Think of it that you are a Southern Cameroonian resident in either the Northern or the Southern Zone. Fifty-eight difficult years of marginalization, torture, rape, extra judicial killings, and exploitation are behind you; a huge, depressing darkness lies ahead with the French Cameroun army burning and destroying more than 200 of your villages and towns killing more than 3000 women and children and then the French Cameroun tyrant that dooms your fate declares arrogantly that everything will stay like this and that your children should be sent back to school.

Your territory will remain under French Cameroun military occupation forever and ever. The French Cameroun defense minister, Joseph Beti Assomo who hails from the same tribe as the 86 year old head of state Paul Biya and who is actually the second in importance in the crime syndicate regime in Yaoundé that subjugates your leaders, reechoes the two cubes of sugar rhetoric that a Southern Cameroons state will never be established.

Come to think of it that you are a Southern Cameroonian and your women and children are in danger including those who are living in the bushes and those who have managed to escape into neighboring Nigeria. Everywhere you turn, a Francophone gendarme or a Francophone soldier or a French Cameroun Police officer may open fire at you. Every night, your homes are invaded brutally by elements of the French Cameroun military known popularly as the Rapid Intervention Battalion, BIR. You will never be treated like human beings in a country where your older generation voted peacefully in a plebiscite to create.  They destroy, humiliate, intimidate, perhaps even arrest traditional and religious leaders, possibly without trial.

There are close to 2500 Southern Cameroons detainees. Many have simply disappeared in detention.  If one of your family members is arrested, you will have difficulty visiting him. If you succeed, you will have to pay hundreds of thousands of Franc CFA just to maybe get half an hour’s conversation.

Many Ambazonians have even become accustomed to the French Cameroun land theft policy. At every moment a, French Cameroun civil administrator or members of his family can invade your land, burn your crops or torch your fields and brandish a land certificate issued in French language stating that your ancestral land was handed to him by the government. The French Camerounian will not be brought to justice for this; the gendarmerie officers who are supposed to protect you will stand idly by.  French Camerounians own and run the courts so there’s nothing you can do.

You are indeed a Southern Cameroonian you can’t travel from Akwaya to Mamfe without going through Nigeria!! It’s not easy to move from Kumbo to Jakiri either or Weh to Wum.  A French Camerounian can go to Europe and all over Africa from all the nooks and crannies of French Cameroun name them, Garoua, Maroua, Douala and Yaounde, much more easily than you a Southern Cameroonians can go from Mamfe to Calabar.

Let this be known to Ministers Mengot, Paul Elong, Paul Tasong, Dion Ngute and Barrister Agbor Balla that there are no dreams, no wishes in this Southern Cameroons revolution. Children who are confronted with this kind of situation have a slim chance of accomplishing anything in life, even if they go “Back To School”. All they can look forward to is a life of humiliation and unemployment.

There’s no chance that this situation is about to change anytime soon. French Cameroun is not strong as the leadership claims but has French government backing, the United States is slow in acting, Ikome Sako and Chris Anu have weakened the Ambazonian Interim Government, Boh Herbert, Cho Ayaba, Mbah Akuro and Akwanga are all running out of cash and  isolated, and the world is losing interest in the Southern Cameroons fate. What should Ambazonians do?

We of the Cameroon Concord News Group think that there are two possibilities. The first is to accept, give in, give up and tell Papa Paul Biya that it was a costly mistake to even have tested his political will. The second is to resist. Whom have we respected more in history? Those who passed their days under the oppression and collaborated with it like Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, or those who struggled for their freedom like Thomas Sankara?

This explains why we of this publication are behind President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his top aides who were arrested in Abuja, Nigeria and the Southern Cameroons young men and women who are involved in the armed struggle against invading French Cameroun soldiers. You have every right to resist. In fact, the great Hon. Wirba has made it clear to you all that it is your civil duty to resist. No argument there. Your right to resist occupation is secured in natural justice, in the morals of history and in international law.

The only limitation that the Southern Cameroons Interim Government now faces is on the means of resistance. Ambazonians should be moving from den guns to bombs if not all our demonstrations in capital cities in the West and the lives of our fallen heroes will be all in vain. Are we to despair and give up? This has almost never happened in history, so we’ll continue.  It is our right to resist.

Why should a Southern Cameroons lawyer and leader of the much respected Cameroon Anglophone Civil Society Consortium be clamouring for Southern Cameroons parents to again put their children in the hands of people who set live children on fire in Buea and Bamenda universities?

Southern Cameroonians don’t want armed settlers from French Cameroun who invade university campuses and raped students infecting hundreds with HIV.  Southern Cameroonians do not want to be in a country where judges sentence children for making a Boko Haram joke because of their origin. Southern Cameroonians don’t want French Cameroun supported by France to continue tyrannizing them, so they will resist. The Ambazonia Diaspora should start making available their money to Vice President Dabney Yerima. That’s what it means to be part of the Southern Cameroons resistance. We agree that sometimes our Amba Boys have acted with heinous murderousness, but even that is not as bad when compared to the crimes committed by French Cameroun soldiers in the Federal Republic of Ambazonia.

