Cameroon’s three-year separatist conflict has left close to 3,000 people dead and growing numbers in need of psychological care.  An influx of people impacted by the conflict are flooding into trauma centers across the English-speaking regions of the central African state.  Medical officials say they are running short of supplies and trauma workers are struggling to provide care.

A middle-aged woman cries for help at the Integrated Mental Health Care Center in Babungo, a village in Cameroon’s English-speaking Northwest.

She tells a reporter her husband was shot dead in a crossfire between the military and separatist fighters in September.  Then on Saturday, her only son’s body was found in an abandoned school building in the town of Mbengwi.

In the same trauma center, 19-year-old Yvonne Ikah says that last month three armed men in the English-speaking town of Bamenda stopped her on the way to school and raped her.

“They told me to climb on a bike [motorcycle] and I tried resisting.  But, when I saw the gun, I had no option.  They took me to a bush.  I insisted that I was an orphan.  They beat me and I had no option.  What I went through, I am not sure I will ever want to go back there again,” she said.

As Cameroon’s separatist conflict heads into a fourth year, the number of trauma victims is only growing.

At the Babungo Mental Health Care Center alone, the number of patients has tripled in the past two months to nearly 600.

Trauma care specialist Evangeline Nchang says patient numbers jump when fighting stops, as it becomes safer to travel to the center.

“The trauma is just too much,” she said.  “Youths are dying, elderly people are dying, even old mothers that cannot even run away when the guns are being shot.  They are just shot like that.  There are more mental patients every day because of the trauma of this crisis.”

There are not enough beds, so the patients sleep on the floor in crowded hallways.

Medical supplies are running short, despite donations from Germany and the United States.

And director of the trauma center John Tumenta says most staff have fled because of nearby fighting between Cameroon’s military and the separatists.

Earlier this month, Cameroon’s government hosted a week-long “national dialogue” with the aim of ending the conflict.

While some welcomed the effort by President Paul Biya for reconciliation, critics dismissed the dialogue as a sham debate.

Separatist leaders refused to take part, noting thousands of people are still locked up in connection with the conflict, and vowed to continue fighting.

Meanwhile, the United Nations says the humanitarian situation in the troubled western regions is getting worse with half a million internally displaced, and over a million in need of assistance.

Fighting broke out in 2016 after Cameroon’s military cracked down on anglophones calling for an independent state within the mainly French-speaking country.  Cameroon’s English speakers say they are treated as second-class citizens and given fewer jobs and support from the state.

Source: VOA

Over 1,000 new recruits of the Cameroon army on Tuesday concluded an anti-terror drill in the country’s South Region.

The drill enhanced their capability of handling terror attacks and also defended the territorial integrity of Cameroon, said Lt. Col. Gerald Tataw Tabi, commander of the military training center of Djoum town in the region, where the new recruits were trained for roughly two months.

“Fifty-one days of training is a whole program of transformation … We put them in the situation of the tactical field, especially today [when] we live in a period of uncertainty,” Tabi said.

The 1,226 soldiers swore to defend the flag of Cameroon during a ceremony in Djoum that brought together top military officials of the country.

Maj. Gen. Philippe Mpay, commander of military schools and training centers, encouraged the soldiers during the oath-taking ceremony to defend “the institutions of Cameroon against internal and external enemies and to do this in honor and loyalty.”

Cameroon is facing growing threats from the terror group Boko Haram in its Far North Region and a separatist conflict in its English-speaking regions of Northwest and Southwest.

President Paul Biya has promised not to harm the separatists and Boko Haram militants who will lay down their weapons, but warned that those who continue the armed struggle will “face the full force” of the Cameroon army.

Source: Xinhuanet

At least 11 plantation workers were seriously injured and four others abducted Monday night by Ambazonia Restoration Forces in Tiko, a locality in the Fako County in Southern Cameroons.

Four of the injured workers on a rubber plantation of state-owned Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC) were rushed to the hospital early Tuesday with life-threatening wounds.

“They (armed separatists) arrived when the workers were about to sleep and assembled them in the yard and started flogging one after another with machetes. They chopped off the fingers and hands of some of them. And then abducted four men and left for the bush.” Lygonga Mbonde, one of the unit managers of CDC told reporters.

The Southern Cameroons Interim Government recently vowed on the Ambazonia National Television channel, SCBC to make the territory ungovernable. They consider CDC a legitimate target, according to security reports.

The CDC runs banana, palm oil, and rubber plantations in Southern Cameroons. In August last year, the agro-industry said, more than 6,000 of its 20,000 workers had fled sporadic attacks, killings and kidnapping from Ambazonia Restoration Forces.

The English-speaking region now known as the Federal Republic of Ambazonia has been hit by an uprising since 2017.

A so-called national dialogue to end the conflict was held in the French Cameroun capital of Yaounde in early October and recommended that a special status should be granted to the British Southern Cameroons territory.

Reported by Xinhaunet with additional editing from Cameroon Concord News

The leadership of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government has reminded Yaoundé that summary executions of Ambazonia civilians carried out by Cameroon government army soldiers constitute a war crime and that the Biya Francophone Beti Ewondo regime is deemed responsible.

Vice President Dabney Yerima made the comments recently during a trip to Manchester in England and observed that the Ambazonia Interim Government was in the process of assembling pieces of video footages showing summary executions carried out by troops loyal to the Biya regime in French Cameroun.

Dabney Yerima told reporters in Manchester that the footages, many of which have been widely shared on social media, appears to show Cameroon government soldiers filming themselves capturing and executing several innocent Southern Cameroons civilians.

The Southern Cameroons exiled leader noted that Yaoundé-backed militias operating inside Southern Cameroons have been committing unspeakable atrocities against women and children.  Comrade Yerima further pointed out that the African Union, the EU including the UN have turned a blind eye on the sufferings of the Ambazonian people.

Under international law, summary executions are serious violations, and amounts to a war crime. The Ambazonia second-in-command stressed that Biya and his French Cameroun political elites are responsible for all the crimes committed by the Cameroon government military and their affiliated armed militias.

Dabney Yerima called on the United Nations and the European Union to immediately launch an impartial, transparent and independent investigation into the crisis in Southern Cameroons and force Yaounde to apprehend soldiers responsible for atrocious crimes, some of whom should be easily identifiable from the video footages they themselves shared on social media.

By Chi Prudence Asong in Manchester

Several hundred people from Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea have escaped a French Cameroun commercial town of Sangmelima following violent conflicts and looting between communities there, where townspeople claim outsiders are causing mounting insecurity. The Biya regime has deployed at least 300 troops to Sangmelima.

Hundreds of people, especially youths armed with machetes, hammers, spades and spears, defied antiriot police Thursday and Friday, invading shops in Sangmelima, looting and torching some over resentment of outsiders. Among their victims is 46-year-old motor spare parts dealer Romouald Mefirou, who said he fled for his life.

 “Within 24 hours I have lost everything I took 23 years to invest in this town. I do not want to lose my life so I have to leave with my family. It is a deplorable situation,” he said,

Felix Nguele Nguele, governor of Sangmelima’s South region of Cameroon, said Mefirou, who is from Cameroon’s western town of Foumban, is just one of hundreds of people who have fled since the violence erupted October 9.

Nguele Nguele said the violence intensified when outsiders were suspected in the killing of a 27-year-old local motorcycle taxi driver. He says he requested and got more than 200 troops from Cameroon’s capital city, Yaoundé, to reinforce security and stop the bloody attacks and the looting of shops and houses that has paralyzed business.

The conflict started when the motorcycle taxi driver was found dead in the town. Locals blamed people from other Cameroon towns who live in Sangmelima of causing insecurity, pointing to increasing aggression stealing and rape.

The government said besides Cameroonians who are migrants, immigrants from neighboring Gabon and Equatorial Guinea had also escaped to safety after at least 20 people were severely wounded by rampaging youths, who attacked people they considered foreigners.

The youths have always complained that the influx of who they call foreign citizens to their town to work in cocoa, banana and cassava plantations and others as merchants deprive them of jobs.

Cameroon Higher Education Minister Jacques Fame Ndongo, who was born near Sangmelima, attended a crisis meeting October 12 and condemned the attacks and looting. He said the government has taken note of the youths’ grievances but that Cameroonians from its over 260 tribes and foreign citizens with residence permits are free to live and do business wherever they want in the central African state.

He says no community should be stigmatized because all of them are Cameroonians and should feel free wherever they live. He says the government has taken note of all the grievances raised by the population and will attend to them according to the means available. He says he is insisting that the youths relinquish their weapons because peace should return.

The South region has been the country’s most peaceful. Cameroon has been battling the Boko Haram insurgency on its northern border with Nigeria, fighting rebels who cross over from the troubled Central African Republic to attack communities in the east for supplies, containing piracy in the Gulf of Guinea to the west and, recently, a separatist crisis that has killed at least 2,000 in the English-speaking North West and South West regions.

Reported by the VOA with additional editing from Camcordnews

The passing into eternal glory of the Lord of the great legal luminary Barrister Helen Ebai has deprived us of a commanding voice at the service of justice and the truth.

I did my first case as a lawyer before her at the Victoria Magistrate Court with the distinguished legal luminary Fon Gorgi Dinka in the case of C. J Woleta v Imoh. Several years later, she briefed me as a counsel in the Besongabang Chieftaincy cases against Barrister Enonchong. 

She was a passionate, tireless and fearless crusader for justice, and a ferocious outspoken defender of the oppressed, the poor and the weak. For many, she was a gadfly in her passionate pursuit of social justice. For others, she was a star of hope in a grossly unjust and corrupt society that at the time of her departure was still at war with its soul.

The Mayanarong was a commander who slayed the beast of impunity and arrogant abuse of power with diction, tact, zeal and the bravery of a Spartan. She was greatly admired, loved and respected by the majority poor and passionate seekers of justice. With these attributes too many to recount, permit me in all humility, to submit that Mrs Helen Ebai qualified for a respectable place on our collective book of life.

I am impelled to make this bold statement about the departed inspirational symbol of hope, because I was a privileged witness of her great contributions to the collective good of humanity.  One quality that was embedded in her towering human qualities was compassion.  I witnessed this in her judgments when she was a magistrate. She was an outstanding lawyer and as a community leader. In her professional law career, on the bench or in the bar, in her private or public life, she commanded attention with dignity, self-respect and exemplary strength of character.

As a Christian in the Catholic Church, I witnessed Mrs. Ebai working tirelessly to reconcile broken relationships within and out of the church. She also dedicated herself in combating the prurient propensity that has unfortunately snowballed into the Church of God. Her mere presence at the site of every conflict inspired the hope that peace would reign as indeed, it did, most of the time.

As we mourn the passing into eternal glory of this great daughter of the Lord, let us give thanks to the Lord for inspiring her as He did ever so often, to eternalize her legacy through her powerful defence of the truth and the rebuke of deception at the expense of  precious human life.

She represented the voice of our enduring genuine human values when she summoned the courage and detachment to remind her audience during a recent meeting summoned by the Prime Minister of Cameroon, that justice and the truth not deception are enduring attributes at the service of peace which is a higher value than political power for the sake power.  She has left behind a monumental record of service to the law, justice and advocacy for the poor, the weak to inspire and guide us on.

May her soul rest in peace

By Chief Charles A. Taku

The Benue State Government has relocated over 6,000 Cameroonian refugees camped and catered for in the state from Anyake Camp to Ikyogen Cattle Ranch in Kwande Local Government Area of the state.

The refugees who were displaced as a result of growing political upheaval in the country, were mostly indigenes of the state and were relocated amidst tight security made up of men of the Nigerian Army, Police, Department of State Services (DSS) and the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) among others.

The IDPs are to be relocated to the new place for better facilities such as shelter, education, water, sanitation and land for farming.

The Executive Secretary of the State Emergency Management Agency, (SEMA) in conjunction with United Nation High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and other top security apparatuses, commenced relocation of the refugees yesterday. SEMA Chairman, Mr. Emmanuel Shior, while handing over the first batch of the refugees conveyed in over 30 buses to the traditional ruler (Mue Ter) of Ichongu, Chief Simon Baver, who represented the paramount ruler of Kwande (Ter Kwande), Hillary Ikyima, appealed for cordial relationship between the community and the displaced persons. Shior commended Governor Samuel Ortom for providing the needed support for the refugees, saying that the security of both the refugees and relevant stakeholders working tirelessly for their welfare remained the governor’s top priority.

He reiterated the collaboration of SEMA with UNHCR and other relevant stakeholders in providing essential services to cushion the hardship the refugees were passing through such as in security, shortage of food items, lack of healthcare services and poor education among others.

Head of the UNHCR Sub-Office in Ogoja, from neighbouring Cross River State, Mulugeta Zewdie, commended the state government for providing security and assistance to refugees.

Source: Newtelegraphng.com

The Riverside International Friendship Gardens opened a new garden Thursday dedicated to the country of Cameroon. The garden is located inside Riverside Park in La Crosse, which is a sister city to Kumbo, Cameroon.

The international garden exists to honor cultures throughout the world. “We are all connected to one another,” said Chuck Hanson, president of the Riverside International Friendship Gardens. “We’re all part of this good earth and we all have a responsibility to ourselves and our posterity to keep the good earth viable and healthy for future generations.”

Kumbo is the latest sister city of La Crosse to be honored with a garden, others include ones dedicated to China, Germany, and Russia. The relationship between Cameroon and La Crosse started over 20 years ago when two sisters got together.

“How could they work together in a different way and one Franciscan sister turned to the other and said ‘that sounds pretty good, we should try that.’ One of them was Cameroonian and one of them was from Wisconsin,” said Sister Eileen Mckenzie, President of Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration.

Since then the two cities have formed a good relationship with one another. Red, yellow, and green can be seen throughout the garden, which are the three colors of the Cameroon flag.

Organizers said they had to get creative to honor Cameroon with this garden being that the climate in Africa is a little different than here in La Crosse.

“We convey the culture through sculpture, as you can see before us in the fountain,” Hanson said. “This is the Mami Wata. She is a fictional, mythical character in Cameroon. The protector of the waters, making sure those children don’t stay in too long or go out too far.”

The park also features a raffia palm art installation, since the winter weather wouldn’t allow for the real thing. For some native Cameroon people living in America, the garden means a lot to them.

“Khiafan told us that ‘well we don’t need to take our children back to Cameroon now. We can take them to La Crosse, Wisconsin and learn about our culture,” Hanson said. Organizers say they have plans to add more sculptures to the garden in the future.

Source:  weau.com

The arrest and detention of Cameroon’s best-known Muslim scholar of the Bible, Abdulkarim Ali, has both outraged and united the world’s most important religious leaders. Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Church of England Justin Welby, and Sheikh Abdullah Awad Al Juhany, one of the Imams of the Grand Mosque in Mecca (Saudi Arabia), united on Thursday in calling for the unconditional release of Abdulkarim Ali.

Last September 25, Abdulkarim Ali was seized by armed plain clothes men, reportedly Cameroonian gendarme officers. The abduction lasted a few minutes and eyewitnesses, including security guards manning the entrance to the Swiss embassy in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, say Ali was roughed up and bundled into a waiting car which immediately sped off.

Back from a recent trip to Switzerland, Ali had stopped by to brief Pietro Lazzeri, the Swiss Ambassador to Cameroon. Last June 27, Switzerland’s federal ministry of foreign affairs officially announced it was mediating between the Cameroon government and pro-independence movements campaigning for the breakaway Republic of Ambazonia in the country’s two English-speaking regions.

Ali’s apparent crime – he has not yet been charged – is the fact that he participated in meetings organized by the Swiss to help Ambazonian leaders prepare for the negotiations. Victim of Religious Persecution The arrest and detention has infuriated the Vatican and the Church of England. Both have said they are gravely concerned by reports that Ali was beaten at the time of his arrest, has been tortured in detention and is being starved.

Reportedly ill at the time of his arrest, Ali has been denied access to a doctor. Access to his lawyers and members of his family has also been restricted. Sheikh Abdullah Award Al Junaby slammed the abuse Ali has suffered in detention, including efforts by gendarmes to prevent him from praying. “This is unacceptable”, he told Al-Arab News Channel. Staff at the Grand Mosque in Mecca say they have been flooded by complaints from Muslims in Cameroon, notably from Bamenda, the provincial town where Ali occasionally serves as a preacher/teacher.

Cameroonian gendarmes have allegedly also tried to force Ali to eat food not prepared in keeping with Muslim standards.

Is it Genocide?

This is “outrageous, shocking, and unacceptable”, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has said of the abuse. Relations between Cameroon and the pair of Archbishop Welby and ex-Nigerian leader Olusegun Obasanjo have deteriorated considerably since last August. Without the courtesy of advance warning, Cameroonian officials cancelled a trip the two were about to take to visit the country.

Both Obasanjo and Archbishop Welby were visiting to show support for the mediation process initiated by the Swiss and supported by, among others, the USA, UK, UN, EU, Canada, the African Union and Commonwealth. Obasanjo earlier this year reportedly used the word genocide in describing the violence unfolding in Ambazonia. Yaounde did not take kindly to Obasanjo using the G-word.

President Paul Bya, 86, in power since 1982, has dismissed the charges of genocide, describing them as “ridiculous”. Biya’s supporters agree with him. A one-time campaigner for a return to federalism in Cameroon, Barrister Agbor Balla, who runs a human rights organization, says it cannot be genocide. On a recent television interview, Agbor Balla said if it were genocide, the victims (Ambazonians) would not run for shelter in French-speaking Cameroon (home of the “genocidaires”).

Botched Decolonization to Blame

The breakaway Republic of Ambazonia is presented as the successor of the United Nations British Trusteeship Territory of Southern Cameroons which gained independence on 1st October 1961. Nineteen months earlier, the Republic of Cameroon had won independence from France on 1st October 1960 within international boundaries that did not include Southern Cameroons.

The two Cameroons were supposed to form a union of two states, equal in status. Things did not turn out as anticipated.. In violation of the then constitution, the predominantly French-speaking administration rolled back autonomy for Southern Cameroons notably after it abolished the two-state federation in 1972. In 1984, as Biya probably now sees, he went one step too far, when he simply reverted (by presidential decree) to the name of the French-speaking part before independence.

Ambazonians argue that the move constituted secession from any union by the French-speaking part. It left them with no choice, they argue, than to restore the independence and sovereignty of Southern Cameroons. However, when they issued a unilateral Declaration of Independence Restored on 1st October 2017, Biya responded with shocking violence followed by a declaration of war on 30th November 2017.

The erstwhile peaceful movements hastily formed armed wings which have been battling government forces in hit-and-run guerrilla warfare for nearly two years. No fewer than 4,000 people have been killed. Implementation of a scorched earth policy has seen over 300 villages burnt to the ground by Cameroonian forces. Nearly 2..5 million have been impacted with about 600,000 of them internally displaced in a conflict which the United Nations describes as “Africa’s biggest mass displacement conflict”.

Ali Left Starving, Dehydrated

Ali’s kidnapping or abduction style arrest outside the Swiss embassy is a frequent occurrence. Over 5,000 suspected Ambazonian supporters have been picked up in similar style in Ambazonia or in neighboring Nigeria and deported to prisons in the French-speaking part of the country. In the jails, dungeons and prisons, including private prisons where those arrested are held, torture is rampant.

Eyewitnesses say gendarmes withheld water from Ali in the hope of breaking his will. A palette of water brought to him by his lawyers was held up from reaching him by gendarmes, according to several accounts including one by the Bonn-based Cameroonian journalist Mimi Mefo. “Since you are willing to die, why do you want to drink water?” gendarmes reportedly mocked Ali when he pleaded for water at the height of exhaustion and dehydration earlier this week.

Ambazonians in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and Germany have started petitions calling for action on the part of the leaders of these countries and their parliaments. Across Europe, one effort is gathering signatures for a protest to be delivered to the European Union Parliament and Ueli Maurer, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year. Reporters at the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung, who have seen a draft, said the petition is very critical of the fact that Switzerland has not openly and aggressively called for Ali’s release.

Another petition started by a Bonn-based Ali family member is being finalized for the attention of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German Parliament. Several members of the U.S. Congress have already been bombarded by thousands of online petitions and phone calls asking Washington to call for Ali’s release.

Water on a Duck’s Back

The Swiss embassy in Yaounde has called, albeit quietly, for his release during several meetings with Cameroonian officials. The Swiss ambassador has notably raised the issue with Cameroon’s Prime Minister Dion Ngute and the Secretary General at the Presidency Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh. If Yaounde is moving on anything, it must be too sluggishly to be even visible. It took until Wednesday night for Ali’s spouse to be finally allowed to briefly visit with him. She traveled over 350 miles to bring him his first home-cooked meal at a detention facility where most political dissidents, out of fear of being poisoned, regularly skip official meals.

Growing Anger

Anger is growing over the abduction and continued detention. United Nations officials in Yaounde have protested the detention and called for his immediate release on behalf of Secretary General Antonio Guterres. “People are free to hold opinions that are different from those of their government, to mobilize other people for legitimate purposes and to protest against political decisions,” said UN Human Rights in a tweet on Thursday. “These are neither crimes nor terrorism. They are basic Human Rights,” the rights body added.

The Biya government has charged a majority of those arrested in connection with the campaign for independence with terrorism, secession and rebellion; charges which carry life in prison terms. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Yaounde has expressed frustration at not being allowed to see Ali. In the Old Town neighborhood of Bamenda (Ambazonia) where Ali serves part-time as an imam/teacher, anti-government leaflets have been disseminated. They call for nationwide protests by Muslims on a date yet to be determined

Many fear that members of the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram based in neighboring Nigeria could use the detention as a pretext to ignite a new wave of suicide attacks, notably in the northern parts of the country. Ambazonian self-defense groups are threatening to take the war across the border to into the French-speaking part unless Ali is released. It is unclear if Biya, who is traveling this week in Lyons, France, has been briefed on the arrest and ongoing detention. Many supporters of Ali were disappointed when a decree ending criminal proceedings against 333 detainees before the Yaounde Military Tribunal did not include Ali’s name.

Critics of the Swiss mediation have seized on the arrest and detention to claim that Switzerland lacks the leverage to enforce an outcome. Speculation is rife across some Ambazonian circles that the special unit that arrested Ali intended to treat him the same way Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist of the Washington Post, was assassinated at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. Yaounde spent last week giving diplomats calling for Ali’s release the run around. Biya officials put off any discussions of Ali’s release on claims that they were too busy with the Major National Dialogue held in the capital last week. That excuse may not work well anymore as Abdulkarim Ali enters a third week of arbitrary arrest and detention without charge..

Reporting by AP, Reuters, AFP, Al Jazeera and Vatican Radio