Monthly Archives: May 2018

31, May 2018

Repression is worsening in Cameroon- The Economist ⁰

THE parade featured singing schoolchildren and goose-stepping soldiers. A giant presidential portrait was wheeled along the boulevard. To some observers it must have looked like a comic sketch about an event staged by an African dictator. But no one dared snigger. The celebration of Cameroon’s national day on May 20th was lorded over by President Paul Biya, who at 85 is Africa’s oldest head of state.

He hoped the parade would show national unity. But it hinted at a deep fissure dividing Cameroon. In the country’s two English-speaking regions a simmering uprising has been met by brutal repression. As members of the main opposition party, the Social Democratic Front, marched past the president they showed their indignation. Placards were banned, so the marchers pulled up their shirts to expose pictures taped to their bodies of people tortured, mutilated or murdered by the government.

The conflict started in October 2016, when English-speaking lawyers took to the streets complaining that legal documents were not being translated from French and that English-speakers were discriminated against. The country has been officially bilingual since its two constituent parts voted to form a federal republic after gaining independence in 1960 and 1961. But English-speakers, who make up less than a fifth of the population, say their regions get less than their fair share of public money and that the government forces them to use French in schools, courts and other public institutions.

Mr Biya’s government responded by arresting activists and cutting off the internet in English-speaking regions. In doing so it fanned secessionism, transforming peaceful protests into a vicious war, with kidnappings and beheadings. Atrocities have been committed by both sides. More than 100 civilians have reportedly been killed, as have more than 40 members of the security forces.

Peter Henry Barlerin, America’s ambassador to Cameroon, says April proved the bloodiest month. He accuses the government of authorising “targeted killings” and the “burning and looting of villages”. Thousands of people have fled, many of them across the border into Nigeria.

The strife is also affecting the fight against Boko Haram, a jihadist insurgency that has spilled over from Nigeria into neighbouring countries. The dense swamps that surround Lake Chad in northern Cameroon give the jihadists cover. Elite Cameroonian soldiers, who are among the most effective fighters in the region, have been removed from Lake Chad and redeployed to English-speaking regions in the south.

There are few signs that Mr Biya is trying to find a peaceful solution. For much of the year the ageing president reportedly rules Cameroon from a luxury hotel in Switzerland, a country he likes to visit with his wife Chantal (known for her designer dresses and signature hairstyle).

In March Mr Biya called his first cabinet meeting since October 2015 and gave a speech that sounded as if he had already hit the campaign trail for the presidential election scheduled for later this year. Mr Biya has not yet said whether he will stand, but if he does run it would be for his seventh term in office.

In any case, the government is wasting no time clearing his path. Ahead of senatorial elections in March it arrested several journalists and opposition activists. On May 25th seven activists were convicted on charges of rebellion and acts of terrorism. They were given jail sentences of 10-15 years. Cameroon’s war over words seems likely only to intensify.

Source: The Economist

31, May 2018

Letters to the editor: Why Biya will fall ⁰

The 85 year old murderer and war criminal is taking the last kicks of a dying horse. It is obvious that this disgusting animal has committed the vilest and atrocious acts in Southern Cameroons that the face of the earth has ever seen.

He has killed and tortured thousands of Ambazonian men and women and innocent children like toddlers and babies who die for no reason because this dirty animal wants to stay in power and France is also with him because they also enjoy murdering innocent Southern Cameroonians who have done absolutely nothing.

Our houses get burnt and destroyed and our children are stuck and have no way out. He will fall and he will fall in a horrible manner. The only solution to this devious catastrophe is Biya’s death.

He is almost lost and internal opposition supported by the West is growing. He must give up the position and go to Morocco!! Yes that is where all disgraced Francophone dictators go or Ambazonians will hunt him.

Paul Biya is doomed and he will eventually fall from power whether through the course of regular passing of time or by the hands of army soldiers. Biya has committed heinous crimes against his own people and the people of Southern Cameroons and he doesn’t deserve to rule over the country again. At some point or another in this 2018, he will lose his power.

By Iya Fembe Pauline

Oslo, Norway

The opinions expressed here are not that of the Cameroon Concord News Group

31, May 2018

Naija: Buhari approves Not-Too-Young-To-Run Bill ⁰

Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, 75, has approved a law to reduce age limits to serve in political office, making it easier for younger candidates to run in next year’s election.

The Not-Too-Young-To-Run Bill says a 35-year-old can serve as president – the previous threshold was 40.

Anyone who is 25 or above can be state and federal representatives. Previously it was 30.

Youth groups had waged a strong campaign to reduce the age limit, saying it would encourage youth participation in politics.

Mr Buhari is running for a second term in elections due next year.

Source: BBC

31, May 2018

Heartless France: Pensioner goes on trial for helping African migrants ⁰

A 73-year-old Amnesty International volunteer appeared in court in France on Wednesday charged with helping two underage Africans illegally enter the country, the latest case involving activists assisting migrants on the move through Europe.

The trial of pensioner Martine Landry is the first of its kind in France involving a member of Amnesty.

It comes a day before three activists — two Swiss and one Italian — appear in court for helping a group of migrants cross from Italy to France through a pass in the Alps in April.

Landry is the coordinator of Amnesty’s refugee response in southeast France. She risks up to five years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros ($34,700) if convicted of illegally assisting two Guinean youths in July 2017.

She is accused of helping the pair, both aged 15 according to Amnesty, cross back into France after they were arrested and returned to Italy during a raid on the home of olive farmer and activist Cedric Herrou, where they had been sheltering.

Landry claims that she did not help the teens re-enter France after they were turned back at the border by Italian police.

The white-haired campaigner said she stepped in only after they crossed onto French soil and took them to the police to register for asylum.

‘Solidarity is not a crime’

Her case, like that of the Alps campaigners, has become a cause celebre among critics of President Emmanuel Macron’s tough stance on migration.

Several dozen activists gathered outside the courthouse in the city of Nice holding banners reading “Solidarity is not a crime”.

In April, MPs voted to soften laws criminalising acts of solidarity with illegal migrants, to exempt those who provide them with free food, shelter or medical care.

Helping migrants illegally cross the border remains a crime, however.

Amnesty condemned the case against Landry.

“Dragging a compassionate pensioner before the court on these surreal charges makes a mockery of justice. Acts of solidarity should be promoted, not punished,” its senior campaigner on migration, Maria Serrano, said in a statement.

The three activists on trial Thursday in the Alpine town of Gap are accused of helping a group of migrants reach France after dozens of anti-immigrant campaigners blocked another pass on the trans-alpine migrant trail.

They face up to 10 years in prison and fines of 750,000 euros each as well being banned from France if convicted.

NGOs have contrasted the treatment of the campaigners with that of “Spiderman” Mamoudou Gassama, the illegal Malian migrant who was fast-tracked for French citizenship this week after rescuing a young boy hanging from a balcony in Paris.

“A few symbolic gestures mask a policy of repression and expulsion,” said migrant support campaigner Michel Rousseau.

(AFP)

31, May 2018

French Cameroun tyrant nears day of reckoning ⁰

The French Cameroun despot sent army soldiers to burn down villages and towns in Southern Cameroons and to kill hundreds of Ambazonian civilians as his hated regime looked increasingly likely to fall. Biya is resorting to sorties by his still ill-equipped ground forces to resist what appears to be the final gambit of a senseless war he orchestrated against the people of Southern Cameroons.

After two years of fighting to crush the Southern Cameroons resistance and a death toll of nearly 2000, a combination of political errors, international isolation from the Trump administration and a well-organized Ambazonia Self-Defense Council Restoration Force, we of the Cameroon Concord News Group can now say Biya’s days look numbered. Only reticence in France about the prospect of an Anglophone taking over in Yaoundé appears to be holding back a CIA-French intervention as witnessed in places such as Libya and Zaire.

The genocide currently going on in Southern Cameroons has enabled the opponents of the Biya regime in Yaoundé to secure US support for regime change. Earlier last week, it was rumored that the Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia has recorded a major diplomatic breakthrough deep within the US Congress for the restoration of the state of Ambazonia.

There are fears in some capitals within the Sub Saharan and CEMAC region that without a regime change in Yaoundé thousands more will die. Yet the Biya Francophone Minister of Communication and so-called Cameroon government spokesman, Issa Tchiroma Bakary continues to blame the killings and sufferings of Southern Cameroonians on the Interim Government and the Southern Cameroons Diaspora.

Signs of a stranglehold being tightened on the Biya regime could be seen recently with the US ambassador Peter Barlerin stating that the two US warplanes handed over to the Francophone dominated army should be used only to counter Boko Haram insurgency.

A number of Nigerians have been killed on Southern Cameroons soil since the revolution started and Abuja is slowly but surely moving away from Biya, but Nigerian ailing President Buhari maintains the strategy is not a step towards intervention in Cameroon’s domestic affairs. Cameroon government forces have continued to kill innocent Southern Cameroonian citizens in both the Northern and Southern Zones. The army also fired bullets at several villagers in nearby Bamenda suburb of Santa.

As well as the growing Southern Cameroons challenge, Biya faces an alliance of young Western-backed militants of his ruling CPDM crime syndicate who have openly stated that he should step aside.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

31, May 2018

Nigeria: A study of Boko Haram’s public communications offers hints on its strategy ⁰

In July 2011, the Nigerian government unveiled plans to make telecommunications companies dedicate toll-free phone lines so civilians could report Boko Haram activity. Months later, insurgent spokesman Abu Qaqa threatened to attack service providers and Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC) offices.

“We have realized that the mobile phone operators and the NCC have been assisting security agencies in tracking and arresting our members by bugging their lines and enabling the security agents to locate the position of our members,” Qaqa announced, according to a 2013 article by Freedom Onuoha on the E-International Relations website.

Eight months later, Boko Haram made good on Qaqa’s threat. The militant group launched a two-day attack on telecommunications towers belonging to several providers in five cities: Bauchi, Gombe, Kano, Maiduguri and Potiskum. Qaqa announced that Boko Haram launched the tower attacks “as a result of the assistance they offer security agents.” Of the 530 telecommunications base stations damaged in Nigeria in 2012, Boko Haram was responsible for 150.

The attack on telecommunications providers illustrates an important aspect of Boko Haram messaging. The group often has used its public messaging as a harbinger of things to come. Although it might sound foolish to telegraph likely attack targets, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) researcher Omar S. Mahmood told Africa Defense Forum the gambit could help Boko Haram achieve two important goals. First, it can help gain a concession through intimidation, such as the release of detainees.

“The other is I think it’s a pretty powerful message if Boko Haram comes out and says, ‘I’m going to attack X because of this,’ and then they go out and they do it,” Mahmood said. “It just serves to make their next warning even more intimidating and effective.”

MESSAGES PORTEND ATTACKS

Mahmood, in his March 2017 paper for the ISS titled “More than propaganda: A review of Boko Haram’s public messages,” showed that a significant number of Boko Haram messages between 2010 and 2016 issued warnings and threatened violence. In fact, warnings and threats constitute the second-most-common theme of the group’s messaging out of the 145 messages studied.

“Given the proliferation of warnings in Boko Haram messaging, especially during [leader Abubakar] Shekau’s extended rants in which he accuses essentially all opposed to him, it can be difficult to discern between a legitimate threat and bluster,” Mahmood wrote. “But a careful reading of the situation may determine what Boko Haram’s next target could be, which is more likely to result in action when linked to a specific and articulated grievance.”

Boko Haram demonstrated this tendency further in its threat against schools. In January 2012, Shekau complained publicly about alleged mistreatment of Islamic schools and students, and he threatened to launch attacks.

Again, Boko Haram followed through. From January to early March 2012, militants destroyed at least a dozen schools in the Maiduguri region of Borno State. About February 20, 2012, the first three schools were set ablaze. Six days later, Boko Haram said the attacks were in retaliation for state raids on Islamic schools, according to Human Rights Watch. From February 26 to 29, militants burned at least four schools, and on March 1 torched another five.

Ties between messaging and attacks also can be seen in Boko Haram’s assault on Nigerian media and the nation’s oil industry. As Qaqa complained that the media misrepresented Boko Haram, insurgents bombed This Day newspaper offices in Abuja and Kaduna in April 2012. Boko Haram’s anger at This Day stemmed from a 10-year-old column on the Miss World pageant published in the paper, which some Muslims found to be blasphemous. Peaceful protests already had taken place in the runup to the pageant, but the column sparked violent clashes between Christians and Muslims that resulted in about 250 deaths, according to Human Rights Watch.

The 2002 pageant, originally scheduled to be held in Nigeria, eventually was moved to London, but Boko Haram’s anger culminated in the attack years later.

