17, December 2019
Southern Cameroons-Ambazonia Completely Destroyed: Francophone army soldiers are overseeing and directly participating in massacres, summary executions of civilians 0
The Biya Francophone regime in Yaoundé is directly responsible for crimes against humanity in English speaking Cameroon now known as the Federal Republic of Ambazonia. The Francophone dominated government; its military and the French Cameroun elite force also known as the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) including the National Gendarmerie Service and Amba Boys the Yaoundé regime arms and supports have committed numerous atrocities on the civilian populations in the entire Southern Cameroons.
The Francophone soldiers deployed to Southern Cameroons are overseeing and directly participating in massacres, summary executions of civilians-including women and children – burnings of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by the people of Akwaya in Manyu, Aghem in Menchum and Nso in Bui. The Cameroon government army has killed several Roman Catholic priests, An American Missionary and a sea of Christian Pastors.
The Biya government and its Amba Boys have killed thousands of Southern Cameroonians – often in cold blood, raped women, and destroyed villages, food stocks and other supplies essential to the civilian population. They have driven close to a hundred thousand Southern Cameroons civilians, mostly farmers, into camps in neighboring Nigeria where they live on the very edge of survival. More than half a million have fled into the bushes but the vast majority of war victims remain trapped inside French Cameroun cities such as Douala, Baffoussam and Yaoundé.
This conflict has international historical roots but escalated some three years ago when the Biya regime used excessive force on Anglophone teachers and lawyers who were demanding an abrupt halt to chronic economic marginalization, respect for the Anglo-Saxon system of education and the Common Law. They also sought government action to end Francophone dominance in Anglophone districts.
The Biya Francophone regime responded to the ‘lawyers-teachers’ demands by targeting the Southern Cameroons civilian populations. The Yaoundé government brazenly engaged in its policy of manipulation by reintroducing the North West/South West Divide tactics which was designed to put the Anglophones of Bantu and semi Bantu extraction at daggers-drawn positions with the Anglophones of the Grass field known as the Tikars. The Francophone military was deployed in their thousands to Southern Cameroons and President Biya, backed by French Cameroun elites of his ruling CPDM crime syndicate has been providing effective impunity for all the crimes they are committing.
The Cameroon government army partnership with what is now known as the Atanga Nji Amba Boys is characterized by joint attacks on civilians rather than on the Ambazonia Restoration Forces. These attacks are staged to force the Southern Cameroons population to develop a kind of trust on the Francophone regime in Yaoundé.
All Cameroon government attacks in Southern Cameroons towns and villages have decimated farming communities, with death tolls estimated by the Ambazonia leader President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe as more than 20,000 with most unrecorded.
The Roman Catholic and the Presbyterian Churches that were in a better position to document abuses in rural areas previously well-populated like Kembong in Manyu, Fontem in Lebialem, Wum in Menchum, Jakiri in Bui and Ndop have withdrawn several revered fathers and Pastors due to killings and kidnappings sponsored by the Francophone regime in Yaoundé. The leadership of these two strong Christian churches has been also consistently inconsistent with their positions ever since the beginning of the conflict.
With some few exceptions, the rural areas in Southern Cameroons are now empty. Everything that can sustain life – houses, livestock, food stores, TV and radio sets have been looted or destroyed by Francophone soldiers. Villages all over Southern Cameroons have been torched not randomly, but systematically – often not once, but twice.
The huge Francophone army presence sometimes with helicopters in the burned rural areas, and in burned and abandoned villages, has driven Southern Cameroons civilians into the bushes and the poorly paid and badly fed troops who speak only the French language kill, rape, and pillage – even stealing emergency relief items – with impunity.
Despite international calls for investigations into allegations of gross human rights abuses in Southern Cameroons, the regime in Yaoundé backed by Francophone African diplomats deep within the African Union headed by Chad’s Moussa Faki and the French government of President Emmanuel Macron has responded by denying any abuses while attempting to manipulate and stem information leaks.
Yaoundé has strategically been keeping an Anglophone as prime minister and head of government with no powers than to read from scripts provided by the Biya Francophone regime. The Prime Minister’s role is to limit reports from Southern Cameroons in the national press, restrict international media access to Southern Cameroons and host UN, Francophinie, Commonwealth and African Union leaders in five star hotels in the nation’s capital Yaoundé and both former prime minister Philemon Yang and now Dr Dion Ngute have tried to obstruct the flow of Southern Cameroons refugees into Nigeria and Francophone Cameroun.
For close to four years into the conflict, no high-level UN or European Union assessment team has been permitted to enter Southern Cameroons. The 86 year old President Paul Biya and his gang of French Cameroun political elites have promised unhindered humanitarian access, but have failed to deliver.
With counterfeit municipal and parliamentary elections coming up in February 2020, the Biya regime has reportedly intensified its genocidal campaign and continuing human rights abuses in Southern Cameroons. The United States government has cut Cameroon from a trade pact over allegations of human rights violations.
President Donald Trump said the West African nation failed to address concerns over its “persistent gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” allegedly committed by Cameroon’s security forces.
The US also cut more than $17 million in security aid and support to Cameroon in February over concerns about its human rights record. And lately, 9 US lawmakers wrote to President Biya urging the dictator to seek a peaceful end to the conflict in Southern Cameroons.
Thousands of Southern Cameroons civilians could die in the bushes from lack of food and from disease within the next six months.
The international community, which so far has been very slow to exert all possible pressure on the Biya Francophone Beti Ewondo regime to reverse the ethnic cleansing and end the associated crimes against humanity it has carried out, must act now.
President Donald Trump should take urgent measures to ensure the protection of Ambazonian civilians, decree the unrestricted delivery of humanitarian assistance and reverse ethnic cleansing in Southern Cameroons. It will soon be too late.
By Asu Isong and Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai
18, December 2019
Ambazonia: The lies the 11 Grand Masters of Maryland tell themselves about the Swiss Peace Initiative 0
Ever since the so-called Swiss Peace Initiative was made public to the international community, several Southern Cameroons civilians have been killed by the French Cameroun army deployed to Ambazonia. Recently, three French Cameroun soldiers were killed in the Northern zone of Ambazonia. The three were reportedly killed in a firefight with the Southern Cameroons Restoration Forces. The three represented the 23rd and 24th French Cameroun deaths in Southern Cameroons since the attack on the late Retired General Tataw James convoy en route to Mamfe.
Correspondingly, that’s a modest count compared to the old days when the Manyu Odeshi Warriors and the Red Dragons of Lebialem were actively around in the towns of Mamfe and Fontem and the Great Nso Warriors ran the resistance in Jakiri and French Cameroun army deaths were three times higher. Nonetheless, French Cameroun military deployments have been limited to the urban towns with very little or no involvement in fighting in rural areas. Still, there’s reason for concern. Through just some few months into the Swiss Peace Initiative, more Southern Cameroonian civilians have been killed than in any year since the revolution started— a peace initiative which was supposed to mark the end of the French Cameroun combat mission in Southern Cameroons.
The latest Southern Cameroons deaths occurred in the midst of ongoing and reportedly intensive and productive discussions between the Swiss government, a Southern Cameroons group known as Sako’s IG, and, to a lesser extent, the Ambazonia Interim Government. To his credit, and based especially on his public statements, the Ambazonia Vice President Dabney Yerima appears serious in his desire to end the more than three year old indecisive French Cameroun war in Southern Cameroons. The complete absence of any French Cameroun delegation appointed by President Biya, the early withdrawal from the talks by Vice President Dabney Yerima and the continues attacks on Southern Cameroons civilians, demonstrate that while Vice President Dabney Yerima and the Ambazonia Interim Government are working from a position of strength as they pursue a “talk-and-resistance” strategy eerily reminiscent of that of the ANC in South Africa, the 11 Grand Masters of the so-called Sako IG are simply seeking for relevance and cheap Ambazonia money.
It’s highly unlikely, if not impossible, for Southern Cameroons to win in any meaningful sense this war of liberation if something is not done and done in a hurry to put an end to this international childishness being demonstrated by the disgraced Samuel Ikome Sako and his gang using a group of half-baked Southern Cameroons intellectuals in the USA. This is obvious as all the empirical evidence, from statements from US lawmakers, members of the UK House of Commons, the African Union, and deliberate neglect by major Southern Cameroons donors’ points to impending Yaoundé victory or perpetual stalemate.
Two recurring problems best explain the poor international image of the Southern Cameroons war of liberation: Sako, Chris Anu and their acolytes serving as anti-anything-President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and Vice President Yerima and the fear that Southern Cameroons may just be another South Sudan. This is why the 11 Grand Masters in Maryland are still trading the Swiss Peace Initiative to many ill-informed Southern Cameroonians while the Ambazonia Interim Government including Vice President Dabney Yerima long found the Swiss peace talks both insulting and intellectually bereft.
Leaving aside all the high-level, macro analysis and wealth of available information being put out there by the renowned Boh Herbert, the one million dollar question is: Southern Cameroonians and the Swiss are talking in Geneva, but is anyone in Yaoundé listening?
Day-by-day, the French Cameroun army is flooding in more troops and stationing them in key Southern Cameroons locations and the Ambazonia Restoration Forces are essentially under siege and facing daily attacks often within sight of their camps. It is shameful that young Southern Cameroons boys and girls are in Ground Zero desperate to break the French Cameroun army siege, protect women and children including the old and the sick, and resist just a bit more for help to come from the Amba Bonds Project and others in the diaspora passing for front line leaders are instead playing dangerous political games with some like Cho Ayaba creating local militia, arming and paying them, and positioning them (with Francophone advisers) in Southern Cameroons villages.
Like Dr Cho Ayaba of the ADF, Minister Paul Atanga Nji of French Cameroun is also empowering local warlords, favoring some Southern Cameroons tribal fighters over others and Southern Cameroonians who are putting themselves first before the resistance are indirectly helping the French Cameroun surrogate.
Most of the Ambazonia semi illiterates that were incorporated into the defunct Restoration Council headed by Mr. Kometa have transformed into warlord-led militias in Europe and the US and are using social media to send out wrong signals about the Ambazonia Vice President and the Interim Government in Ground Zero now littered with locally controlled armed bands. And slowly but surely, Ground Zero is beginning to view as illegitimate anything coming from the diaspora with whom they had far more in common under President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe.
The whole charade of people seeking attention and staging swearing-in ceremonies and issuing medals of honour to cronies and publicizing them on social media has left many both in Ground Zero and in the diaspora frustrated, angry, and, finally, deeply disoriented which is why we of the Cameroon Concord News Group find the whole conversation over the Swiss peace talks a little ridiculous, and very absurd. To be accurate, shameful, disgusting and disgraceful!
The only reason why the Federal Republic of Ambazonia is still in this war since the arrest of President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his top aides in Nigeria is the character and determination of this new generation of Southern Cameroonians in Ground Zero who understand that the French Cameroun military cannot win, cannot even marginally alter the outcome in troubled Southern Cameroons and to a greater extend the poor handling of the crisis by French Cameroun’s 86 year old President Biya and his Beti Ewondo kinsmen.
Maybe President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe will actually be the one to end Southern Cameroons’s longest war; maybe he won’t. But what is actually passing for a Swiss Peace Initiative in Geneva will not change anything in Southern Cameroons. The civil war will wage on, the Ambazonia Interim Government under Comrade Dabney Yerima’s stewardship will generally emerge triumphant. Thus, when Southern Cameroonians finally get to Buea, whether soon or years from now, expect most Ambazonians to target men and women like Sako Ikome, Chris Anu, Elvis Kometa and Irene Ngwa.
By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai