A video circulating on social media of the barbaric slaughter of a Southern Cameroonian in Muyuka, Southern Zone of Ambazonia is unacceptable and the Interim Government of Ambazonia condemns the act forcefully. There is no place in the Southern Cameroons for such appalling cruelty and the perpetrators will be brought to justice no matter how long and hard it takes to apprehend them.

Initial investigations by our intelligence services have pointed to family disputes that have no connection with our struggle. But as this crime was perpetrated in Ambazonia, the Interim Government shall stop at nothing in uncovering the truth and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Ambazonia Intelligence Services have briefed the Interim Government this morning that intercepted cables provide conclusive evidence that Atanga Nji Boys have been hired to commit similar criminal and savagery acts in Southern Cameroons with the sole purpose of discrediting Ambazonia Self-defence forces in the estimation of the international community.

For over four years now, La Republique du Cameroun has unleashed terror on our people with the burning of over 421 of our villages and the murder of over 10,000 Ambazonians. The recent abduction of four civilians in Bafut who were murdered with their hands tied and their lifeless bodies uncovered in a river after a few days exhibits a pattern consistent with previous actions of savagery and cold-blooded murder by forces of La Republique du Cameroun.

In October 2019, the Xinhua news agency reported that more than 30 vigilante groups had been created in the Southern Cameroons. In April 2020, the government of La Republique du Cameroun acknowledged that its forces used vigilante groups during their massacre of 24 Ambazonians in Ngarbuh. This episode was far from an isolated incident and there is now a mounting and worrying trend of vigilante groups in Ambazonia. This is a severe concern to the Interim Government as their sole purpose is to fashion mayhem and commit despicable atrocities.

The execution in Bambui by French Cameroun forces of American Missionary Charles Wesco, the execution in broad daylight at a hotel in Menka- Pinyin of 29 youths by French Cameroun soldiers, the burning of Mami Appih Sarah, 96 year grandmother in Kwakwa and the beheading of Chiaba Samuel alias Sam Soya in Belo will live long in the consciousness of our nation.

It is worth recalling that these heinous crimes were photographed by French Cameroun forces and posted on social media for the sole purpose of discrediting our struggle in the eyes of the international community.

Ambazonia Intelligence services have confirmed that these acts are committed to set our local population against their Self-defence Forces. In every community of humans there are traitors and there is no doubt that La Republique du Cameroun is now using militias as was the case during the Ngarbuh massacre to perpetrate violence against our people. We have identified with evidence that many in the French Cameroun military and gendarmes are purported Amba Boys at night carrying out these carnage.

The time just before dawn is the darkest. It is however critical to note that just being a little steadfast at such times prepares one to overcome despair. The valley of the shadows of death that we now traverse shall come to pass.

Despite the violence and unending brutality from the regime in Yaoundé, the Interim Government of Ambazonia has consistently made it clear that we are ready to find a peaceful end to the war between our two nations. The Interim Government is placing an urgent call to Ambazonians to take the following dispositions.

• A need to be strategic in our actions and pronouncement and speak as one voice to the world.
• Stay vigilant within your communities to avoid such barbarous killings from militias of French Cameroun.

To avoid the re occurrence of such vicious execution, concrete steps need to be taken and supported by the international community to create an atmosphere for peace. Our policy position is that the following confidence-building measures would create a conducive atmosphere for productive engagement of any kind with French Cameroun and that the entire process would have to be underwritten by the UN, African Union, US, Great Britain, Germany and Russia.

The key confidence-building measures that would need to be taken are:

1. A UN Humanitarian Intervention in the Southern Cameroons. This necessary action will secure the safety of the people of the Southern Cameroons and humanitarian workers.
2. The release of all Southern Cameroon’s political prisoners being held by La Republique du Cameroun in various prisons and torture facilities.
3. An International Fact-finding Mission to investigate the crimes perpetrated in Ambazonia by the regime in Yaoundé.

The Interim Government of Ambazonia considers that the adoptions of these measures are critical to a discontinuation of crimes against humanity and the numerous executions committed by French Cameroun forces and their militias.

