An unknown gunman has opened fire onto a crowd in the city of Baltimore, Maryland in northeastern United States, killing one person and injuring seven more.

The assailant took on the targets on Edmondson and Whitmore avenues in West Baltimore at around 05:00 p.m. local time on Sunday, the Associated Press reported, citing Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Michael Harrison.

The fatality was identified as a male, who collapsed behind a Baptist church. The wounded have been transferred to hospitals.

Two cookouts were in progress on opposite ends of the street and shell casings were found in two different locations, Harrison noted. He called the incident “a very tragic, very cowardly shooting.”

The incident appeared to be “extremely targeted,” he said without elaborating.

Acting Mayor Jack Young emphasized that the shooting did not involve the church.

He, however, insisted that those with knowledge about the incident share their information.

“Someone knows something,” Young said, and added, “These things … they don’t happen by happenstance. People know who’s doing these shootings.”

The agency said the city, which has chronically been inflicted with high crime rates, witnessed more than 300 homicides last year and the same number in the previous one.

Also on Sunday, a shooting at a synagogue near the southern California city of San Diego left one person dead and three others wounded, local reports said, adding that a 19-year-old male suspect was caught by police. Describing the attacker, San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore said, “This individual was with an AR-type assault weapon and opened fire on the people inside the synagogue.”

The US’s gun laws have staunch supporters among the country’s far-right politicians and activists, most of whom are either members of or associated with the Republican Party.

Resistance to change in the governing legislation has either nipped in the bud or subverted efforts at enforcement of stricter gun control across the country.

Source: Presstv

The Norwegian Refugee Council humanitarian organization expressed worries on Thursday about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon caused by violent conflict between the government and non-state armed groups and called upon international community to pay attention to the situation.

“We need to scale up the humanitarian response, and there is a need for independent reporting from the international media. But most of all, we urgently need stronger international diplomatic engagement to help solve the conflict,” Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council Jan Egeland said.

He pointed out that hundreds of villages in the English-speaking regions had been burnt during the conflict. Moreover, almost a million children did not attend school with tens of thousands of them “hiding in the bushes without any support.” According to Egeland, the locals felt abandoned by the UN and international organizations. In addition, they expected support from their former colonial leadership such as Britain and France.

Egeland urged the international community to help the warring parties to come to terms and to agree on such vital issues as reopening of schools.

Cameroon has been facing separatism in southern regions for decades. The German territory of Cameroon was partitioned between France and Britain under the 1919 League of Nations mandates. The French authorities administered the largest part of the country, while the British mandate comprised two geographically separate territories, Northern Cameroons and Southern Cameroons, which are currently part of Cameroon, called the Southern region.

The separatist crisis in the English-speaking parts of Cameroon sharply deteriorated in late 2016 with an appointment of Francophone judges in the areas. Later, it escalated to a violent conflict between the government and the militants. More than half a million people have fled their homes, according to UN figures. On October 1, 2017, activists from Cameroon’s English-speaking regions proclaimed their independence from country’s French-speaking areas. The declaration came on the anniversary of South Cameroon’s independence from Britain in 1961.

Source: Urdupoint

A separatist conflict in Cameroon that has forced half a million people from their homes is in danger of worsening, the head of a major aid agency has warned, condemning what he called the “international silence” over the crisis.

Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said the world had underestimated the impact on civilians of the violence that has gripped Cameroon, where entire villages had been burned to the ground.

“I’ve been all over the world, dealing with humanitarian work for many years and I was really shocked by the unbelievable extent of this emergency that is underestimated, underreported and neglected by the international community,” said Egeland.

“There are atrocities every single day against civilians … and the world doesn’t seem to know or want to know about it,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone during a visit to Cameroon.

Long-running tensions in the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon erupted into conflict in late 2016, prompting crackdowns by security forces and leaving 1.3 million people in need of aid, according to the United Nations.

Egeland said the violence had pushed tens of thousands into hiding in the bush without access to food or medical help, and meant nearly a million children could no longer go to school.

But he said there was a danger the situation could worsen. “I really, really hope there will be mediation efforts, that there will be an outreach and an interest in dialogue on both sides that will lead to talks which can end this before it is too late,” he said on Thursday.

“I’ve seen too many places which started with a smaller conflict … and ended up in a war that no one could stop.”

Cameroon’s English speakers have felt increasingly marginalized by the French-speaking government in the capital Yaounde and in 2017 thousands took to the streets to demand a breakaway state.

The military stepped in and thousands of Anglophones fled the ensuing crackdown, which Cameroon authorities described as an anti-terrorist operation.

In a statement Egeland, whose organization is distributing survival kits to victims including food, tools and materials for temporary shelters, said there had been little pressure on the parties to stop attacking civilians.

“The international silence surrounding atrocities is as shocking as the untold stories are heart-breaking,” he said.

A U.N. human rights committee in February criticized the “heavy-handed approach” of the security forces to the crisis, which saw medical facilities, schools and entire villages destroyed. Allegra Baiocchi, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator in Cameroon, said the violence was hampering relief efforts, and also blamed a lack of funding from other countries.

“The violence has been characterized by massive human rights violations. Attacks against schools and health providers have reached an alarming scale,” she said.

“Negotiating safe humanitarian access is extremely complicated and it is slowing us down.”

Source: Reuters

Civilians in the African nation of Cameroon continue to be killed in the crosshairs of ongoing violent clashes between French-speaking government soldiers and English-speaking separatist forces seeking to form their own country.

The violence has been unceasing for the past three years in the midst of grievances that boil down to the alleged underrepresentation and squelching of those who speak English and follow British common law.

As France and Britain were allies against Germany in World War I and were granted rule of the colonies by the League of Nations, Cameroon has been a mix of both French and English-speaking inhabitants. Areas were known as French Cameroon and British Cameroon. However, following the formation of a united Republic in the 1960’s that merged both into one nation, Anglophones — those who spoke English — began sensing that although the country was considered bilingual, they were in the minority. Out of the 10 regions, eight are French and base their legal system on French law, while the other two, in western Cameroon, follow British common law.

The government also speaks French, the country’s currency is in French, and most television and radio programs are in French.

Because of this, Anglophones have felt marginalized, and the last straw seemed to be in 2016 when a business transaction law was circulated in French but not also translated into English. Lawyers in the English-speaking regions had enough of the installment of local judges who didn’t speak English well and weren’t familiar with common law.

Teachers were likewise upset about Francophones increasingly being hired in Anglophone schools. According to reports, lawyers and teachers alike took to the streets to protest the encroachment, which resulted in both arrests and violence. During one protest, government forces used live bullets and tear gas to try to break up the gathering.

Anglophones have since called for the formation of their own country, called Ambazonia, but the Cameroonian government does not wish for the nation to be divided and has sought to put down any rebellion.

Over the past three years, as clashes between English separatists and the French security forces have raged, thousands of residents have fled for their lives into other regions or to the neighboring nation of Nigeria. Reports of innocent civilians being killed have regularly been in the headlines, and both sides have been blamed for the violence.

“People are dying everywhere,” Pamela Njoke told the New York Times. “In short, it’s horrible.”

“Armed separatists in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions have stabbed to death and shot military personnel, burned down schools and attacked teachers, while security forces have tortured people, fired on crowds and destroyed villages, in a spiral of violence that keeps getting more deadly,” wrote Amnesty International in June.

It explained that video footage obtained by the organization showed military forces burning down the village of Kwakwa, while residents in other areas have allegedly been detained and tortured in an effort to get them to confess that they supported the separatists.

However, those who do not cooperate with the efforts of the Ambazonia Liberation Forces, or who are even suspected of supporting the government, are reportedly also vulnerable to violence and unmerited attack by the separatists. A number of schools have been set on fire or principals abducted, and some students or teachers have even been shot.

“The assailant … told me that I was still coming to school in defiance of calls for a schools boycott. … He then asked me to raise my hands, but before I could do so, he shot me,” one teacher told Amnesty International.

A report published by AFP earlier this month says that five civilians were shot and killed by security forces in an English-speaking village, with one beheaded.

“Three of the bodies were later discovered mutilated, including two found with their hands tied and their genitals cut off,” the outlet states.

One woman was also killed at a local hospital and another wounded while government soldiers searched for separatists.

“[S]ecurity forces allegedly shot and killed over a dozen civilians, including at least seven people whom witnesses said had intellectual, psychosocial or physical disabilities who did not flee because they were unable or refused to. At least four older women died, burned alive, after security forces set their homes on fire,” Human Rights Watch similarly wrote in its 2019 report.

In September, The Guardian published an article stating that “[a] self-declared member of the Ambazonia Liberation Forces appeared in a … video alongside images of a soldier’s decapitated head …”

President Paul Biya urged separatists last year to cease the fighting or they will be “neutralized.”

“If my appeal to warmongers to lay down their weapons remains unheeded, the Defense and Security Forces will be instructed to neutralize them,” he said, according to Journal Du Cameroun. “I am well aware of the distress these rebels are causing the populations of these regions. This situation cannot be allowed to continue.”

However, some have stated that the government’s equally violent response has not helped to bring peace.

“People in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions are in the grip of a deadly cycle of violence. Security forces have indiscriminately killed, arrested and tortured people during military operations which have also displaced thousands of civilians. Their heavy-handed response will do nothing to calm the violence. In fact, it is likely to further alienate Anglophone communities and fuel further unrest,” Samira Daoud, Amnesty International Deputy Director for West and Central Africa, said in statement.

More than 500 civilians have been killed as a result of the three-year clash, as well as over 200 government soldiers, and an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 residents displaced. The European Union has spoken out against the violence and has called for dialogue between the two sides.

“Regrettably, unlawful killings and atrocities continue to be reported regularly in the regions, allegedly involving both the security and defense forces and separatist groups,” one representative recently lamented before the EU parliament.

Source: Christian News