough," he said. It was not "French neo-colonialism," but the kind of humanitarian military intervention that the world "generally agrees is a good thing," Mr Melly said. "Maybe because the French are the old colonial power and have the African military experience it was decided that they should be the ones that should do it," he said. Nobody else was yet prepared to, it seems.