Cameroon’s main opposition leader, Maurice Kamto, who has continuously claimed he won the last year’s contentious presidential election, is in detention after he was arrested alongside dozens of protesters in the economic capital Douala on Monday (Jan. 28) for organizing and participating in street demonstrations.

The crackdown was also extended to reporters, with the arrest of two journalists on duty, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Kamto, president of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement, was a runner up to president Paul Biya in last October’s presidential election, coming a distant second with 14.23% of the vote. He claimed the election was marred with irregularities and immediately proclaimed himself winner. Kamto has since then been organizing sporadic demonstrations to reclaim “his victory.”

The demonstrations, christened “White Marches”, which were violently quelled, left about six people with bullet wounds. Up to 117 protesters were arrested in Douala, Yaounde, Bafoussam and Mbouda, according to Rene Emmanuel Sadi, minister of communication. The minister said the public demonstrations were unauthorized and condemned the “unacceptable maneuvers to destabilize Cameroon under the false pretext of an electoral hold-up.”

Demonstrations also took place abroad. In Paris, Cameroon’s embassy was ransacked while protests also took place in the United States, United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and Germany.

Many rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have called for the immediate and unconditional release of Kamto and other protesters, underscoring the need for the government to respect people’s right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.

The government of president Biya, who has ruled Cameroon since 1982, is yet to respond to the many calls for the protesters to be released. This is similar to the uncompromising action the government took at the onset of the Anglophone crisis.

Back then in 2016, when a modest protest by Anglophone lawyers and teachers over perceived and real marginalization by the Francophone-dominated government erupted, the government’s instinct was to respond with force, deploying the elite Rapid Intervention Battalion and numerous arrests.

Many Cameroon watchers now believe the aggressive show of force frustrated any hope of a peaceful resolution of the conflict through dialogue early on after the government arrested trade union leaders with whom it was negotiating and outlawed the umbrella union.

There has been no end to the conflict in sight since then. And as the army has been empowered to use heavy force, many more people have been radicalized and increasingly bold armed separatists are earning support at home and from the diaspora and are multiplying in numbers.

Many now fear the recent twist of issues can take same course as the same cause always produces the same effect.

Source: Quartz Africa

The lawyer for Cameroon’s arrested main opposition leader says he now faces eight charges including sedition, insurrection and inciting violence.

Christopher Ndong told The Associated Press Thursday that Maurice Kamto also faces charges that include hostility against the fatherland and disruption of peace. If he is found guilty, he could face five years to life in prison.

Kamto and members of his Movement for the Renaissance of Cameroon party were arrested on Monday in Douala. The party over the weekend had called for protests against what it called irregularities in the Oct. 7 election that saw President Paul Biya easily win a seventh term. Official results said Kamto finished a distant second.

More than 100 protesters were arrested in various cities. International rights groups have called for their release.

Source: AP

Human rights groups and activists are appealing to the Cameroonian authorities to immediately release opposition leader Maurice Kamto, who was arrested in the economic capital Douala on Monday night.

Prof Kamto was reportedly whisked away to the Judicial Police Headquarters in the capital Yaoundé. The area was cordoned off and no one, including his lawyers and journalists, were allowed access to the detained opposition leader on Tuesday.

Amnesty International said the arrest of the leader of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (MRC), who came second in the October 2018 presidential election, signalled an escalating crackdown on opposition leaders, human rights defenders and activists.

Prof Kamto was arrested alongside four of his supporters.

“The authorities must immediately and unconditionally release them, as well as the peaceful protesters detained at the weekend simply for exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” Amnesty’s West and Central Africa director Samira Daoud said in a statement.

Less tolerant

“Instead of taking steps towards improving the country’s human rights record, we are witnessing the authorities becoming less and less tolerant of criticism. This must stop,” the statement further quoted Ms Daoud.

The Network of Human Rights Defenders in Central Africa (REDHAC) said Prof Kamto’s arrest was a “flagrant violation of the law” and called for the “immediate and unconditional release” of the opposition leader and all those who were arrested in relation to last weekend’s protests.

The MRC secretary-general secretary, Mr Christopher Ndong, said Prof Kamto was arrested alongside several other party members. Two journalists were among those arrested.

Prof Kamto has continuously insisted that he won the presidential poll, whose official result show he emerged a distant second with 14.23 percent vote. His supporters have been organising sporadic protests against what they term “an electoral hold-up” in defiance of a government warning against post-electoral disorder.

Remain calm

At least 117 people, including Prof Kamto’s former campaign manager, Mr Paul Eric Kingue, and popular musician Gaston Serval Abe (Valsero), were arrested during protest marches in several towns including Yaoundé and Bafoussam at the weekend.

Saturday’s nationwide “white marches” by the opposition party were unauthorised according to Communication minister Rene Emmanuel Sadi. He said those arrested were “caught disrupting public order and perpetrating various assaults”.

However, according to the MRC third vice-president, Mr Emmanuel Simh, the hidden aim of the “unjustified political arrests, was to decapitate the MRC and Prof Maurice Kamto’s winning coalition”.

MRC has called on its members and sympathisers to remain calm and attentive to instructions the party national directorate would give.

Source: The East African

The whereabouts of Cameroon’s opposition leader Maurice Kamto remain unknown. This follows his arrest on Monday night in Douala alongside several other members of his party, the Cameroon Renaissance Movement.

He was arrested at another politician’s home in the country’s economic capital Douala following weekend protests against President Paul Biya.

The opposition leader still claims to have won last October’s election, which saw 85-year-old Paul Biya secure a seventh consecutive term in office.

A press release from the party on Tuesday called on members and sympathisers to remain calm and attentive to instructions the party national directorate would give.

Source: Africa News

Cameroonians are taking their grievances against the regime of President Paul Biya to the world. Over the weekend, Cameroonians occupied the embassies of their country in Berlin and Paris, to support protests back home.

Protests continued on Monday in the capital, Yaounde, outside a police station, after at least six people – including opposition municipal council member and lawyer Michele Ndoki – were wounded and 117 people were arrested over the weekend in anti-government demonstrations. The government denied allegations that shots had been fired by security forces. But Ndoki and another opposition member, Celestin Djamen, suffered bullet wounds to the leg.

The government has reacted by accusing the opposition led by Maurice Kamto of wanting to destabilize the country. Territorial administration minister Paul Atanga Nji, responsible for licensing political parties, threatened to suspend Maurice Kamto’s Cameroon Renaissance Movement (MRC), for failing to respect Cameroon laws. “The MRC political party and its leadership have been very notorious in the disruption of public order since presidential elections were held in Cameroon,” he said.

The opposition won’t give up

Paul Biya, who has been in power for more than 36 years, won a seventh consecutive term in elections on October 7. But the poll was marred by fraud allegations, low turnout, and violence. Kamto’s party has held sporadic protests since then to dispute the result. The party leader himself, whom the government has refrained from arresting as yet, told his followers: “I am out to fight injustice. I am a son of the country who has decided to fight for and with his people until victory is achieved.”

Biya’s government has banned demonstrations and the security forces have not been shy in using force to disperse protesters. Human rights activist Ateba Bruno of the Cameroon Centre for Democracy says that not allowing peaceful protests is another way used by the government to stifle freedom of expression. “They refer to opposition parties as those who want to tarnish Cameroon’s image to the outside world. But after all that we have seen, I ask if it isn’t the opposition or the government who truly want to tarnish the image of Cameroon. We know exactly what is happening and we should stop such acts which do not honor our country,” he told DW.

Calling on the world to pay attention

The protests gained a new dimension over the weekend when Cameroonians briefly invaded andoccupied their country’s embassies in Paris and Berlin. In a video published on social platforms online, Daniel Essissima, one of around 50 protesters in the French capital, said that “Cameroonians are fed up with being taken for idiots.” About ten Cameroonians followed suit in Berlin, without inflicting as much damage to their embassy there as was the case in Paris. A large police squad removed the people from the Berlin premises in the early hours of Sunday.

The action taken by Cameroonians in France and Germany is a sign of growing resistance against Biya. The president is fighting on several fronts at once, including a revolt in the Southwest and Northwest Anglophone regions against what they perceive as discrimination by the Francophone majority. Armed separatists have been clashing with the Cameroonian military almost daily in the country’s equatorial forest.

A slew of problems for Biya

Attacks by Nigerian Boko Haram jihadists expanding into neighboring countries is another conflict Yaounde has to contend with. In the east, armed groups from the Central African Republic are an additional source of instability. All of this is putting a severe strain on Cameroon’s economy, further stoking grievances. And the loss, in November, of the right to host this year’s African Cup of Nations as a result of delays and concerns over violence was another serious blow to Cameroon’s prestige.

The ongoing conflicts have caused a drastic increase in the need for humanitarian assistance. United Nations Development & Humanitarian Coordinator Allegra Baiocchi recently said that the organization estimates that some 4.3 million Cameroonians, or one in six of the population, require lifesaving assistance.

Source: DeutschWelle

On 6 November 2018, 85-year-old Paul Biya was sworn in for his seventh term as president of Cameroon, extending his 36-year rule. It is remarkable, more so considering that up to 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 25. It means that the vast majority of Cameroonians have never known a president other than Biya and have never lived through a truly free and fair election, where anyone other than Biya could win.

The question of longevity in office has been a focus for political organizing in many parts of the world since the 1990s, when one-party regimes fell apart – unable to sustain themselves after the Cold War. Many of the long-serving leaders of that era owed their survival to client relationships with the US and the Soviet Union. When the superpowers no longer needed them, there was finally enough space for democracy to take root. Only a handful of countries in Africa and Asia have resisted this transition, and the case of Paul Biya highlights why.

In crude terms, Cameroon was a second-tier state that was more interesting to secondary Western powers – namely France – than it was to either the US or the Soviets. Indeed, Biya owes much of his survival in power to a longstanding relationship with various French administrations. As such, despite the cloud of violence surrounding this latest election, France’s president Emmanuel Macron was one of a handful of leaders who congratulated Biya on his election victory in a letter (which Biya published on his Facebook page) that the Élysée claimed was supposed to remain private.

Nor have other nations made any tangible moves to distance themselves from Biya. Despite the mounting domestic resistance to his regime, particularly in the Anglophone region of the country, Biya travels the world freely. He frequents the InterContinental hotel in Geneva, where Cameroonians allege he spends more time than in Yaoundé. He regularly attends African Union Heads of State meetings and recently turned a three-day Africa-China summit in Beijing into a two-week trip.

When a president has been in power for 36 years in a country where elections should nominally change the leadership, it’s logical to ask, ‘Why aren’t the locals resisting?’ But in Cameroon, regional and international institutions do their best to nullify any local resistance. The army and the police have a nominal monopoly on the use of force and a relatively limitless access to weapons, training and other tools. And because the arms trade remains one of the least regulated industries in the world, after a while the only recourse left for those who resist is armed conflict, if the central state is unwilling to negotiate.

Thus, in 2015, citizens in the Anglophone region of Cameroon began a peaceful campaign to protest poor access to government services. That protest was met by violence from the army and the state, and has since morphed into a full rebellion. A secessionist campaign has been brutally countered by state violence and collective punishment of civilians. But this information is broadly kept out of the mainstream media by restricting access to the restive regions. By controlling how information about Cameroon is created and disseminated, Biya manages to shield the country from scrutiny, leaving Cameroonians to resist his regime by themselves.

Never-ending presidential terms are a hot topic right now in Africa, with the youngest population in the world, and in Cameroon, with a gap between an 85-year-old president and a population with an average age of 18.5, it looks particularly absurd. Biya’s Cameroon highlights that change is not just about sheer demographic numbers but power, violence and political institutions. Longevity is also a chance to ask important questions about the international systems that connect and sustain regimes around the world.

Source: New Internationalist