Cameroon government army soldiers are moving throughout Southern Cameroons committing what has been described by human rights organizations as crimes against humanity and war crimes as thousands of Ambazonian civilians continue to escape in to Nigeria. Hundreds of Southern Cameroonians are moving further into areas held by Ambazonia Restoration Forces with fighting reportedly slowing down due to the outbreak of the coronvirus. The war in Southern Cameroons is a geopolitical and humanitarian crisis that is threatening the Federal Republic of Nigeria and increasing crime rate in states such as Benue and Cross River.   

Hundreds of poorly armed Southern Cameroonian criminal fleeing the conflict have also migrated into French Cameroun towns and cities such as Dschang, Bafoussam, Douala and Mbounda, creating the possibility of another Francophone and Anglophone confrontation deep inside French Cameroun territory. Cameroon government army soldiers dedicated to President Paul Biya of French Cameroun and abetted by French government military aid say they are in the final stages of attempting to take control of the entire British Southern Cameroons occupied by a number of Ambazonian Resistance groups. From every indication, the Buhari administration in Nigeria does not want to become involved in the Southern Cameroons war. Yet as hostilities move inside Nigerian territory and as an estimated 50,000 Southern Cameroons refugees inundate border settlements in Nigeria, Abuja could be drawn in.

The Southern Cameroons war has become a war in which the French, the British and the Chinese are exploiting to get whatever oil, gas and mining deals they had long for from the failed French Cameroun regime in Yaoundé. In a country already fractured in two, it was evidently clear that from the abduction of the Southern Cameroons leaders in Abuja and their forced extradition to Yaoundé, Southern Cameroons independence was no longer in doubt but was now linked to Biya’s continued stay in power.

The Southern Cameroons crisis has indeed spawned many arguments about humanitarian interventions with the UN coming across as a toothless bulldog that can bark but cannot bite. Under the UN’s watchful eyes, thousands of innocent Southern Cameroons civilians including women and children have been killed by the Francophone dominated Cameroon government army soldiers as they flee attacks in both the Northern and Southern Zones of Southern Cameroons. The renowned Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group have both described the situation in Southern Cameroons a total meltdown of humanity. The recent attack in Bafut carried out by the Cameroon government army is yet another humanitarian disaster in Southern Cameroons – and the Ambazonia Interim Government and its current Vice President Dabney Yerima are calling on the international community to intervene.

The Marginalization of Southern Cameroons: When facts don’t lie

Lying is a sin that was committed by five Francophone Ministers who told the world at a press conference that there is no Anglophone problem in Cameroon. The integrity deficit associated with lying about the Anglophone problem is a travesty that insults and diminishes every Cameroonian and must stop.

The point must therefore be made, and with emphasis, that there is an Anglophone problem but the problem is deeply embedded in the asymmetrical political structure of the country, which has led to institutional paralysis engendered by leadership failure. Anglophones are divided over the Anglophone problem, just as Francophones are united in their bellicosity and belligerence towards Anglophones whom they cast as treasonable felons and secessionists who cannot be trusted. Francophones have used this self-fulfilling fallacy as an excuse to exclude Anglophones from the commanding heights of decision-making and treat them as second class citizens. But facts don’t lie.

Consider this: over 58 years after independence and re-unification, there has never been an Anglophone President or an Anglophone Secretary General or Director of Civil Cabinet at the Presidency. Nor has an Anglophone ever held the strategic ministerial portfolio of Defense, Finance, Communication, External Relations or even in charge of the Police, Gendarmerie, the Army and Intelligence services; not even ambassadors to English-speaking countries like the USA and Nigeria.

For a region that represents about 20% of the population, accounting for over 60% of GDP, the fact that the lone oil refinery named in French (SONARA) is in Anglophone Cameroon, yet has been run by Francophone general managers with a predominantly Francophone workforce since its creation is unacceptable. It just cannot be that there are no competent Anglophones to occupy these positions.

As if that was not enough, higher institutions like the National Polytechnic, ENAM, IRIC, ESSTIC, INJS, IFORD, CUSS, Public Works, ENSPT, IRAD, are heavily laden with French courses; another way of saying, Anglophones need not apply. Although Cameroon is officially a bilingual country where both English and French are equal, when has the president ever made an official address to the nation in English? All official correspondences are in French, even when directed to Anglophones. French is the language used in the administration, police, gendarmerie, army and the courts. Anglophones have to seek translators at their own expense. All road signs are in French and there is not a single word in English on the FCFA currency in circulation; is this constitutional?

The facts and figures of Anglophone marginalization under President Biya are staggering. Of the 292 ministers appointed since Biya took office in 1982, only 76 (10.8%) have been Anglophones. In the last 63-member cabinet before Southern Cameroonians started the uprising, there were only six Anglophones (9%) and only, Philip Ngole Ngwese (2%) out of the 38 Ministers had a cabinet portfolio. There are four Anglophone Secretary Generals (10%) and three Anglophone DAGs (7%) in the central administration. In state corporations, there are less than 15 Anglophones (11%) out of over 130 general managers. Of the over 130 Board chairmen of state corporations, there are only 10 Anglophones (7%). only three of the nation’s 33 generals in the Armed Forces are Anglophones.

The picture in the judiciary is even more pathetic and scandalous with Francophones occupying all key positions in the Supreme Court – President of the Supreme Court; Attorney General; Head of Judicial Division; Head of Administrative Division; Head of audit Division; Head of Special Criminal Court; Special Attorney Special Criminal Court; Director of Military Justice; Registrar-In-Chief Supreme Court and Secretary General Supreme Court. 58 (39%) of the 148 magistrates in the Southwest are Francophones while 54 (61%) of the 89 magistrates in the legal department in the Southwest are Francophones. Of the 50 magistrates working in Buea (Bench & Legal Department), 20 (40%) are Francophones while 20 (71%) of the 28 magistrates in the legal department in Buea are Francophones. Of the 30 new bailiffs that were appointed in January 2014 in the Southwest, 28 of them (93%) are Francophones.

The situation in the Northwest region is even worse. Of the 128 magistrates in the Northwest, there are  67 Francophones (52 %). Of the 97 magistrates of the legal departments, 64 of them are Francophones, (65.9%); 22 (48.9%) of the 45 magistrates in Bamenda are Francophones. There are 27 magistrates in the legal department in Bamenda of which 21, (77.8%) are Francophones. All the 21 new bailiffs (100%) appointed in January 2014 to the Northwest are Francophones. Comparatively, of the 119 magistrates in Douala, only two (1.7%) are Anglophones. Likewise, only two (1.9%) of the 107 magistrates in Yaoundé are Anglophones. These are very disturbing statistics in a bilingual country with two legal systems!

There is no reference hospital and no functional airport or seaport in Anglophone Cameroon. It is worth recalling that preliminary studies by the consortium charged with the construction of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline had established that the project will be cost-effective if the pipeline was built from Doba in Southern Chad to Limbe, which has a natural deep seaport. According to documents from the World Bank and the Washington-based Environmental Defence Fund, the then Secretary General at the Presidency, Joseph Owona re-routed the project to his native Kribi; taking the pipeline through ecologically sensitive areas and increasing the distance by 90 miles and the cost by $2 billion. Owona warned the investors that Limbe was risky because Anglophones might one day agitate for secession and the pipeline will be exposed to sabotage and vandalism.

To add insult to injury, the government has made it a point to assign Francophones who neither speak nor understand English to Anglophone regions. A Francophone DO in Oku, Kamdem Andre once called a meeting with traditional rulers and started speaking in French. Not understanding what he was saying, the Fons started dozing. Feeling snubbed, the angry DO ordered his bodyguards to wake-up the Fons with a slap each and the meeting ended in chaos.

DO Kamdem is not an isolated case. Francophones disrespect Anglophones in positions of authority, even the prime minister, head of government. Francophone ministers either ignore cabinet meetings called by the PM or come late, in breach of standard protocol. When then prime minister, Achidi Achu appointed Raymond Gwanyalla as Director of Customs, the then Finance Minister; a Francophone openly challenged the PM in a flagrant display of insubordination. The Minister not only refused to preside at Gwanyalla’s installation, but ordered a boycott of the event which was heeded by all Francophone Directors in the Ministry of Finance. Surely, nothing like this happens in any country worthy of respect.

As Prime Minister, Peter Mafany Musonge was humiliated by the paymaster general in Yaoundé. Musonge was dealing with a crisis after a timber truck derailed killing dozens, mostly roadside hawkers in the hotbed of Mutengene. Anger was boiling on the streets when President Biya ordered that FCFA 200 million be given to the PM to go help the victims and deceased families. A voucher was established to this effect; with the “visa” of the Finance Minister and the PM’s office and sent to the Yaoundé central treasury, but then paymaster general, Etogo Mbezele refused to pay, ostensibly because the director of the treasury had not “visa” the voucher.

The treasury director was vacationing in France and traveled abroad with his “visa.” Informed of Mbezele’s decision, an exasperated Musonge could not help but exclaim in anger and frustration: “Oh these Frogs!”  It must be stated in no ambiguous terms that Musonge spoke from the heart. His spontaneous outburst speaks to a deep-seated Anglophone frustration with an erratic system of government, with its consequent value misplacement, the like of which should never be countenanced in any civilized nation.

There are countless instances where Francophones are appointed to boss better educated and qualified Anglophones. It is a tragedy that after fifty-five years of independence and re-unification, we are still talking of Anglophones and Francophones, but that is the sad reality of Cameroon. Anglophones have been treated shabbily; they are asking whether they made the right choice in 1961, since only they were asked if they wanted reunification with Francophones.

Despite that fact that East Cameroun was deeply embroiled in a bloody insurgency and terrorism, Anglophones closed their eyes and voted with their hearts. Fifty-five years after that vote, all Anglophones are asking is to be given the opportunity to manage their own affairs but they are being called secessionists and enemies from within, Biafrans, and even asked to go back to Nigeria.

This in itself is demeaning and outlandish. Our strength as a nation lies in our diversity. The bridge towards our future will be built on lessons from the past; hence the government must refrain from assuming that anyone calling for restructuring of the present structure wants to breakup the country. It is not Anglophones who threaten national unity; rather, it is the politics of exclusion and marginalization of Anglophones that poses a threat to peace and stability. Those who see Anglophones as a conquered people should look at these unsettling statistics and learn the right lessons because the mood is very scary.

What Could Be Done?

To stop the genocidal campaign going on in Southern Cameroons, there must be regime change in Yaoundé. The West should design a plan for the 87 year old French Cameroun monarch to abdicate immediately. Correspondingly, France and the United States should stop supplying Yaoundé with weapons on lame and ridiculous reasons that the Biya regime is fighting the Nigerian Islamic sect, Boko Haram.

Southern Cameroonians should channel their financial resources to the Ambazonia exiled government represented by its Vice President Dabney Yerima instead of chosen from the many obscure resistance groups such as the ADF and the Sako-IG. All other regional participants – the Buhari administration in Nigeria, President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of Chad should be required to depart.

Persuading the jailed Southern Cameroons leader, President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe to accept and enforce a cease-fire will be a complex process, but could save hundreds of lives both in Ambazonia and deep within the French Cameroun army.

The provision of humanitarian aid by the UN and other aid agencies to displaced Southern Cameroonians must become a priority at the negotiating table while an independent international fact-finding mission with a UN Security Council mandate should be deployed to Southern Cameroons.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai with additional reporting from Valerian Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai

French Cameroun Head of State so-called reconstruction plan, sold to the international community to avoid a UN intervention into the crisis in Southern Cameroons, gave French Cameroun surrogate, Prime Minister Dion Ngute and his gang of CPDM thieves the green light to start lining up fake consultants and contractors to siphon the imaginary millions budgeted for the suffering peoples of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia.

The French Cameroun government’s Southern Cameroons reconstruction plan is already heading towards complete fiasco and the appointment of Minister Paul Tasong by Dion Ngute has turned the plan into an illusion. The only solution left for Southern Cameroonians all over the world is to continue to fund Ground Zero self defense operations under the direct supervision of Vice President Dabney Yerima.

Approximately four years ago, the French Cameroun dictator declared a war against the people of Southern Cameroons and Biya gave the Cameroon government army ‘plein pouvoir’ to carry out a scorch earth policy.  Ever since soldiers loyal to the regime in Yaoundé invaded Southern Cameroons towns and cities, Biya has repeatedly endorsed their atrocities which include the destruction of more than 300 Southern Cameroons villages and towns and the killing of thousands of innocent Ambazonian citizens including women and children.

Southern Cameroons groups have unanimously resisted the French Cameroun military invasion which largely meets the financial demands of French Cameroun senior army officers and has so far achieved nothing than pushing the people of Southern Cameroons slowly but surely into achieving an Ambazonia state.

The so-called reconstruction plan does not provide the people of Southern Cameroons with anything new but allows the French Cameroun regime to continue its genocidal campaign in the territory and also to continue to plunder Southern Cameroons wealth. The plan inter alia denies Southern Cameroons detainees the right to freedom from French Cameroun jails and detention centers mindful of the dangers posed by the coronavirus.

The Ambazonian leader Sisiku Ayuk Tabe has called on the international community to prosecute Biya and his French Cameroun regime at the international Criminal Court.  In a recent statement, the Vice President of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government, Dabney Yerima appealed to the United Nations to pass an immediate resolution necessitating an Independent Fact Finding Mission to start work in the Southern Cameroons. Dabney Yerima observed that only such a mission will establish the facts in Ngarbuh and other scenes of genocides in Southern Cameroons.

There has been conflicting signals coming from the USA and in Western Europe following a dramatic U turn made by former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Herman J. Cohen. Hon. Cohen has been quoted as saying via a tweet message that “Elements of peace starting to come together in Cameroon: Government transparency about Ngarbuh massacre; US congratulations; Anglophone citizens becoming fed up with extremism of separatist militias. Let the US-led talks begin. ”

Cameroon Concord News Group has not been able to confirm if the US administration are 100 percent backing the French Cameroun regime but Yaoundé has interpreted retired Ambassador Cohen’s pronouncement as meaning that the Americans absolutely are siding by Biya and his ruling CPDM crime syndicate and the European Union hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic is so shy in their statements regarding what’s going on in Southern Cameroons. The European Union is practically doing nothing in effect to stop the killings going on in Ambzonia.

Senior Southern Cameroons leaders both within and out of the Ambazonia Interim Government have  said the French Cameroun reconstruction plan with Minister Paul Tasong at the head has dealt a devastating blow to the so-called One and Indivisible Cameroon. To be sure, the Biya plan has indeed closed the door to all Southern Cameroonians serving the French Cameroun regime.

Cameroon Concord News Group gathered that prominent Southern Cameroons scholars in the West have raised fingers against Ambassador Cohen with many observing that his recent take on the Ngarbuh massacre among other Southern Cameroons issues served as a green light to Biya and French Cameroun to float international law.

An aide to Vice President Dabney told Cameroon Concord News Group that  the former US diplomat is a man of integrity and understands that “French Cameroun administrators and troops in Southern Cameroons are colonizers and their activities clearly indicates that this is an occupation, a brutal occupation, and Ambazonians have got to stand up and resist until help comes.”

Biya and his French Cameroun political elites have become more brazen in their efforts to trample upon Southern Cameroonians’ rights since he started the extermination campaign four years ago and the French government of President Emmanuel Macron has unprecedentedly intensified Paris support for the Yaoundé regime.

Southern Cameroons leaders have voice their strong opposition to any reconstruction activity which French Cameroun Prime Minister Dion Ngute and Minister Paul Tasong are being teleguided by Biya and his French Cameroun gang to implement in the Federal Republic of Ambazonia and we of this publication are emphasizing the need for popular Southern Cameroons resistance against any scheme from Yaoundé.

The level of barbarism being perpetuated by Mr Biya’s military and his government militias as they pursue their genocidal war and scorch earth policy to completely annihilate the Southern Cameroons (Ambazonia) is alarming. So far, as a result of the on-going genocide in the Southern Cameroons (Ambazonia), an estimated 20,000 people have been killed, over 280 towns and villages have been burnt down, over 120,000 people are seeking refuge in Nigeria and further afield, over 1million people are internally displaced or living in bushes and over 3,000 persons incarcerated in prisons and detention facilities. It is also reported that over 4.5. Million people are at risk of famine. One thing we know for sure is that Mr Biya and his military and private militia will be held accountable for these crimes. While not exonerating Ambazonian self-defense forces, we also know that Mr Biya’s government is doing everything through its private militia (popularly known as Atanga Nji Boys) to commit atrocities and link them to self-defense forces, so as to evoke international sympathy. Only an independent fact-finding mission can establish the facts and thus far, Mr. Biya’s government has resisted all requests by independent humanitarian organizations to visit Southern Cameroons and establish the facts.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

Prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic that has put everything in life on hold, many in Cameroon thought they were second only to God.

Due to their being around for too long, some Cameroonians were already thinking that they were immortal.

But the Coronavirus has changed all of that. The country’s president who has been making a mockery of his critics for years has been hiding at the Unity Palace.

Sources at the Unity Palace say he sometimes hide under the bed for fear that the insidious virus might show up at the Unity Palace to look for him.

The virus does not like fat and old people. It has run amok in Italy and America where it has been on a cleanup campaign.

Nature has a way of ensuring that there is equilibrium in the world and in this case, it has sent a virus to rid the world of old people who have had a long life.

This is a reason for Cameroon’s Lazarus to be hiding. He knows that if the virus runs into him, he will not stand a chance.

He is not the only person hiding. Even people like Rene Sadi are all hiding in their homes, refusing to even receive their collaborators.

Times have changed and many people around the world have suddenly discovered the emptiness of life.

Ever since Atanga Nji was appointed as the country’s Territorial Administration minister, he has been conducting himself as if he was above death.

He has plotted the death of many young Southern Cameroonians just because he wants to prove a point.

He has been urging the Southern Cameroonian fighters to drop their arms without conditions and has even attended ceremonies where those fake Amba fighters have dropped their guns as a strategy to woe others to follow suit.

For more than three weeks now, a group of Amba boys has been struggling to meet the authorities so that they can drop their weapons, but nobody wants to meet with them.

The group contains some guys infected with the Coronavirus and they really want to meet with Paul Atanga Nji and the Northwest regional governor, Adolphe Lele L’Afrique, but the most powerful guys in Cameroon are not in any mood to meet them. Nobody toys with COVID-19 and Atanga Nji is in no rush to leave this planet.

The virus has cut the Yaoundé strong men to normal human proportions. Atanga Nji who loved going to Bamenda every week no longer wants to meet Amba Boys who want to help him stage his normal show.

The weapons are in the jungle and until he meets with them, the boys will not down their weapons. They may be observing the global ceasefire, but downing their tools will only happen when they shake hands with the all powerful territorial administration boss.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

Chairman/Editor-In-Chief

Cameroon Concord News Group

A Manyu Town Hall Meeting has been called for Sunday the 26^th of April 2020 at 7pm Amba Time. As Manyu people congregate to take the future of the Ambazonian revolution in their county into their own hands, Cameroon Concord News Group shares their enthusiasm and wisdom. It was this media outlet on the 8^th of April 2020 that incessantly flashed out signals about the clumsy and impractical governing experiment in the county. We are delighted that the people of this strategic county are responding to the challenges ahead. The people of Manyu are about to begin a new chapter in Southern Cameroons history instead of waiting to be concealed by regret in the years ahead.

Cameroon Concord News has been provided insight information that the four LGAs in the Manyu County have been inefficient at fundraising and collaboration and consequently making the CPDM criminals in Yaoundé to look professional and well-organized. This media outlet can confirm that many LGAs in the northern zone of Ambazonia spent more on defence materials than the County of Manyu over the last nine months. But Manyu has Senators and Congressmen. The bureaucracy within the county has evolved to nothingness as titles of Chairman, Senators and Congressmen have been the preoccupation of county officials. Somehow, these people have forgotten that their country is at war!

Manyus have a long and occasionally dishonourable history with titles and ego but even the most zealous advocates of such cultural insanity would never have contemplated such foolishness in the middle of an existential war. Fortunately, the court of public opinion and some elders in the county have decided to act. From Ground 1 and Ground 0, there is a current impatience with social media lawyers, pseudo political scientists, social media grammar consultants who spend hours showcasing their pitiful personalities on whats app platforms than raise funds for the struggle. The excitement from G1 and G0 towards the new setup is understandable and the need for Manyu people to join is encouraged.

