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