A month after the This Day attack, Boko Haram issued an 18-minute video that sorted Nigerian media into three groups based on its perception of their transgressions. This Day stood alone in the first tier because of the Miss World incident and other perceived offenses. The second tier included several newspapers and a radio station. These outlets would be attacked soon, the narrator stated. The third category included media organizations that faced attack if they were not careful, listing more newspapers, an international radio service and a website.

In June 2014, a suicide bomber detonated a bomb outside a Lagos oil refinery. Mahmood wrote that the decision to attack the refinery so far from Boko Haram’s home base likely was an assault on government wealth sources rather than evidence of a grievance with the oil industry. Similar attacks did not follow, and oil interest messaging rarely has been repeated. “Rather than emerging out of nowhere, the assault was foreshadowed in Boko Haram messages in February, March and May that year [2014], indicating its commitment and ability to follow through even on pledges considered to be unrealistic at the time,” Mahmood wrote.

HOSTAGES AND PRISONERS

Boko Haram’s highest-profile action is the kidnapping of 276 Chibok schoolgirls in 2014. On April 14, militants attacked a boarding school in Chibok, Borno State, in the middle of the night. Insurgents raided dormitories, loaded girls into trucks and drove away. Some girls jumped into bushes as trucks rushed away, leaving 219 children held captive. The atrocity drew worldwide condemnation and parallels a long-standing grievance of Boko Haram: the desire for the release of incarcerated members.

Negotiations and conditions comprise the third- most-frequent theme appearing in messages Mahmood studied. “Specifically, the demand for all incarcerated Boko Haram members to be set free has been a recurrent refrain in messaging,” he wrote.

In the rampup to the Chibok abductions, Shekau referenced the wives and children of insurgent detainees no less than seven times in 2012 and 2013, and accused federal officials of kidnapping insurgents’ family members. In 2012, spokesman Qaqa stated: “We would soon start kidnapping the wives and children of all the people that have had hands in the arrest of our wives and children.”

In October 2016, after months of negotiations, Boko Haram released 21 of the Chibok girls in exchange for a monetary ransom, Daily Trust reported. In May 2017, insurgents swapped another 82 of the girls for five militant leaders.

EXPANDING VIOLENCE, JOINING ISIS

Boko Haram grew as a local insurgency from 2009 to 2012. In 2013, a willingness to expand into regional operations emerged with the kidnapping of a French family in Cameroon, the insurgent group’s first foray across the border of Nigeria’s neighbor. The kidnapping, the group said, was a response to the arrest of Boko Haram members in Cameroon. From there, operations increased in Cameroon in 2014, and by early 2015, Shekau was openly taunting the presidents of Chad and Niger as well.

“This coincided with the first violent Boko Haram operations in both countries in February 2015, again demonstrating the close convergence between messaging and group action, and confirming the extension of its struggle to the Lake Chad region,” Mahmood wrote.

It was about this time that the insurgent group pledged its allegiance to ISIS. A new Arabic-language Twitter account claiming to be the official outlet for a new Boko Haram media group launched, called Al-Urwah al-Wuthqa, the BBC reported.

The ISIS alignment was the beginning of big changes in messaging for Boko Haram. Until then, messaging was closely associated with what the group was going through or accomplishing. Ernest Ogbozor, a Nigerian doctoral student at George Mason University in the United States, said his research points to three distinct phases of Boko Haram messaging, culminating with the ISIS alignment.

The first phase, roughly from 2009 to 2012, focused on grievances, recruitment and revenge. In 2009, Nigerian forces killed founder Mohammed Yusuf, destroyed mosques and disrupted a micro-credit lending scheme. “Now the group was left with nothing,” Ogbozor said, adding that messaging sought to parlay these grievances into popular support.

Boko Haram’s most powerful period was from 2013 to 2015, when it was capturing and holding territory, and dealing setbacks to military forces. Messages at this time focused on praise for territorial and military achievements.

By late 2015 and through 2017, Nigerian and regional military assaults began to take their toll on Boko Haram. “So instead of praising itself, the message changed to seeking relevance,” Ogbozor said. “This is when Boko Haram pledged allegiance to Islamic State.”