This journey we have undertaken is difficult and bloody but the outcome will be freedom and independence. No one can say for sure how much more suffering we will be subjected to by the brutal regime in Yaoundé and how many more massacres will be committed by their vigilante groups but we must continue to look forward and keep our eyes on the prize.

We definitely shall not accept a return to the status quo nor accept anything less than total independence. This time, we want real freedom and real peace.

Thank You,

Dabney Yerima,

Vice President

The Federal Republic of Ambazonia

Nigeria’s indifference to the separatist conflict in Cameroon—in which its minority English-speaking people (Anglophones) are seeking for a homeland they call Ambazonia —calls for a searing indictment. Apparently because of Boko Haram’s menace, Nigeria, which was once the destination for persons fleeing political persecution all over the African continent, has become inhospitable in recent years.

In 2018, in an extraordinary rendition scheme—since condemned by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and other countries—Nigeria arrested on its home territory, and subsequently deported to Cameroon, 47 Ambazonian activists, including former Ambazonia interim leader Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, who is presently serving a life sentence in Cameroon’s prison.

If Nigeria’s revulsion at the current Cameroon’s Anglophones’ aspiration for independence  stems from the horrors of its 1967-1970 civil war—in which more than one million of its citizens died after Biafra, the short-lived republic, declared itself independent from Nigeria—then that argument is short-sighted for one reason: Timing.

Biafra’s secession, which was declared just seven years after Nigeria obtained independence from Great Britain, lacked the traction for success, because it was out of tune with the mood at that moment, which was for Nigeria’s ethnic and linguistic groups—as it was for other African countries emerging from years under colonial rule with similar characteristics —to merge and form the new republic.

It helps explain why General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s military head of state at the time, was able to marshal every available asset, including the United States’ “One Nigeria” policy under President Lyndon Johnson, to crush the Biafra secession. (A similar fate befell Katanga and South Kasai, two breakaway provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC), where, just weeks into its independence in June 1960, they also declared themselves “independent” from DRC, sparking a raging civil war that led to an end to their secessionist status.)

But if Biafra’s bid for independence collapsed —to validate my argument that the circumstances  differ from the current conflict in Cameroon—because of its inauspicious timing, Anglophones’ yearning for nationhood (roused almost sixty years after failed attempts at creating an egalitarian federalism between them and Francophone-Cameroon) comes on the heels of other pro-independence movements in Africa and elsewhere in the world—South Sudan, Eritrea, East Timor, Macedonia—that have mostly been successful.

Nigeria’s frontline state status and its historical ties to Anglophones—up until October 1961 Anglophones were part of Nigeria—call for the former to bring on its diplomatic juggernaut to bear (as its previously done over other hotspots around Africa) on the current conflict, paving a way for a negotiated settlement. Its less inspiring commitment to this role further raises another question, which is whether Nigeria no longer acts—as it once did—as the massive rampart against French influence in West Africa.

Keeping the French at bay in this region has historically been one of Nigeria’s foreign policy objectives. And at the heart of this conflict lies French influence, which dates back to 1972, when “Total”, a French oil company, began operations in the Anglophone region.

That same year— over concerns that without a strong unitary system of government in place, its oil interests in the Anglophone region lacked the needed protection—France coerced Ahmadou Ahidjo, Cameroon’s head of state at the time, into abolishing the federal system of government then existing between Anglophones and Francophone-Cameroon, a decision that Anglophones felt was a betrayal, and whose consequences loom over the current conflict.

When Jaja Wachuku, Nigeria’s first Foreign Minister, spoke at the United Nations in October 1961 about his country being “independent in everything but neutral in nothing that affects the destiny of Africa”, and Yakubu Gowon (speaking at an OAU Conference in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1974)  about “the inalienable right to self-determination; the necessity for decent life; and the unquestionable demand for human dignity”, they were apparently making references to these French machinations that have, to an extent, contributed to this conflict in Cameroon.

But at their hour of peril, when they needed Nigeria for guidance, Nigeria, it seems, deserted the Anglophones.

By Joseph M. Ndifor