Ambazonians, it’s your right; it’s your duty

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

For those who are familiar with the expression “wata na wata” you probably think of it as a historical Southern Cameroons grievance over events that unfolded some 57 years ago. That was the time when the French government facilitated the creation of the so-called Federal Republic of Cameroon and later transformed it into the United Republic of Cameroon.

The French Commissioner to French Cameroun, Roland Pre ousted Andre Marie Mbida as Prime Minister of French Cameroun and replaced him with a man the world came to know as President Ahmadou Ahidjo. Ahidjo was then accorded the task of assimilating British Southern Cameroons.

Some Southern Cameroonians fled towns like Mamfe and Nkambe upon hearing of the 1961 plebiscite results that John Ngu Foncha and the KNDP had won.  Southern Cameroons political elites who called for a thorough interpretation of the plebiscite results were flushed out. Correspondingly, communities that tried to resist the reunification process were decimated.

There was a feeling of considerable slaughter of Southern Cameroonians during the Bamenda Preparatory Conference in 1961 and it has been hard for Southern Cameroons political commentators to explain why Dr Emmanuel Lifafe Endeley was absent in Bamenda. Endeley wrote a letter to the Bamenda Preparatory Conference which was never read but in that document, he noted that his feeling about the Plebiscite was more of a “massacre” than anything else.

When all was said and done, the Federal Republic of Cameroon was established after the Foumban Conference and on May 20th 1972, French Cameroun started the process of seizing and destroying everything that is Southern Cameroons. Since then, the people of Southern Cameroons lost everything including the name of the port city of Victoria that was changed to Limbe by French Cameroun political elites with the support of the disgraced Prime Minister Ephraim Inoni.

As the Biya Francophone government continues to celebrate its military superiority over Ambazonia Self-Defense Forces, Southern Cameroonians are weeping over the failure of leadership in the Interim Government caused by the abduction of President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his top aides in Abuja, Nigeria.

This is true as the French Cameroun army continues to destroy Ambazonia villages and killing hundreds of Southern Cameroons women and children. It is genocide for the explicit purpose of replacing the Southern Cameroons population with French Camerounians, ignoring the objections of major human rights organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The French Cameroun army has successfully decimated as many as 200 Southern Cameroons villages and in some cases even ordered Ambazonians out of their ancestral homes so that the French Cameroun army and it civil administrators can take their place.  These French Cameroun crimes against the people of Southern Cameroons have surpassed the scale of calamity carried out in Rwanda during the genocide. The international media has failed to convey Southern Cameroons’s tragedy accurately as a struggle against marginalisation, discrimination and exploitation.

To resolve this conflict, the Southern Cameroons leader, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe made an extraordinary gesture despite the enormity of the injustice imposed on him, his aides and the Ambazonian people for over 57 years. President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe requested for an all inclusive dialogue to be hosted in a foreign country and supervise by the United Nations.

President Paul Biya and his gang of French Cameroun political elites simply moved the goalposts. The French Cameroun army has continued to destroy Southern Cameroons towns and villages. To be sure, Biya’s killing machine has continued to operate under the pretence of a “Back to School” process now headed by a certain Barrister Agbor Balla.

French Cameroun government ministers who hail from Southern Cameroons including some Southern Cameroonians running fraudulent NGOs have moved us farther away from holding Yaoundé accountable for their crimes, supporting Beti Ewondo extremist hardliners for blood money, backing away from Southern Cameroons statehood, taking everything off the table and even replacing the use of the word “Federalism” with ‘Decentralization” to support French Cameroun army’s presence on Southern Cameroons territory.

So here we are, more than three years after the Southern Cameroons revolution started, Ambazonians are back at square one with some struggling on social media to defend a Pastor-Leader who wasted their hard earned money for his self-aggrandizement with a few pretending to host an Ambazonia Cultural Festival in London on the 17th of August at a time when much of the international community has resigned itself to tepid commentary instead of meaningful action against the Biya Francophone regime.

Biya and his French Cameroun military with support from the French government and French speaking African diplomats have barred Southern Cameroonians from every avenue towards dignity and freedom: No right to reside in a viable environment, no right to return to their original homes from Nigeria or from Europe and America, and live bullets awaits those who mount any effective protest, even when they’re unarmed and non-violent.

But no matter how bleak the reality looks today in Ground Zero and in the Southern Cameroons Interim Government with Sako  Ikome and Chris Anu now appearing as fifth citizens (Fifth citizens were Europeans who cooperated with the Nazi when the German army invaded their respective countries), in terms of policy and on  Ground Zero including the work of Vice President Dabney Yerima, there is a counter-reality we Ambazonians must recognise: Southern Cameroonian aspiration for freedom is mightier than any army that stands in its way. French Cameroun bullying and coercion over the past 3 years have not broken the spirit of the Southern Cameroons revolution, and another 57 years won’t either.

The Southern Cameroons resistance for justice, which envisions the kind of equality and prosperity that protects the future of all Ambazonians, will continue until we bring this 57 years long “wata na wata” battle to an end, once and for all.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai