Interpol’s president Meng Hongwei has been reported missing after travelling to his native China last week, French police said on Friday.

Meng’s wife contacted police in Lyon, the French city where the international police cooperation agency has its headquarters, after not hearing from him since his departure on September 29, police sources said.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post quoted an unnamed source as saying Meng, 64, was under investigation in China and had been taken away for questioning as soon as he landed there. Interpol said it was aware of reports in connection with Meng’s “alleged disappearance”.

“This is a matter for the relevant authorities in both France and China,” the agency said in a statement. French police sources told Reuters their investigation was into what is termed in France a “worrying disappearance”.

Interpol’s main function is to provide a mechanism for police forces in different countries to notify each other of wanted suspects.

Meng has almost 40 years’ experience in criminal justice and policing, and has overseen matters related to legal institutions, narcotics control and counter-terrorism, according to Interpol’s website.

Meng is listed on the website of China’s Ministry of Public Security as a vice-minister, but lost his seat on its key Communist Party Committee in April, the South China Morning Post said.

He was named president of Interpol in 2016. Rights groups expressed concern at the time that Beijing might try to use Meng’s position at the body to go after dissidents abroad.

Beijing has in the past pressed other countries to arrest and deport back to China citizens it accuses of crimes including corruption and terrorism. Reuters was not immediately able to reach China’s Ministry of Public Security for comment.

Diplomats say the role of Interpol president is largely ceremonial, with day-to-day work carried out by its secretary general Juergen Stock and his staff.

In July last year, Meng gave a speech on the importance of cracking down on cyber crime which observers said might reflect China’s views on the issue. Police sources said Meng’s wife and children remained in Lyon.

(REUTERS)

As the clock ticks down to Sunday’s presidential elections in Cameroon, President Paul Biya remains tightlipped about a grisly video gone viral of two mothers and their young children executed in cold blood by government soldiers.

The grainy video shows two women—one with a baby on her back and another holding hands with a young child—walking across a dirt patch. Armed men walk behind them, and one yells in French “You are B.H. [Boko Haram], you are going to die.” The women are forced to kneel. Shots ring out and the women fall to the ground, one with her child still strapped to her back.

The video, posted July 10, 2018, was examined by Amnesty International using open source investigation methodologies and found credible.

Brian Castner, military and weapons adviser for Amnesty International and a former explosive ordnance disposal officer, commented on Twitter, “My Amnesty colleagues and I have analyzed it, and here’s all the reasons—weapons, uniforms, language, geography—we think it’s legit.”

A government spokesman dismissed the video, calling it an unfortunate attempt to distort actual facts. “Its sincerity can be easily questioned,” said Issa Tchiroma Bakary. “It’s fake news.”

The government of the largely French-speaking country insists the Oct. 7 vote will be peaceful, even in the troubled English-speaking southwest and northwest, where nearly 400 people have died and 200,000 have fled into exile, according to the International Crisis Group think tank.

President Biya, known as “the Sphinx,” is one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders since taking power in 1982. He downplayed the conflicts as mere “trouble.”

The central African nation of 25 million people has never held elections amid insecurity so serious that the military is currently deployed to three of 10 regions.

What began as a limited movement calling for greater economic opportunities and recognition of the English language has snowballed into a deadly fight with government soldiers from the French-speaking majority pitted against armed separatists seeking an independent state they call “Ambazonia” in Cameroon’s English-speaking northwest and southwest regions.

A spokeswoman for the Pentagon said the U.S. is working with the State Department to “ensure the government of Cameroon holds accountable any individuals found to be responsible.” A number of soldiers have been arrested, according to the BBC.

Biya is favored to win another seven-year term, as opposition parties did not succeed in backing a single candidate.

Source: Amsterdam News

The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist treating victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi human rights activist and survivor of sexual slavery by Islamic State in Iraq.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement that the award recognizes “their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”

“Mukwege is the foremost, most unifying symbol, both nationally and internationally, of the struggle to end sexual violence in war and armed conflicts,” the statement said. “His basic principle is that justice is everyone’s business.”

Murad, herself a victim of war crimes, “refused to accept the social codes that require women to remain silent and ashamed of the abuses to which they have been subjected,” the statement said. “She has shown uncommon courage in recounting her own sufferings and speaking up on behalf of other victims.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee received nominations for 216 individuals and 115 organizations. Only a few dozen of them are known, the committee keeps the list of nominations secret for 50 years, although some candidates are revealed by their nominators.

Among those put forward this year are the Syrian civilian aid group White Helmets, Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper, Edward Snowden and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Last year’s winner was the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, Physics and Chemistry were awarded earlier in the week.

The literature prize was not given this year because of a sexual misconduct scandal at the body that decides the award.

The Nobel Memorial Prize for economic sciences will be awarded Oct. 8.

​The prize will be presented in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will. It comes with an award of $1.1 million.