We of the Concord Group have learned that some in Manyu intended to make their county governing structure a gladiatorial political game with titles and social media congresses and senates while their villages are being burned and villagers are sleeping in the forests. Conditions of genocide in Ambaland convey no emotions to these US based comedians. With the impending structural change, fundraising and self-defence is the foundation and plaudits should go to this triumph of logic over social media emotions. The Manyu county coordinator remarked last night ‘this is intended to separate the real Manyu Men and Women from the rogues and noisemakers’.

We hope that profound lessons have been learned and that these changes will encourage a more aggressive fundraising and self-defence dynamics in Manyu. It is tasteless to insist on titles, bureaucracy and politics when the number of avoidable deaths in the county is rising. Cameroon Concord News believes that the moment of reckoning has come for Manyu and all people of goodwill in the county should celebrate by opening their minds and wallets. Any blackmailers and campaigners against this genuine progress will face the colossal force of the Ambazonian people. And that is a contests they can’t win. 

Despite the lack of progress and a stagnation of self-defence operations in the county, our understanding is that a rogue element within the current administrative structure is determined to oppose this impending positive change and progress. Let it be known that Ambazonia is at war and any citizen who stands in the face of constructive and dynamic change in Manyu will be considered an enemy of the state of Ambazonia and will be treated as such!! Ambazonian self-defence forces are facing danger and a ferocious enemy daily. We owe them a duty to make available the best materials possible in their quest to protect our land.

The stirring up of sentiments intended to bring hostility between Mamfe Central LGA and Eyumojock LGA by bigots from Eyumojock local government area is a CPDM style madness that shouldn’t and wouldn’t be tolerated. Cameroon Concord News and Cameroon Intelligence Report intend to name and shame anyone who engages in division and blackmail at this crucial point of this revolution. We would not tolerate anyone or anything that aids and abets the enemy. Any conspirator will be crushed with ferocity and rapidity. Ambazonia is at war!

This media outlet believes that the new structure in Manyu will showcase the potential for a more planned, practical and fruitful way of fundraising as well as defending Ambazonia. Manyus need to recognise and embrace this great opportunity to get their revolution back on track. The time for Manyu to rise again is here. Sunday the 26^th of April 2020 at 7pm, the journey starts for this strategic county. A stitch in time saves nine

By Isong Asu

London Bureau Chief

Cameroon Concord News Group

Sixty eight days ago, we woke up to a familiar dose of state sponsored barbarism by the French Cameroun regime in the village of Ngarbuh in Dunga Mantung County. According to the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, twenty three local residents, amongst them fourteen children, eleven girls and nine under the age of five were executed in cold blood. In this massacre, a pregnant woman was executed and another lost her baby at a local hospital. After their brutal and unprovoked killings, French Cameroun military personnel set ablaze nine homes in the village to cover their dreadful crimes. The atrocities of the 14^th of February 2020 will never be deleted from our consciousness as a nation.

I come to you today in profound disappointment following the report released yesterday by the regime in Yaoundé into the massacre.As a government, our initial investigation after the attack pointed to French Cameroun’s military. Our judgment was accurate and now we must bring the atrocities of this neo-colonial regime to the consciousness of the world.We must remind ourselves that the regime in Yaoundé initially rejected any role in the massacre. But French Cameroun’s self-confession that ‘17 members of a local vigilante committee’ were working with their soldiers in this atrocity confirms our previous accounts that they have been sponsoring militant groups to terrorise and kill civilians in Southern Cameroons.

The neo-colonial regime in Yaoundé claimed immediately after the massacre that it was an accident after fuel supplies exploded into flames during a gun battle with separatists. They have now contradicted their own version of events. The inclusion of a so-call vigilante committee is a farce and deplorable. For over two years now, we have flawless evidence that the regime in Yaoundé is actively involved in stirring up intercommunity violence in Ambazonia.

The French Cameroun regime has never had an association with truth and honesty and so it claimed that ‘panic-stricken, the three servicemen with the help of some members of the vigilante committee, tried to conceal the facts by causing fires’. Even by their unashamed standards, this statement is an assault on the truthbecause all eyewitnesses confirmed that this was an unprovoked attack on a village in Southern Cameroons.

In March 2018, Mami Sarah Appih, 96 years old was burned alive in her bed in Kwa Kwa village by French Cameroun forces. In May 2018, the Guardian Newspaper in the UK carried an article after painstaking investigation on the burning of villages by French Cameroon forces. In May 2019, French Cameroun forces invaded a peaceful community in Muyuka, Southern Zone and summarily executed scores of people including five months old baby Martha. The burning of villages by forces loyal to Paul Biya’s regime has been plentiful and documented. None of the above atrocities have been investigated.

Yesterday’s statement endorses our reservations that this regime can’t be trusted to investigate its atrocities. On the 18^th of February 2020 in Geneva, the spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated‘We call on the Government to ensure that the security forces abide by applicable international law norms standards during the conduct of their operations’. Yesterday’s report identified that the United Nations was invited to attend but it offered technical support instead. As a people, Southern Cameroonians regret the non-attendance of the United Nations in this investigation.

Since the declaration of war by French Cameroun on the peaceful people of Southern Cameroons, army loyal to the regime in Yaoundé have burned down over three hundred and twenty villages. The village of Ngarbuh in Dunga Mantung County is one of their hundreds of crime scenes. We condemn these acts of genocide strongly. These attacks are now premeditated, predominant, well-planned and they show a flagrant disregard for life by these soldiers. It is particularly disturbing that on paper, French Cameroun is a signatory to many international conventions on human rights but in Southern Cameroons, their military is pursuing and executing acts of genocide with impunity.

After yesterday’s report, the evidence is now overwhelming that this regime and its forces aren’t trustworthy.  Yesterday’s statement admits reluctant guilt on the part of French Cameroun’s forces.

We are today calling on the international community through the United Nations to pass an immediate resolution necessitating an Independent Fact Finding Mission to start work in the Southern Cameroons. It’s our paramount belief that only such a mission will establish the facts in Ngarbuh and other scenes of genocides in Southern Cameroons.

We hope that the international community accepts this statement as a genuine attempt from the people of Southern Cameroons (Ambazonia) to bring this war to a close and the perpetrators of these crimes to real justice.

Sincerely,

DabneyYerima

Vice President

Federal Republic of Ambazonia

State of confusion

Ambazonia would be the first new country in a decade, and a potentially rich one. But, as Yoletta Nyange reports, the battle for independence from Cameroon is far from over

Last June, the InterContinental hotel in Geneva cleared its 16th floor for an exceptionally loyal and lucrative guest. At $40,000 a night for his family and entourage, President Paul Biya of Cameroon has been favouring the InterContinental with his business for longer than many of its staff can remember. He stays there when health concerns bring him to Switzerland, and frequently for summer holidays. In 2019, his 37th year in power, he might have had a third agenda item too: a Swiss offer to mediate a conflict that threatens to split Cameroon in two and turn part of it into the newest country in the world.

Biya declined the offer but his break was still rudely interrupted. Cameroonian emigrés infuriated by his extravagance (average earnings in Cameroon are less than $10,000 a year) staged daily protests outside the hotel on Chemin du Petit Saconnex. Swiss police tried everything to move them on, including tear gas and water cannon. The protesters wouldn’t budge and so Biya was asked to leave instead.

The point of the protest was “to ask Mr Biya to go home and receive medical care in Cameroon”, Marcela Nkwi, one of its organisers, told me. “If he wants to sleep in a luxury hotel, he should build them in Cameroon and sleep there. Geneva was a battlefield and the Swiss don’t like disorder as it inspires others.”

Later, I visited the place that is defying Biya and the weight of its own history to aspire to nationhood. It consists of Cameroon’s two westernmost regions – the only two where English rather than French is an official language. It’s half the size of Portugal and could be rich and bustling. Instead, it has become a battleground where violence can suddenly give way to emptiness and silence.

Walking through the town of Tiko felt like being in an epic Western, with the wrong plot. There were no sandstorms, no cowboys riding horses, only empty wooden market stalls on the roadside. In Mutengene too, to the west, human activity had come to a halt. To the north, in Muyuka, metal sheeting sealed the doors of shops, restaurants and supermarkets. Along the slopes of Mount Cameroon, there was an endless string of military checkpoints set up to control an invisible population outlawed as terrorists by its own government.

The wind was the only soundtrack, interrupted by gunfire and stray bullets, because these two regions are sliding towards war. They should be lucky places. They form a rough oblong of territory blessed with extraordinary natural wealth. Their volcanic soils are preternaturally fertile. Their dark brown beaches are a well-kept secret. Their coastal waters give access to largely untapped oil and gas, and their people are confident enough to have set their heart on self-determination. If their dreams come true they will create the first new country in nearly a decade, after South Sudan. It could become one of the richest in Africa, and it would rejoice in the name Ambazonia. The word derives from Ambas Bay, an historic indent in the West African coast at the mouth of the Wouri River, where in 1858 an English missionary founded a settlement for freed slaves.

Ambazonia is a place, but also a cause. Over the past three years it has served as a rallying cry for nearly 5 million English-speaking Cameroonians whose parents and grandparents were forced into a French-speaking country 60 years ago and kept there, they say, as second-class citizens.

Parts of this territory have become no-go zones for Biya’s army. Others have felt his wrath: his soldiers have torched nearly 300 towns and villages leaving at least half a million people in internal exile. On satellite pictures, where there used to be neatly demarcated streets and compounds, there are now grey smudges.

Ambazonia’s self-proclaimed leaders sit in prison in the French-speaking capital, Yaounde, but most of their homeland is controlled from day to day by bands of armed volunteers who have filled Ambazonia’s power vacuum with incipient anarchy.

These are the Amba Boys, some as young as 15. Between flashes of violence they preserve a sort of calm, as if before the storm. Their cause is financed by a Cameroonian diaspora spread from Oslo to Birmingham and Houston to suburban Washington. Their time, they are convinced, will come.

Within the territory they claim, Ambazonians have ceased recognising central authority. Their default posture is non-violent resistance: businesses and individuals have stopped paying taxes and started using what they call “ghost town” tactics against the regime, rather as Marshal Kutuzov used the evacuation of Moscow against Napoleon. To vanish, they have learned, is to prevail.

They used similar tactics to sabotage Cameroon’s latest elections, on 9 February: both Anglophone regions boycotted the poll, as did the official national opposition, leaving Biya’s ruling People’s Democratic Movement with an overwhelming but meaningless majority.

For now, Biya remains nominally in charge and Ambazonia’s two halves are still officially called the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon. But on 1 October last year the people of Bamenda in the grasslands of Northwest region came out to celebrate their independence and chant the name of Sisiku Tabe, an engineering graduate from the University of Sheffield.

Exactly two years earlier, Tabe had declared Ambazonian independence. At the time he held a teaching position at the American University of Nigeria in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, and it was there, three months later, that he was hosting a cabinet meeting of the Ambazonian government in exile when Nigerian police broke into the meeting room in the Nera Hotel and arrested them all. They were extradited to Cameroon and consigned to Kondengui maximum security prison in Yaounde, where they are still being held, and where their sense of destiny is palpable.

“We have learned from the Tamils, the Sahrawis [of Western Sahara] and the people of East Timor, South Sudan and Kosovo,” said Fidelis Ndeh-Che, one of the prisoners. “Nothing will change the inevitable march of history.”

Since the start of the war the Cameroonian army has been stationed along Ambazonia’s western border to intercept weapons from Nigeria’s black market. From the east, the government deploys militias that can be disowned when diplomatic appearances require, and from Douala, Cameroon’s commercial hub, prisoners have been released to wreak havoc in the Northwest and Southwest regions. “Thieves and bandits have deserted the economic capital and relocated to Ambazonia, where war brings more opportunities,” Halima Alim, a Douala based police officer, told me.

There is no real centralised command in the Ambazonian heartland that the Amba Boys call Ground Zero, only a loose co-operation between each community patrol group dictated by the rhythm of military clashes. Most Amba Boys are aged between 16 and 25, forced out of school and armed only with “den guns” from their parents – weapons traditionally used during cultural celebrations such as weddings. They now make do with captured weapons from government soldiers, and with spirituality.

“When Amba Boys call you have no choice but to respond,” Che Paul Bih, a taxi driver in Ekona, told me. “They called me to come sit with them and eat, to find out if I was on their side. We ate dog meat [a taboo food] to mark our alliance and they taught me the coded language.” That language is partly visual, partly verbal.

Some Amba Boys wear distinctive red beads with supposedly bulletproof properties, reminiscent of the Edochie cult in Nigeria. For added protection, some also cut themselves to insert charms under their skin, and all use incantation – a form of prayer.

Real Amba Boys, Bih added, claim a higher moral ground than the fake ones, who steal phones and money, or the government soldiers, who kill and rape. They don’t harass; they “advise”, he said. “But if they see you as a black leg, as someone who is against them, they will take you to their camp to explain yourself. If you don’t talk they will keep you in the bush and tell the government ‘we have taken one of your people’.”

In their diversity, the people of the Cameroons have an attitude that could be misread as passivity. Like Ugandans, they know they are spoiled by extravagant natural abundance and don’t make a big fuss of it. They also wear a mane of stubbornness, borrowed from their national football team – known as the Indomitable Lions.

But this only partially explains why the Cameroonian army in all its might, with modern artillery and armoured vehicles, has failed to crush the Ambazonian independence movement. Its leaders are convinced they are righting wrongs inflicted on a people who were forced into a cohabitation with a partner whose language they don’t speak. In the late 19th Century their homeland was colonised by the newly unified Germany and named Kamrun. In 1919, as part of the Treaty of Versailles, it was divided between France and Britain. In 1961 a UN resolution declared that the Ambazonians’ forebears had “decided to achieve independence by joining the [Frenchspeaking] independent Republic of Cameroun”. But the details of their relationship with the republic were left to “urgent discussions” – which never happened. For four of the six decades since then their fate has been bound up with that of President Biya, one of Africa’s longest-serving dictators and a Francophone to his core.

Like the Kikuyus of Kenya and the Igbos of Nigeria, the Ambazonians’ cause is one of economic selfempowerment. But it is also, crucially, a reaction against Biya’s policy of forced Francophonisation; of governing in French in a place that doesn’t speak it. It is not hard to find French-speaking Cameroonians who see why this can’t work.

“How is it possible to judge an Anglophone in French when he cannot understand what he is told?” asked Emmanuela Afewo in Limbe, a surf town on the Atlantic coast. “How can he be told ‘tu signes’ [sign here] and be sent to jail? How can Francophone teachers be sent to teach Anglophones when they don’t speak the language of their students?”

Last October, startled by the depth of popular support for Tabe and his imprisoned cabinet, Biya convened a “national dialogue” intended to steal their thunder. It achieved the opposite. The secessionists were not represented and Biya wrapped up proceedings stating that “the future of our fellow citizens in Northwest and Southwest is in our republic”.

The dialogue served only to raise the stakes in a conflict whose participants fear will end if not in the creation of a new country, then in genocide. Charity workers say 20,000 people may have been killed since the violence began, many of them burned along with their villages and buried in mass graves.

This scorched earth strategy might have achieved its aim by now, but for the Cameroonian diaspora. Thousands of Cameroonians, Francophone and Anglophone, have left the country during Biya’s decades of misrule. Many are now wealthy, and some took part in the protests that embarrassed the Swiss into sending Biya home from Geneva last year. Others have been peacefully protesting in front of the Cameroonian embassies around the world.

In London, they use eggs. “Seven of us have shut the embassy down without breaking the law,” Kingsley Sheteh Newuh, a Cameroonian political scientist based in Birmingham, said. “We believe in pressure rather than violence. We would buy a thousand eggs to throw at the embassy building in protest. We chose eggs for each life that is killed in Cameroon.”

Different pockets of the diaspora support – and fund – different groups of Amba Boys. The Ambazonia Defence Forces is backed from Norway by Lucas Ayaba Cho, a former youth organiser. The Southern Cameroons Defence Forces is led from Maryland by Ebenezer Akwanga, an ex-trade unionist. Another group is part-funded from Houston by Chris Anu, a pastor facing allegations of embezzlement whose brother leads yet another – the Red Dragons and Tigers – in the hills of Lebialem.

Cho and Akwanga are seen as hardliners embittered by long periods of imprisonment in the 1990s. They have distanced themselves from Tabe since his emergence in 2017, believing he enjoys the legitimacy that they earned. With Tabe’s imprisonment, infighting and intrigue in the diaspora has intensified to the point of farce.

In 2018 Samuel Ikome Sako, a preacher living in Baltimore and moonlighting as acting president of Ambazonia, launched a multimillion-dollar online fundraiser that he called “My Trip to Buea”. It was billed as a sort of liberation pilgrimage to Buea, a bucolic town on the eastern slopes of Mount Cameroon that Ambazonians regard as their Jerusalem.

With tickets going for up to $8,000, Sako promised to deliver a state in three months or else resign. He later withdrew the pledge in a live Facebook interview, claiming he was no longer able to deliver the new country because his demand for $2 million had not been met.

It was, says Martha Tataw, a Cameroonian accountant based in Paris, “the most elaborate scam” – but more broadly the diaspora has lobbied effectively against the Biya regime. The US has suspended military aid and the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, has called for a new dialogue with all “stakeholders” present.

West of the Bonabéri Bridge over the Wouri River, the natural boundary between Cameroon’s two linguistic communities, Ambazonia unfolds as a giant agro-industrial complex that starts 20 kilometres west of Douala. Here, 42,000 hectares of bananas, rubber and palm oil are grown, processed and marketed for foreign export by the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), the country’s second-largest employer.

Twelve of Cameroon’s 14 functioning oil and gas pipelines come ashore on Ambazonia’s coastline. All told, the region accounts for 60 per cent of the country’s $35 billion economy. Independence movements can be awkward when so much is at stake. Ambazonians believe they were tricked into choosing between Nigerian and Cameroonian independence in 1961. Their uprising is a blow to foreign companies that have invested heavily in the country’s infrastructure. It has upset relations between the CDC and Del Monte, for example, which buys 98,000 tonnes of bananas every year from Ambazonian plantations. And it complicates life for foreign stakeholders in a new $1.5 billion Etinde gas field off the coast – among them the Scottish company Bowleven and Russia’s Lukoil.

Beneath the surface, a jumble of players is fighting for control of the Gulf of Guinea, a choke point for the transport of oil and goods to and from central and southern Africa, and a node of instability between the kleptocracies of Equatorial Guinea and the Central African Republic (CAR). France’s President Macron is anxious to bind Cameroon into a single currency for 15 West African countries that would deepen French influence over them all. Bowleven’s stake in the Etinde field was announced by Liam Fox, the then UK international trade secretary, as part of Britain’s push to expand into new territories post-Brexit. And Russia, which has upgraded Africa to a foreign policy priority, is using mercenaries from the Wagner Group to establish a post-colonial outpost in the CAR.

But Ambazonians themselves are fighting above all for control of Buea. Built at the heart of the plantations, Buea was Cameroon’s first capital, and even now it exudes a distinct colonial charm. There is one road in and out. It leads ultimately to Yaounde, 200 miles to the east, where on 1 October last year, I saw Sisiku Tabe sing Next Year in Buea, the anthem of a country-in-waiting, behind bars in Kondengui prison.

Tabe likes singing. He and the nine others arrested in Abuja are now serving life sentences handed down by a military tribunal, and they sang in court as the verdict was read out. In the prison I sat in the sun in an exercise yard with the men who have become known as the Nera Ten. These are all fathers and grandfathers who, at 50 and older, have become Cameroon’s most dangerous criminals. What I saw were men who – like their people on Ground Zero and abroad – knew they were free.

“We need ourselves, we have ourselves and we will do it ourselves,” Tabe said. “We have all studied in Western universities and we have nothing to envy Westerners. They know that and they are afraid that we’ll set an example to other Africans. It is either total independence of Ambazonia or resistance for ever.”

As I stood up to leave, all ten of them gathered around me in a circle and held hands. Nfor Ngala Nfor, the 67-year-old leader of the Southern Cameroons National Council, offered a short prayer. It was “for our enemies in the Cameroonian government to free us”, he said, “so that we can go work the land and leave it for our children”.

Cameroon may be doomed to repeat a familiar cycle of insurgency and vengeance – or, just possibly, it may bequeath to the world a small, perfectly formed new country with every opportunity to thrive. Much will depend on the man with a weakness for Swiss five-star hotels, but the current of Ambazonian independence runs strong. From what I saw, it has the power to sweep away the past.

This story was published by Tortoise