GROUP, MESSAGING SPLIT

In August 2016, Boko Haram split into two factions: One is led by pugnacious spokesman Shekau; the other by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, ISIS’ choice for leader. Although Shekau pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2015, the group soon grew tired of his management of the war against regional forces and his propensity for targeting civilians, Mahmood said. The al-Barnawi faction broke off, and with this change came differences in messaging.

Shekau had been featured prominently in Boko Haram messages. Soon after pledging allegiance to ISIS, that ended. Al-Barnawi’s faction started releasing themed batches of photos through social media that highlight nonmilitary aspects of the group’s struggle, such as governance, justice and services that Boko Haram can provide as part of ISIS.

The split also has left al-Barnawi’s ISIS-aligned faction the clear winner in terms of potential longevity and lethality, Mahmood said. Shekau’s wing is just trying to survive, but it still uses ISIS logos in messages.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ACTION

Mahmood said more research is needed to see how Boko Haram messaging resonates with local populations. It’s possible, he said, that Boko Haram messaging might not be particularly effective locally. If so, then countermessaging efforts may not work either. However, he writes: “Boko Haram messaging provides a window into a group that otherwise remains largely enigmatic and obscure. … Messaging can thus expose important insights beyond simply serving as a propaganda tool, and thus should be closely monitored.” He suggests that observers:
Continue researching the effects of Boko Haram messaging on local populations, focusing on recruitment. Doing so will lead to more effective programs to reduce this influence.
Analyze Boko Haram messages to see changes in group divisions or the identification of new targets.
Continue frustrating Boko Haram messaging by detaining media operatives or removing social medial posts. Such tactics can reduce messaging or discontinue certain practices, such as social media use.
Reduce penalties and stigmatization for those who watch Boko Haram messages to keep from enhancing its appeal. Long-winded rants may actually present the group as negative and volatile.
Balance factual press coverage of Boko Haram messages with the need to limit its outreach. Careful reporting guidelines can keep the media from becoming a propaganda tool.

“The messaging says a lot about their strategy,” Mahmood said. “It goes hand in hand, so it’s important to really look at these aspects because they can tell you a lot about the movement.”

Culled from Defenseweb

31, May 2018

Zimbabwe: Mixed reactions greet July 30 polls ⁰

Mixed reactions have greeted news of a July 30 date for Zimbabweans first general elections after Robert Mugabe was forced out of power.

On Wednesday, Emmerson Mnangagwa announced that a general election will be held on July 30, seen as crucial to securing foreign investments.

“I think he has got the final say, he has got the powers to put on a date, we have been ready to vote”, said Harare resident, Aston Matava.

Frank Nemayire ’‘looks forward to any changes in employment, or lack of liquidity, from the one who will be elected.“

However some are disgruntled. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which relies on voters who have fled the Mugabe regime, has suffered a setback as the Constitutional Court has decided that Zimbabweans in the diaspora could only vote by moving to the country.

‘‘First of all we have been clamoring for diaspora vote, we wanted the demilitarization of Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission and the army, the state security agents should not be involved in the electoral process”, said Albert Chidhakwa.

Lyne tte Biti thinks the announcement is rather too soon. ‘‘In my opinion our party’s demands for electoral reforms have not been heard, so it makes no sense”, she added.

Missing from July’s election, for the first time in 20 years, will be Zimbabwe’s foremost political gladiators, Mugabe and longtime leader of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai, who died of cancer in February.

Mnangagwa goes into the election with the advantages of incumbency and the backing of the army. His face main rival is 40-year-old Nelson Chamisa and the MDC.

Critics have accused Mnangagwa of being Mugabe’s most loyal acolyte, and blame him for a crackdown on rebels in the mid-1980s that rights groups say killed 20,000 civilians. He denies those charges.

Source: Reuters

31, May 2018

Kenya: President Uhuru vows to recover resources lost in youth fund corruption scandal ⁰

Kenya’s public prosecutor said on Wednesday 24 civil servants and business people charged with involvement in the theft of nearly $100 million of public funds will stay in custody pending a June 4 hearing on their application for bail.

The suspects, who include the public service ministry’s principal secretary, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to magistrate Douglas Ogoti to charges that relate to theft at the government’s National Youth Service (NYS).‏

“Accused to be remanded in custody until Monday 4th June, 2018 when court will rule on their bail application,” the office of the director of public prosecution said on Twitter.

The NYS is a state agency that trains young people and deploys them to work on projects ranging from construction to traffic control.

It is rare for prosecutors to bring such a large group of public officials to court to answer corruption charges.

Kenyatta tells suspects to ‘carry own cross’

President Uhuru Kenyatta pledged to stamp out graft when he was first elected in 2013 but critics say he has been slow to pursue top officials and ministers.

In the wake of the latest NYS scandal, the president vowed to recover all resources that have been lost to corruption schemes.

“These people who are corrupt should be jailed and we recover all the stolen funds to deliver on the things we promised Kenyans,” Kenyatta told residents of the capital Nairobi while launching a government project on Wednesday.

The president also called out any Kenyans that might entertain the notion of defending people implicated in the scandal, based on their ethnicity.

“I do not want to hear anybody defending those caught in corrupt dealings. A thief is a thief irrespective of the tribe he/she comes from,” said the president.

Chief prosecutor Noordin Mohamed Haji on Monday named 54 people, 40 of them government officials, to face charges including abuse of office and conspiracy to commit an economic crime. Some of those charged remain at large.

The prosecutor’s office also tweeted that it had applied for arrest warrants for suspects who failed to turn up in court on Tuesday, or that they could surrender to the police.

Diplomats urge Kenya to decisively deal with corruption

Ambassadors from 18 Western diplomatic missions including the United States, Britain and Canada issued a statement on Wednesday welcoming Tuesday’s indictments and saying they stood “with Kenyans in the fight against corruption”.

The diplomats, noting their governments provide “wide-ranging assistance” to the Kenyan government, praised the investigation into the alleged looting of funds at the NYS and urged the judiciary “to ensure fair trials and justice”.

“Corruption has long undermined Kenya’s prosperity, security and democracy,” the statement said. “It is, quite simply, theft from the Kenyan people.”

The diplomats included ambassadors, high commissioners and head of delegation of the European Union, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Ireland, United Kingdom, Denmark, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Poland, Romania and Norway.

Source: Africa News

30, May 2018

Africa’s next civil war could be in Cameroon ⁰

On May 20, Cameroon’s national day, citizens in the capital of Yaounde marched in parades, and President Paul Biya congratulated members of the armed forces on their commitment to peace and safety. At the same time, in the country’s unstable Anglophone regions, separatists kidnapped a mayor, killed two police officers and intimidated people who tried to celebrate the holiday.

Such incidents have human rights activists worried that Cameroon could soon be the site of Africa’s next civil war.

“We are gradually, gradually getting there,” said Agbor Nkongho, an Anglophone human rights lawyer and director of the Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa. “I’m not seeing the willingness of the government to try to find and address the issue in a way that we will not get there.”

Since late 2016, Cameroon has faced an increasingly violent uprising in the bilingual country’s minority Anglophone regions, where English speakers say they have been marginalized by the French-speaking majority for decades. When peaceful protests started 18 months ago, government forces opened fire on protesters and looted and burned down villages. Now an armed separatist movement is gaining traction, kidnapping government officials and killing gendarmes.

Some observers say the situation has already reached a point where it could be considered a civil war.

“If you look at what is going on now, you can call it a civil war,” said John Mukum Mbaku, a professor at Weber State University in Utah and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The government is shooting down defenseless villagers, and many have decided to defend themselves and are fighting back.”

At the end of World War I, the League of Nations divided the German colony of Kamerun between France and Britain. The French-controlled territory won independence in 1960, and the British territories that now make up the southwest and northwest regions of the country joined the next year.

On paper, Cameroon is now the only country in the world other than Canada where both French and English are official languages. But only one-fifth of the country’s 22 million people are Anglophone. Biya, who has ruled for 35 years, is Francophone, as are most of the country’s elites.

“The fact of the matter is, if you don’t speak French, you cannot survive in the country,” Mbaku said.

Anglophones say they are being forced to assimilate into Francophone culture, and their frustrations reached a boiling point in 2016.

A protest movement was launched with teachers and lawyers at the forefront, attacking the “Francophonization” of their home towns. A particular complaint was the growing number of non-English-speaking teachers being sent to Anglophone areas.

“It’s not just about language,” Nkongho said. “It’s a culture, it’s a way of life, it’s the way they’ve been raised.”

The Cameroonian military responded to the protests with brute force. Videos emerged of the security forces kicking university students and dragging them through mud. They also opened fire on protesters, killing some of them. As the movement gained momentum and evidence of police brutality circulated on social media, the government cut the Internet in Anglophone regions. Julie Owono, executive director of Internet Without Borders, said the months-long shutdown “convinced people that, indeed, Anglophones are treated differently.”

Support for armed separatists, who want to establish a new Anglophone nation called Ambazonia, started to grow. “You talk to people who were very moderate but they are now supporting the separatist movement,” Nkongho said.

Last week, he said, civilians counted around 40 dead bodies in Anglophone regions of the country — at least 27 of which were allegedly killed in a standoff with government forces. That made for one of the bloodiest weeks since the unrest began 18 months ago. Col. Didier Badjeck, a Cameroon Army spokesman, said government troops engaged in a firefight with separatists and that “several terrorists were neutralized.”

A recent count by the International Crisis Group said at least 120 civilians and 43 members of security forces have been killed since the conflict began. Some 20,000 people have fled to Nigeria as refugees, and 160,000 are now displaced within Cameroon, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

A presidential election looms in October, with Biya expected to run again. Akere Muna, an Anglophone presidential candidate and prominent lawyer, hopes that better governance could keep the country unified. But he said the government has only ignited tensions and dismissed Anglophone calls for more autonomy.

Muna said he recently visited an Anglophone village that is normally home to 6,000 people. Only a handful of people were left, he said. “If [Biya] gets reelected, the country will become ungovernable,” Muna said. “By the day, it’s getting worse.”

Culled from Washington Post

30, May 2018

UN Emergency Response Plan and Overview of the crisis in Southern Cameroons ⁰

The crisis in the South-West and North-West Regions of Cameroon has compounded pre-existing vulnerabilities. Since 2016, political and social instability, exacerbated by sporadic violence, has had a negative impact on the civilian population of Cameroon’s South-West and NorthWest Regions, hosting four million inhabitants (16% of the total population). In November 2017, the sociopolitical crisis progressively translated into insecurity and armed violence. Since then, the escalation of tension and upsurge in hostilities between non-state armed groups and defence and security forces have triggered humanitarian needs across the two regions, linked to significant internal displacement.

In recent months, the epicentre of the crisis moved from Bamenda (North-West) to Mamfe and Kumba (SouthWest). All divisions in the South-West region, host to more than 1.4 million inhabitants, are affected by the crisis.

The number of households forced to flee their villages – or the country – in search of safer areas has rapidly and steadily increased since November 2017. Recent needs assessments report that at least 160,000 people have been internally displaced in the two affected regions and would need humanitarian and protection assistance over the next three months. In addition, more than 21,000 Cameroonians have been registered as refugees in Cross River, Benue and Akwa Ibom States in Nigeria.1 This crisis is taking place against a backdrop of several other humanitarian emergencies affecting 3.3 million people across Cameroon.

Most affected areas

The South-West Region has become the hub of the crisis as it is home to more than 90% of the 160,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in need of humanitarian assistance; 135,000 are located in Meme Division and 15,000 in Manyu Division. The remaining 10,000 are displaced in the North-West Region.

Simultaneously, dozens of villages in Mbongue and Konye Subdivision (Meme Division) have been emptied of their populations. The situation is similar in the NorthWest, especially in Boyo Division.

Many villages have suffered significant material damage in Mbongue and Konye Subdivision (Meme Division), and in Eyumodjok and Akwaya Subdivision (Manyu Division). 1 This Response Plan does not include the need of Cameroonian refugees who found refuge in Nigeria Recently, insecurity has spread to new divisions in the South-West (Ndian, Lebialem, Fako) and North-West (Boyo).

Who are the most vulnerable?

Clashes between non-state armed groups and defense and security forces have displaced the civilian population into the surrounding forests and villages – 80% of the displaced population have found refuge in the forest.

The two regions has experienced a deterioration of living conditions – primarily affecting school-age children, women and the elderly – and a collapse of livelihoods as well as heightened abuses.
The crisis and subsequent displacement have prevented people from accessing their fields and markets. For most of the affected population who relied upon agriculture or livestock as their main sources of livelihoods before the crisis, dependency on external assistance will be inevitable in the short-term.