Cameroon’s military says it has freed nine students and a teacher who were kidnapped this week from a school in one of the country’s restive English-speaking regions. It is the third time this month that students have been abducted from schools in the Anglophone regions.

Senior divisional officer Nto’ou Ndong Chamberlin says several gunmen were killed Wednesday in the military operation, and other armed men responsible for the abduction are on the run. The teacher was wounded in the rescue.

“Nine guns have been seized, four neutralized — among them the head of the team, called ‘Man of Lucks,’ and three bikes destroyed and even the camp has also been burned down by the forces of law and order [military],” Chamberlin said.

Gunmen kidnapped the students and their teacher Tuesday evening from Lords Bilingual School in Kumba, a city in Cameroon’s southwest region.

The kidnapping comes three weeks after gunmen kidnapped and then released 79 students and three staff from a school in the neighboring northwest region.

Eleven students were later kidnapped from the same Presbyterian Secondary School. Church moderator Fonki Samuel said a $4,000 ransom was paid to the abductors for their release.

Pierre Marie Abbe, a political analyst at the Catholic University of Central Africa, says the government’s war against the separatists has been a failure.

The government should drop the idea of war and organize dialogue with English-speaking Cameroonians, Abbe said. But for such a dialogue to be successful, he added, the government should meet Anglophone Cameroonians to find out from them who they see as their true leaders.

The government says separatists in the two English-speaking regions have torched at least a hundred schools and abducted or killed dozens of teachers. More than 90 percent of the regions’ schools remain closed.

The international community and rights groups have condemned violence from both sides and called on the government to negotiate an end to the crisis.

“The U.N. has, along with most of the international community, asked for dialogue,” said Allegra Maria Del Pilar Baiocchi, the U.N. resident coordinator for Cameroon. “We need to hear the voices of the people saying we have had enough and we want solutions. It should not only be the U.N. saying it or the ambassadors. We need confidence-building measures and I think we need peace.”

Unrest broke out in Cameroon’s western regions in 2016, when English-speaking teachers and lawyers protested the dominance of French-speakers.

Cameroon’s military reacted with a crackdown, and armed separatists soon launched a campaign for independence.

Clashes since have killed more than 1,200 people.

Culled from the VOA

The international community cannot expect the CPDM crime syndicate in Yaounde to pursue and implement democratic principles in a country they have misruled for 35 years. Over the last 35 years, Biya has become very dictatorial and he has successfully deleted any lines that existed between the executive, judiciary and legislative branches of the government. It should be recalled that Mr. Biya appoints all magistrates and judges in the country and has a huge influence on members of parliament and senators, 30% of whom are directly appointed by him, while 70% are elected in a counterfeit election whose results are usually known many months ahead of time. And this same influence could be seen during the just-ended presidential elections.

The AU, EU and the UN should understand now that beating the incumbent through the ballot box in Cameroon is a Herculean task. The electoral code is beautifully written to ensure that the 85 year old Paul Biya is maintained in power. Even the election organizing body, ELECAM, is replete with members of the ruling party and this makes it hard for real impartial elections to be held in a country like Cameroon that lacks basic, transparent and fair election rules.

The ruling CPDM (Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement) party is considered by many Cameroonians are a crime syndicate due to the type of people who are its members. This party’s membership comprises ex-convicts, hardened criminals, murderers, business-people evading taxes and embezzlers. It has been banned in the Southern Cameroons by the Ambazonian Interim Government and designated as a terrorist organization.

The recent presidential elections in Cameroun that was state-managed on October the 7^th took place in a repressive political environment and the ruling cabal failed to provide conditions for fair and free voting. Both the Europeans and the current US administration are really awakened by the fact that the butcher in Yaounde cannot be trusted to run a democracy.

No right thinking democrat will be in power for 35 years and seek and gotten a 7^th term. Biya cannot be a democrat when more than 4000 Southern Cameroonians have been killed by troops under his command and when hundreds and thousands of both Ambazonians and French Cameroun political elites and activists’ are languishing behind bars.

The so-called presidential elections in French Cameroun following a massive boycott in Southern Cameroons was to recruit new criminals into the CPDM crime syndicate who will only implement what the dictator says and continue to misrule the impoverished nation.

By Chi Prudence Asong in London

More than 4000 Southern Cameroons men, women and children have died in the territory now known as the Federal Republic of Ambazonia ever since the Biya Francophone regime in Yaoundé declared war against the English speaking minority-though the UN Office in the Sub Saharan region under strong French government influence enthusiastically puts the figure at 400. No UN official has visited the Southern Cameroons since the Francophone genocidal campaign started. The bourgeoisie Commonwealth Secretary General, Patricia Scotland only spent some few hours in Buea under heavy security provided by French Cameroun soldiers.  Meanwhile, the killing of Southern Cameroons women and children continues almost daily.

Fifty-seven years after the so-called reunification of the two Cameroons, there is not an iota of development in the Ambazonia territory by successive French Cameroun governments. So, wherever you go in the Southern Cameroons, there is mud in the rainy season and dust in the dry season. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat. With French government backing  within the African Union and the United Nations Security Council including the European Union, the Ambazonian exiled Interim Government headed by Dr Samuel Ikome Sako is denied the platform to make the Southern Cameroons case as regards the massive killings and torture orchestrated by the Biya Francophone regime to the international community.  At the same time, the UN human rights wing dominated by the French, has blocked or delayed a range of political actions against the Paul Biya regime by its continues release of patronizing statements such “The violence in the Anglophone regions has led to massive internal displacement – at least 436,000 people are believed to be internally displaced, while more than 30,000 have fled to Nigeria since September last year.”

French Cameroun military helicopters with aerial intelligence from the French government and tactical intelligence from the President Buhari regime in Abuja, Nigeria have carried out several attacks on camps hosting innocent Southern Cameroons women and children fleeing the conflict both in Cameroon and Nigeria. An American missionary, Charles Wesco Trumann was recently killed by Cameroon government forces on lame and ridiculous reason that he was a CIA agent helping the Ambazonian Restoration Forces. Several Southern Cameroons medical doctors and university professors have been killed and many have fled the territory into French Cameroun. The French government and now Saudi Arabia are supplying the Paul Biya regime with sophisticated weapons and the French Cameroun army onslaught against the English speaking people of Southern Cameroons is almost every day: it is the most malicious killing of the black race in mankind’s history since the slave trade. Yet, very little appears about it in the international media due to the political packaging of the French backed French Cameroun military campaign conducted under the cover of fighting Southern Cameroons terrorists and Ambazonian separatists which have no authorization from both the AU or the UN.

In covering up for its crimes in Southern Cameroons, the Francophone regime announced a 12 billion FCFA reconstruction aid to victims of its own atrocities and ever since the Commonwealth Secretary General, Patricia Scotland left Yaoundé, nothing has been heard about that plan. The Francophone army has targeted every sector in the Southern Cameroonian life including: villages, fishing boats and farmland. A farmer and his three sons were killed by Cameroon government forces as they were returning home from their farm in Ekona. A Roman Catholic priest was killed in Muyuka after Holy Mass. At the time of writing this report, another Roman Catholic priest, Rev Father Cosmas Omboto Ondari was killed by Cameroon government forces in Kembong in Manyu.  I travelled home incognito for the burial of the late Rev Father Alex Sob and I stood in the cemetery during his final funeral rites and heard an old woman from the Legion of Mary shouting that, “I want to speak to the late John Ngu Foncha who took us to these French speaking people.”

The war in Southern Cameroons is a war against Ambazonian children on many fronts. Firstly, it was a policy to assimilate them by imposing the French language upon them and enslaving them with no jobs after university education. That failed woefully as many like myself migrated to the West. The second phase is what we are seeing now and it involves military attacks with financial support from Paris and Beijing.

After the Eastern Regional Crisis in 1953 which heralded the quasi federal status for British Southern Cameroons, Southern Cameroons parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. To be more accurate, the French Cameroun phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of in Southern Cameroons.  Southern Cameroons had reached a stage where the people were hoping for a royal visit by Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain after our traditional rulers were invited during the Queeen’s trip to Calabar in Nigeria. After 57 years following its forged reunification with French Cameroun, Southern Cameroons with its abundant natural resources is among the world’s bottom.

Many schools in Southern Cameroons have been targets in the French Cameroun-led blitz and several hundred of the children are living in the bushes with their grandparents suffering from malnutrition, dysentery and malaria. The French Cameroun government officials have been blocking shipments of foodstuff and cloths coming from the Southern Cameroons Diaspora to the suffering Ambazonian population. When I questioned a Francophone custom officer at the Douala Port, he in a typical ruling CPDM party pattern responded that most of the materials arriving the Douala Port had been banned by the government for health and safety reasons.

The UN staffers in Yaoundé and Abuja with the help of French diplomats have developed a special relationship with Cameroon government officials with many using the Francophone lobby within the UN system to get promotions and appointments into more lucrative UN jobs and positions. Consequently, the prospect of any public expression of a rebellion within the UN bureaucracy as regards to the war in Southern Cameroons is completely absent and non-existent mindful of the fact that the UN under Antonio Guterres is slowly but surely in the process of destroying an entire African English society. History will slaughter men like Paul Ghogomu, Philemon Yang, Chief Tabetando, Elvis Ngolle Ngolle, Victor Mengot, Patrick Ekema, Peter Mafany Musonge, Paul Tasong and Paul Atanga Nji including other Southern Cameroonians responsible for the killings currently going on in Southern Cameroons.

For how long should Southern Cameroons women and children including the old and the blind be exposed to such vicious French Cameroun military punishment for something they have never done before the UN listens to the Ambazonia Interim Government? Only a corrupt mind can tolerate what is being done to the Southern Cameroons people. Yet no resignation is expected from Southern Cameroonians serving in the Biya regime. History will indeed slaughter them!! By the time the international community will wake up from its sleep to put a stop to this senseless war going on in Southern Cameroons, ten thousand lives would have been lost in the cause of nothing, fuelled by French geopolitical calculations in the Gulf of Guinea and French government support for ruthless dictators in Francophone Africa.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai