Exiled Southern Cameroons leader, Dabney Yerima pledged on Wednesday to push for a new resistance strategy with the Ambazonia Self-Defense Force on secession after the fallout from the failed so-called Major National Dialogue which recently opted to grant a kind of “Special Status” to the people of Ambazonia.

The Ambazonia Vice President told our chief correspondent in London, Asu Isong that the sentencing of President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his top aides will not go unanswered. “The life sentence given to our leaders abducted in Nigeria for standing for self-determination is a wakeup call to every Southern Cameroonian that we must change the tactics by investing in the struggle.”

Comrade Dabney Yerima was referring to the Amba Bonds Project launched this week by the treasury department of the Ambazonia Interim Government which involves Southern Cameroonians investing their money in the resistance.

Announced late on Sunday, the Amba Bonds is a more flexible and transparent scheme by the Interim Government which has pushed increasingly skeptic Southern Cameroonians to once again engage in the Ambazonian revolution.

Dabney Yerima said “the fact that the idea of a special status for Southern Cameroonians came from former finance minister Akame Mfoumou who is a cousin to French Cameroun head of state Paul Biya was indeed an insult to the Ambazonian nation.  I will advocate for Southern Cameroonians to exercise the right to self-determination throughout my term as Vice President.”

“Southern Cameroonians in the diaspora are very much aware of the difficulties our people in Ground Zero are facing through repression and fear. But I want to assure Ambazonians that we of the Interim Government are pushing forward to get supplies to Ground Zero!  I am therefore calling on all our self-defense forces not to allow themselves to be intimidated by threats and deceits,” noted the Ambazonia Vice President.

Dabney Yerima reiterated his condemnation of the violence that he blamed on Minister Paul Atanga Nji militias and misguided Amba Boys whom he said should be isolated and kept away from the ongoing well organized Southern Cameroons struggle.

By Chi Prudence Asong and Asu Isong

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