Culled from the VOA

It was the nine corpses left by the roadside after a gunfight that made Honrne Waba flee her village in Northwest Cameroon in May and hide in the bush. When weeks later she learned that her house had been burned down with all her belongings inside, she decided to leave the region altogether.

“I felt so scared, I had a broken heart and I said I had to leave,” Waba, 40, told Reuters in the narrow courtyard of her daughter’s house in the capital Yaounde, where she has been staying for a month since leaving her home village of Njinikom.

Waba is one of tens of thousands of Cameroonians displaced by a separatist insurgency in the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions who find themselves without a home and with nowhere to vote in Sunday’s presidential election.

Even those still in Anglophone areas will struggle to reach a ballot box: armed separatist groups have vowed to stop the election from happening there, potentially silencing up to five million English-speaking voters in the majority French-speaking country of about 24 million.

The chaos in Anglophone opposition strongholds may help Cameroon’s 85-year-old President Paul Biya, who is expected to easily win a seventh term to extend his 36 years in office, aided in part by a weak opposition and a resigned population, many of whom view elections as a means to rubber-stamp seven more years of Biya.

Victory would leave Biya as one of Africa’s last strongmen, vestige of a post-colonial era that a wave of democracy has slowly eroded. During his tenure, neighboring Nigeria has had nine different presidents; the only current African president to have ruled longer is Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

The level of neglect across Cameroon has caused a “groundswell of discontent” directed at the president, said opposition candidate Akere Muna. However, if Anglophones cannot vote “the irony is that the secessionists may be helping Biya”.

In the Simbock neighborhood of Yaounde, where small concrete houses creep haphazardly up one of the city’s many lush, steep hillsides, displaced Anglophones say they have more pressing concerns than who will win the election.

Waba brought her voting card with her from the Northwest, but four days before the election she was not registered to vote in Yaounde and was unsure if it was even possible.

She is more worried about how to make ends meet now that she cannot sow corn, beans and other vegetables at her farm at home.

“We are not managing very well in Yaounde. Food is very expensive. I sleep on the floor now,” said Waba as she prepared a cloudy cow-skin broth over a charcoal stove. “I used to do my farming, I used to send my children to school.”

NOT ENOUGH ROOM

It is unclear how this kind of hardship will play out at the ballot box.

Biya rules the cocoa- and oil-producing country essentially by decree. His popularity has been largely unaffected by the long stretches he spends abroad in Swiss hotels with his fashion-conscious wife, Chantal, whose flamboyantly coiffed strawberry bouffant has made her instantly recognizable.

He is still considered by many as the “force of experience” touted by election campaign posters across the capital. Still, the Anglophone crisis is his gravest threat yet. What began as a peaceful movement in 2016 calling for broader recognition of Anglophone teachers and lawyers has opened a deep wound in Cameroon.

For ten years after the French- and English-speaking regions joined together in 1961, the country was a federation in which the Anglophone regions had their own police, government and judicial system.

Since then, Anglophone autonomy has declined and English speakers have felt marginalized. Today, the governors of the Southwest and Northwest are Francophone, as are prefects of most English-speaking districts.

A government crackdown on protests against the marginalization of Anglophones since 2016 has killed dozens, bolstering support for radical elements calling for secession.

Soldiers went into remote Anglophone villages, burning houses and killing residents, witnesses told Reuters. In retaliation, hundreds have taken up arms to form small militias, killing hundreds of soldiers and gendarmes.

The military denies using excessive force and accuses the separatists of terrorism.

“It is the separatists in this crisis who have gained most prominence and not enough room has been left for moderates,” said Simon Munzu, a former United Nations official who has called for dialogue between the two sides.

YOU HEAR GUNSHOTS

Displaced Anglophones in Yaounde all agree on one thing about the life they have fled: they were sick of the shooting.

“You can be walking along, you hear gunshots and you see people running. You get inside, you dive on the floor,” said 55-year-old Kum Rose, who in August left Bomaka in the Southwest, taking the bus with four children and 7 grandchildren.

She managed to bring some pots, charcoal and palm oil for cooking but the tiny room where she sleeps with her whole family in a rundown house in Yaounde is no substitute for home. Rose proudly showed her voting card, kept dry in a red holder, but admitted she had no idea where to register in Yaounde.

Musician Rawlings Fofeyen, 23, left the Northwest city of Bamenda two weeks ago. He said the Cameroonian military routinely picked up young men on the streets, suspecting them of being separatist fighters.

His money dried up when friends stopped coming to his studio to record music. He felt he could no longer stay when he saw a dead body in his neighborhood last month.

“I have some friends who have gone and who I never saw again,” he said. Bamenda has gone quiet, he said. Public spaces and markets are empty. “We used to be a happy people, very welcoming,” he said, holding back tears. “Now we don’t trust anybody.”

Source: Reuters