Next week, Cameroon’s government will host what it calls a national dialogue on the separatist crisis in its Northwest and Southwest regions.  However, U.S.- and Europe-based separatist leaders invited to the talks say they will not take part in any dialogue unless it is held outside Cameroon with non-Cameroonians as mediators.  The government has stated it will not accept a foreign mediator.

The week-long dialogue on the separatist crisis is due to begin Monday in Yaounde.  The government says it has invited more than 1,000 people, including lawmakers, clergy, teachers, and civil society activists.

However, none of the U.S.- and Europe-based separatist leaders contacted by VOA said they will attend the talks.

Among those turning down the invitation is Eric Tataw, who lives in the United States.

He says he will not attend because he and fellow separatists based in the diaspora are wanted in Cameroon on charges of secession and terrorism.

Those are the same charges for which separatist leaders Ayuk Tabe Julius and 10 collaborators were arrested and sentenced to life in prison by a Yaounde military tribunal.

Tataw says Cameroon should free Julius and the other leaders as a sign they are truly ready for dialogue.

“I have told them categorically clear that let them release all detainees, and then start discussing with them and then from there we will know if the president of Cameroon is serious to have dialogue or not,” said Tataw.

Fighting in Northwest and Southwest Cameroon has claimed more than 2,000 lives since hostilities broke out two years ago.  English-speaking armed groups in those regions want to break away from the rest of Cameroon and its French-speaking majority.

Some separatists have said on social media they want the dialogue to take place either in Switzerland or Ivory Coast, under the supervision of world powers like the U.S., Germany and Britain, and in the presence of the United Nations.

George Ewane, spokesperson of the national dialogue, says Cameroon’s President Paul Biya has ruled out the possibility of inviting a foreign mediator.  Some nations that have offered to mediate, he says, have not stopped Cameroonians in the diaspora from financially sponsoring violence back home.

“Some make the propositions in good faith but we also know that others do not do that exactly in good faith,” he said. “Now let me ask a question. Are Cameroonians, are Cameroonians unable to solve their own problems to the extent of seeking a foreign mediation? The answer is an emphatic no. International mediation is not necessary.”

Ewane did not name the countries he was referring to, but last July, the Swiss ambassador to Cameroon, Pietro Lazzeri, announced his country was helping the Cameroon’s government negotiate with the rebels.

Source: VOA

Concerned with the increasing violence and repression in Cameroon the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michele Bachelet visited the country last May to meet with government ministers, opposition leaders, and Cameroon’s President Biya who assured full cooperation with the UN on issues of Human Rights.

To summarize the situation: 20% of the French speaking country is Anglophone, and the sparse public services are particularly diminished for the English-speaking areas. A portion of Anglophone leaders support secession of an English speaking region, of an Anglophone state, Ambazonia, abutting Nigeria. Not far from the inland portion of Ambazonia, in Nigeria, begins Boko Haram territory. Since about 2009 Boko Haram, a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist group, worked northern Nigeria, northern Cameroon and Chad.

A Boko Haram military tactic was, and is, reprisal, answering occasional military defeats with wiping out rural Christian villages in Cameroon. In Cameroon the government responded with an ongoing low intensity conflict to protect the area’s Muslim and Christian population. Cameroon’s forces became veterans of war against a military known for atrocities and kidnapping young women and entire schools.

In 2015 Boko Haram pledged allegiance to a larger Sunni Muslim fundamentalist group, ISIS, known for its atrocities in Syria and Iraq.

In 2016 Cameroon’s Anglophone lawyers whose rights were not well-respected, chose to go on strike. The nonviolent strike was joined by Anglophone teachers and students. Responding with military force and arrests the government imprisoned a number of lawyers to try for treason, which led to more violence. When forced to extremes the struggle for Anglophone rights made people choose sides. The result suggests it’s better not to force language struggles to extremes.

In 2017 Ambazonia declared itself a separate Anglophone country which initiated its own defense forces, militias etc. The region’s educational system was / is periodically shut down with threats effected against those who try to teach or attend school. The Cameroon government’s police stations are burned, government police dismembered, government forces engaged. Human rights violations by government forces were / are brutal and recurring. The separatist Ambazonian leader, Julius Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, was recently sentenced to life in prison which occasioned more violence and military reprisal. About half a million people have left their homes in Cameroon.

On August 26th 2019, Lawyers Rights Watch Canada with the support of two human rights NGOs, presented a statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council noting crimes by Cameroon’s government against the country’s Anglophone minority, as well as responsive “violent acts” against the government. The statement requests international concern and encourages international action to prevent “further mass atrocities.” It asks the Government of Cameroon to end its violence and investigate the human rights abuses. The statement relies on and furthers the evidence and guide supplied by the report, “Cameroon’s Unfolding Catastrophe: Evidence of Human Rights Violations and Crimes against Humanity,” authored by the two NGOs supporting the statement.

What can be said for Paul Biya’s dictatorial democracy and rule for 36 years is that in 2018 he was supported by 70% of the voters (Anglophone parties refused to vote). UN News reports “Cameroon is also hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Central African Republic and Nigeria,”⁵ And Paul Biya has allowed Cameroon to survive without the epidemics, starvation, aggression, war, massacres or genocide, which have tormented many African countries since their Independence from colonial rule in the 1960s.

Until 2016 found the government’s military forces suddenly engaged on two fronts – against ISIS in the far North and Anglophone militias in the West. Few journalists or reports mention both fronts in the same article and, for example, LRWC’s multi NGO statement to the Human Rights Council addresses only the Anglophone problem. This is also true of the NGO jointly authored “Report.” Neither mentions that the country is engaged in a war.

There is no mention at all in the LRWC statement or the “Report,” of Northern Cameroon’s Christian communities. When these are targeted by Boko Haram / ISIS they’re wiped out. Fulani tribesmen are also blamed for the attacks. With last July’s attacks on villages 1100 additional families were displaced. A Bible translator was killed, his wife’s left hand cut off. The rainy season until October makes it hard for government troops to deploy to villages. Christian sources note that across the border in Nigeria “Tens of thousands have died over the last 20 years.” Last November in Bamenda 80 students were kidnapped from the Presbyterian school, not by ISIS but Ambazonian separatists. Generally the region’s Muslims and Christians get along. In mid-August Bishop George Nkuo of Kumbo in the northwest made a plea to end the conflict and within hours two priests were kidnapped.

The U.S. which provided military aid to Cameroon’s fight against ISIS has reacted to reports of the military’s human rights violations by withdrawing aid. The rights violations against Anglophones receive international coverage. Cameroon is only twenty percent Anglophone so Anglophone and Ambazonian leaders have encouraged intervention by outside forces.

Is Anglophone strategy to initiate conflict that would require outside intervention? This pattern of gaining outside support and cutting in foreign interests was followed in Cote d’Ivoire and led to the current head of state Alassane Ouattara’s victory. The Christian group revolutionary leader was replaced with a Muslim group’s former World Bank employee and friend of France’s Nicholas Sarkozy more friendly to French business interests.

Since LRWC, CHRDA and RWCHR are lobbying the UN Human Rights Council to encourage intervention in Cameroon, shouldn’t we know more about them?

Lawyers Rights Watch Canada affirms the rights of lawyers globally and addresses points of international law. Logically it would have to address Anglophone lawyers’ evidence of their government’s persecution.

LRWC is joined by the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (CHRDA)¹⁰ with offices in Cameroon and the U.S. CHRDA was founded in 2017 by the Cameroon Anglophone attorney, Felix Agbor Anyior Nkongo, who has studied at universities in Cameroon, Nigeria, the U.S. (Notre Dame), Brussells and Leipzig. He has worked in human rights for the U.N. When imprisoned for treason during the 2016 lawyers’ strike in Cameroon, the Ontario Bar and the U.S. RFK Human Rights NGO and his former professor at Notre Dame among others, protested until he was released. An eloquent lobbyist for the Anglophone cause in Cameroon his NGO encourages “democracy” for all African peoples. He’s among the original lawyers who misjudged the regime’s response which resulted in Cameroon’s 2016 destabilization.

The third NGO presenting the UN with encouragement to intervene is the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) founded by former Canadian Minister of Parliament / Minister of Justice, expert on international law, Professor Irwin Cotler. Both Cotler and Nkongo introduce the “Report” on Cameroon.

With its roots in WWII’s Holocaust of European Jewry RWCHR is a heavy hitter for human rights. And like many Canadian human rights NGOs it is…sanctified. But it takes political rather than moral stands. For example, this NGO has declared the BDS movement anti-Semitic and it generally supports Israel politically. According to Wikipedia RWCHR recently advised Canada’s government that Venezuela’s President Maduro is responsible for war crimes. RWCHR attempted to persuade European Parliament to take the Venezuelan government to International Criminal Court. RWCHR is providing legal representation for Venezuela’s opposition leader, Leopoldo Eduardo López Mendoza. And the NGO was very supportive in the referral of Venezuela to the International Criminal Court made by members of the Organization of American States. In any case, RWCHR’s position aligns with U.S. and Canadian government policy in the attempt to take over a sovereign nation, Venezuela. The NGO is apparently not against aggressive Euro-American takeover of a sovereign state.

To consider Cameroon then, the media haven’t noticed that the Boko Haram / ISIS attacks on Cameroon complement the interests of the Ambazonia secessionists, and vice versa. Both destabilize the State and so encourage outside intervention. A supplier of Ambazonian arms is found to be an Anglophone leader (Marshall Foncha, chair of the Ambazonia Military Council) living in the United States. Other Ambazonian arms are sourced from English speaking Nigeria. Boko Haram / ISIS is said to steal its sometimes advanced weaponry from Nigerian military and security forces. But there’s also verified evidence that ISIS is supported in Yemen by both the U.S. and Israel. Is Boko Haram /ISIS at the service of foreign interests in the destabilization of Nigeria and Cameroon?

Why did the leaders of the Anglophone movement initiate strikes and secession at a time when the country’s resources were strained by refugees, and when villagers of Cameroon were being massacred by foreign forces? The more uncompromising Anglophone leadership is, the more inevitable the armed conflict in a country where 41% of the population has malaria and Médecins Sans Frontières has warned of a cholera epidemic in the north.

On September 10th President Biya ordered his government to start a “national dialogue” to resolve the language conflict and he asked foreign nations to stop Cameroon’s diaspora from furthering the violence which is increasing in his country.

Culled from Dissident Voice