23, August 2020
West African envoys meet ousted Malian president, military junta 0
Delegates from the West African grouping, ECOWAS, met Mali’s ousted president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta and members of the country’s military junta on Saturday in a bid to push for a speedy return to civilian rule following a coup in the troubled nation.
Hours after the ECOWAS delegation, headed by former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan, arrived in the Malian capital, Bamako, three members of the group were granted access to Keïta.
“We have seen President Keïta,” Jonathan told AFP late Saturday, adding that “the negotiations are going well”.
Rebel soldiers seized Keïta, Malian Prime Minister Boubou Cissé and other senior leaders after a mutiny on Tuesday, dealing another deep blow to a country already struggling with a brutal Islamist insurgency and widespread public discontent over its government.
The meeting between the ousted Malian leader and the three ECOWAS delegation members was held at an undisclosed location. No details of the meeting were released.
Earlier Saturday, ECOWAS envoys met with Mali’s military junta, including new strongman Colonel Assimi Goita. The meeting lasted half-an-hour, according to Malian sources.
Mali’s neighbours have called for Keïta to be reinstated, saying the purpose of the delegation’s visit was to help “ensure the immediate return of constitutional order”.
US suspends military aid to Mali
The ECOWAS delegation landed in Bamako just hours after four Malian soldiers were killed in a bomb blast near the Burkina Faso border,underscoring the insecurity in the troubled nation.
Adding to the international pressure to return Mali to civilian rule, the US on Friday suspended military aid to the country, scrapping training as well as support of the Mali armed forces.
“Let me say categorically there is no further training or support of Malian armed forces full-stop. We have halted everything until such time as we can clarify the situation,” the US Sahel envoy J. Peter Pham told journalists.
The US regularly provides training to soldiers in Mali, including several of the officers who led the coup. It also offers intelligence support to France’s Barkhane forces, who are fighting jihadist groups in the Sahel region.
Crowds celebrate president’s ouster, junta thanks them
Despite widespread regional and international condemnations, Keïta’s ouster was celebrated on the streets of the capital, Bamako on Friday with jubilant crowds gathering in the central Independence Square.
The demonstrators were mainly supporters of Mali’s opposition coalition, M5-RFP, who had demonstrated since June for Keïta to step down from power.
Although the coalition was not behind Tuesday’s coup d’état, they issued a statement expressing support for the downfall of the government and endorsing the junta’s plan to return the country to civilian rule.
“The M5-RFP welcomes the resignation of President Ibrahima Boubacar Keïta, the dissolution of the National Assembly and the government,” said the statement.
The junta in turn welcomed the coalition’s support at Friday’s rally in Bamako.
“We have come here to thank you, to thank the Malian public for its support. We merely completed the work that you began and we recognise ourselves in your fight,” the junta’s spokesman, Ismaël Wagué, told supporters of the M5 movement,
UN team meets Keita
Earlier Friday, UN human rights officials said they were given access overnight to Keïta and other detainees. The UN peacekeeping mission, known as MINUSMA, provided no details on what was said or on the condition of the captives.
Junta leaders have promised to oversee a transition to elections within a “reasonable” amount of time. They plan to install a transitional president who may be “either a civilian or a soldier”, the junta’s spokesman told FRANCE 24 in an interview on Thursday.
The junta’s spokesman Wagué told FRANCE 24 that the soldiers who seized power on Tuesday are “in contact with civil society, opposition parties, the majority, everyone, to try to put a transition in place”.
A council headed by a transitional president will be “either a civilian or a soldier”, Wagué said, vowing that the transition would be “as short as possible”.
West African mediation
The military overthrow has dismayed international and regional powers, who fear it could further destabilise the former French colony and West Africa’s entire Sahel region.
The coup is Mali’s second in eight years.
A putsch in 2012 helped hasten a takeover of northern Mali by al Qaeda-linked militants, and al Qaeda and Islamic State group affiliates are active in the north and centre of the country.
France, the EU, the US, the African Union and the UN Security Council have all condemned the latest military takeover and demanded the release of detained leaders.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and REUTERS)



















24, August 2020
Biya must pay the price for attacks against Southern Cameroonians: Vice President Yerima 0
The Southern Cameroons Interim Government has warmed that French Cameroun dictator will pay the price for declaring a war against the people of Ambazonia.
In a televised address to Southern Cameroonians last week, Vice President Dabney Yerima said that the French Cameroun regime and its corrupt leadership must bear the consequences and pay the price for the continued killings going on in the Federal Republic of Ambazonia.
“Over the last three weeks, the barbarisms of the French Cameroun Army and the regime in Yaoundé have been laid bare and the world is witnessing again the unpleasant side of the Yaoundé neo-colonial regime. The past few weeks are a clear sign of its utter desperation in the full realization that our people have decisively rejected annexation and colonial bondage for good. I come to you today on the 34th anniversary of the Lake Nyos disaster to speak of the tragic loss and devastation the Southern Cameroons (Ambazonia) has faced over the last three weeks” Yerima observed.
British Southern Cameroons, home to some eight million people, has been under a Biya French Cameroun imposed war for over four years now which has caused a catastrophic decline in the living standards as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty there.
Vice President Yerima revealed that “On 7 August 2020, a staff of COMINSUD, an implementing partner for several United Nations agencies, was kidnapped from his home and later killed by unidentified armed individuals. On 11 August 2020, an unacceptable and despicable video circulated on social media of the slaughter of a woman in Muyuka. Upon close scrutiny, Ambazonia Intelligence Services identified that the perpetrators spoke with French Cameroun accents.”
“On Wednesday, 12 August 2020, three Southern Cameroonian minors were murdered in their gardens as they hunted for snails by French Cameroun prowling forces. A lawyer commissioned to ascertain the facts surrounding their murder was unlawfully arrested, harassed, detained for two nights. French Cameroun lawless forces continued their genocidal campaign by invading the village of Mautu, in Fako County on 13 August 2020, slaughtered over 30 civilians and recorded themselves dragging the lifeless body of a young man along the streets” the exiled Ambazonia leader furthered.
The Cameroon government army has also launched major operations against Southern Cameroonians residing in the rural areas, killing thousands of Ambazonians each time and shattering the impoverished territory’s already poor infrastructure.
Yerima noted that “Paul Biya and his minions have committed every crime under the sun. Over the last three weeks, we have been reminded of Paul Biya’s atrocities by the hideous execution of a woman in Muyuka, the murder of three children in Tiko, the abduction and brutal execution of four men in Bafut, the massacre in Mautu, the burning of villages in Ikata, the murders in Ndop and the dragging of the body of a slayed young man on the road. These genocidal crimes were committed by Biya’s tribal army and their proxies.”
Ever since the UN Security Council called for an international ceasefire to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, the French Cameroun war machine has been pounding different Southern Cameroons counties through artillery fire and claiming that the military operations were mainly targeting the so-called separatists.
By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai