Cameroon government attacks against Southern Cameroons settlements in Bekora-Ekondo Titi, Menka Pinyin and Muyenge were all in breach of international law. Human Rights groups have opined that the Francophone army deployed to Southern Cameroons have been targeting innocent Ambazonian civilians and they do not take any precautionary measures to minimize civilian casualties.

Ever since the Southern Cameroons crisis started two years, the UN has not bothered to carry out any major investigation. Renowned international organizations such the International Crisis Group and Amnesty International have interviewed several Southern Cameroons residents who are victims of the air, artillery and mortar strikes.

Local Southern Cameroons media houses have reported that there were no separatist fighters in the Bekora and Menka Pinyin vicinity at the time of the Cameroon government attacks. Cat calls have greeted the burning of towns and villages including the massacre of Southern Cameroons civilians with the Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia stating that French Cameroun government actions were indiscriminate attacks that amounted to war crimes.

A senior Southern Cameroons political figure, Hon. Paulinus Jua recently told the so-called Musonge Bilingualism and Multiculturalism Commission that the Biya administration should admit to the scale of damage and war crimes its army soldiers have committed in Southern Cameroons and pave the way for a public independent investigation.

The Francophone dominated Cameroon government military has been implementing a scorch-the-earth policy against what it says are separatist and terrorist targets inside Southern Cameroons. The US ambassador to Cameroon, His Excellency Peter Barlerin has accused the Biya regime that has been in power for 35 years of targeting and killing Southern Cameroons civilians.

By Chi Prudence Asong

Saudi Arabia has started issuing driving licenses to women weeks ahead of kingdom official lifting a ban on women drivers.

On Monday, the kingdom’s general traffic directorate starting replacing internationally driving licenses held by women with Saudi ones throughout the country.

According to the SPA, ten women were given national licenses after handing in their international ones.

“The exchange process is taking place on various spots around the kingdom to lay the ground for women sitting behind the wheels on the roads – a turning point set to be actualized on June 24,” said the SPA.

The move comes a few days after, Amnesty International called on the “international community and allies of Saudi Arabia” to exert pressure on Riyadh to immediately and unconditionally release women’s rights defenders currently detained in the Arab kingdom.

“Saudi Arabia’s allies – in particular the US, UK and France – must push Saudi Arabian authorities to end their targeted repression of human rights activists in the country. European and world leaders must not stay silent in the face of gross and systematic violations of the human rights of activists and human rights defenders,” said the UK-based rights group in a statement.

Over the past few weeks, a number of prominent women’s rights activists, including Loujain al-Hathloul, Iman al-Nafjan and Aziza al-Youssef, were arrested and still remained in detention centers without charge and incommunicado with no access to their families or lawyers.

Most of the detainees are prominent figures, who enjoy considerable respect among the Saudi grassroots, including university professors and a psychotherapist.

Saudi authorities have so far labeled the detainees “traitors”, infuriating the country’s rights activists who fear additional arrests amid much-hyped reports of reforms led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

This is while reforms have been accompanied by heavy-handed crackdown on dissent against Saudi critics, ranging from clerics to some of the very female activists who campaigned for years to end the ban.

During the past few weeks, Saudi authorities have arrested seven women and four men who were outspoken women’s rights defenders in the peninsular country, many of whom had campaigned against the long-standing ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia.

The ban is scheduled to be removed this month, with licenses being issued from 24 June, making Saudi Arabia the last country in the world to permit women to obtain driving licenses.

In September last year, Riyadh removed the driving ban on women as part of reforms to undo the damage the kingdom has suffered for decades of human rights violations both inside and outside of Saudi Arabia.

The move came shortly after women were also permitted access into a sports stadium, for the first time, to watch a concert. Saudi women had also been banned from voting until 2015, when they were allowed to vote in local elections.

Source: Presstv

The United States plans to sharply reduce the number of American Special Operations forces in Africa as part of a new Pentagon strategy that focuses on countering “rising threats” from Russia and China, according to a report.

Defense Secretary James Mattis has ordered a review of America’s elite commando missions in recent weeks which could see counterterrorism forces in Africa slashed by as much as half over the next three years, The New York Times reported on Monday.

The review was issued amid an ongoing assessment of Special Operations forces worldwide after four American service members were killed during an ambush in Niger last year.

US troops killed in Niger ambush

The US has currently more than 7,300 Special Operations troops deployed to 92 countries, with many conducting shadow wars against militants in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere.

Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are worried that the commandos are spread too thin, Pentagon officials said.

The two military leaders have ordered Special Operations and Africa commands to present a range of options by mid-June to meet other challenges, which, in addition to Russia and China, also include North Korea and Iran.

Last month, a Pentagon investigation of the botched US operation in Niger found mistakes on all military levels in the secret mission, which was launched on October 4, 2017 to kill or capture a terrorist leader associated with Daesh.

A group of 30 Nigerien forces accompanied 11 Green Berets, who were traveling in an unarmored SUV. But the mission failed spectacularly when the US and Nigerien forces came under heavy fire from militants in an ambush near the village of Tongo.

The deadly attack accelerated Mattis’s decision to cut some counterterrorism missions in Africa to focus on global powers, two Pentagon officials told the Times on condition of anonymity.

The potential changes are part of a transition period to focus on what Mattis has described as “growing threats” from Russia and China, as outlined in the Pentagon’s new national defense strategy.

“We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models,” Mattis said in a speech at Johns Hopkins University in January as he outlined the new strategy.

“Our military is still strong, yet our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare — air, land, sea, space and cyberspace — and is continually eroding,” he added.

Even before Mattis’s directive, the Special Operations Command had started relying on conventional troops to help handle some of the new challenges since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In places such as Afghanistan and Syria, where Special Operations forces are frequently in combat, conventional soldiers and Marines have also been attached to commando units as additional security or firepower.

At the same time, more Special Operations teams have been deployed to the Baltic nations — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — as well as Eastern Europe to help local commandos identify and confront possible aggression from Russia.

Culled from Presstv

Joseph Orock is a Southern Cameroonian who hails from the Manyu County. He stands regularly on the Nigerian side of the Mfum River- a poorly developed border crossing in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He wears a Manchester United tee-shirt and smiles friendly enough, but he carries an AK-47 by his side.

Orock was raised up in Yaoundé in Obili and spent most of his early life as a student in Essos, where he acquired a mastery of the French language.  In 2000, he moved back home to Eyumojock and has since then been unemployed. This is not the future he had in mind when his parents moved over to French Cameroun as civil servants. He holds a first class degree in Linguistics from the University of Yaoundé but has never had a job.

Orock fervently believes the Francophone government keeps all job opportunities only for French speaking Cameroonians whose political elites are in control of the country. It is the community to which President Paul Biya who has ruled the country for 35 years belongs, as do the majority of senior figures within his administration.

Like many Southern Cameroonians, Joseph Orock thinks the Biya Francophone government is solely dedicated to keeping Francophones in power to continue to marginalize Southern Cameroonians. Biya is backed by the French government, his Beti Ewondo political elites, influential Fulani mafia in the Far North region headed by Vice Prime Minister Amadou Ali and supported by the Joint Chief of Staff, General Rene Meka.

Joseph Orock is an Ejagham, a massive ethnic group that run across into Nigeria with strong ties with the people of Calabar.  After French Cameroun army soldiers stormed and burnt down Kembong village, Orock joined the Manyu Warriors popularly known as the “Odeshi Boys” a movement associated with one of Southern Cameroons largest ethnic group and he is now one of the leading figures in the Odeshi.

We asked him how he thinks the Southern Cameroons resistance will bring about the political solution to the Anglophone problem; he laughed and observed that fighting was the only way to bring about freedom and equal opportunities in Southern Cameroons.

Joseph Orock’s comrade-in-arms, Enow Bessong, was a policeman in Yaoundé, in the Central Region in French Cameroun where he says he saw ethnic chauvinism first-hand. Enow Bessong claims Francophone police bosses fixed the books, adding dozens of ghost names to the payroll, and then shared out the proceeds just among them.

For two years since the Ambazonian revolution started, local anger has long been stoked by the encroachment of heavily armed Francophone army soldiers in Southern Cameroons killing innocent women and children, burning down towns and villages and above all, the disappearance of young men in the Biya government’s heavy-handed counter separatists operations.

Ambazonia Self-Defense Council Restoration Forces spreads

As armed groups bubbled up in Southern Cameroons, the Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia has successfully grouped them under the banner of the Ambazonia Self-Defense Council Restoration Forces.

Manyu Division was previously thought of as one of the safest ruling CPDM constituency in Southern Cameroons.  But Human Rights groups are now reporting numerous cases of abuse by the Cameroon government army soldiers against civilians as they hunted for the Odeshi boys and their supporters.

Among the most brutal of the French Cameroun government’s forces are the Rapid Intervention Battalion, BIR, created by the Biya regime some few years ago. They were instrumental in the purging of opposition elements in the Republic of Gabon and the fight against the Nigerian Islamic sect, Boko Haram.

Cameroon government violence in Ambazonia has increasingly united all Southern Cameroons in a sense of victimhood. It has also generated calls for revenge deep within the Interim Government. Recently, BIR soldiers attacked a bus on the Mbouda highway, separated the 30 Southern Cameroonians from the other passengers, and killed them.

The history of mass atrocities suggests that state terrorism is normally a political tool often used by French Cameroun political elites for – often petty – political purposes.  The UN says the brutality under way in Southern Cameroons/Ambazonia has forced 40,000 Southern Cameroonians to flee to Nigeria and thousands of them – if not more – have crossed Joseph Orock’s Mfum Bridge. The UN also reported that 160,000 Ambazonians have been internally displaced.

Cameroon Concord News correspondent Rita Akana walked for days with her family from Mundemba to Ekondo Titit to reach safety and then Cameroon government troops stormed Bekora. She was quoted by Cameroon Intelligence Report as saying “If the French Cameroun soldiers get you, they will slaughter you like a chicken,”  “They want to kill anyone because they have been told to so by their superiors in Yaoundé and they think you are hiding an Ambazonian Self-Defense force.”

Many Southern Cameroonians with tuberculosis and HIV have not been able to access medicine for months now, since the Biya war shut hospitals and supply lines down. At least 85 percent of Southern Cameroonians in refugee camps in Nigeria are women and children. The men have decided to stay and fight to protect the homeland.

It is genocide

The UN has still not use the term “genocide” but hopefully they will do. Recently, the United States ambassador to Cameroon, Peter Barlerin accused the Biya Francophone regime of “targeted killings” in Southern Cameroons. The Washington Post said Africa’s next civil war could be Cameroon. There is already a steady process of exterminating the English speaking population of Cameroon in several areas of Southern Cameroons using starvation, gang rape and the burning of villages.

No one knows how many Southern Cameroonians have been killed in the war. Cameroon Concord News Group puts the estimate at 3000, but there are reports that it may be more. By some strange happenstance, the French Cameroun government headed by the 85 year old dictator is the only actor in Southern Cameroons with the capacity to collect and verify death tolls and they chose not to.

Senior advisers to the regime in Yaoundé are now saying that they see no end in sight to this conflict in Southern Cameroons.  What is actually going to happen will be unacceptable.  This fighting will continue to the next generation of Southern Cameroons children.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

French Cameroun soldiers invaded Bekora village in the Ekondo Titi sub constituency in Southern Cameroons on Saturday the 2^nd of June 2018 and began burning houses on lame and ridiculous reason that they were hunting down Ambazonian separatists. The heavily armed Francophone soldiers burnt down several houses and destroyed properties worth millions of FCFA during the raid that had residents running for their lives. A young Southern Cameroonian was killed in the fire that engulfed one of the buildings and another by bullets fired at closed range.

The Biya Francophone regime in Yaoundé has not commented on the Bekora killings. The entire Bekora has been completely burnt down. Our chief correspondent in the Ndian County reported that most of the homes burnt by the French Cameroun soldiers belonged to innocent Southern Cameroonians who do not even understand the on-going war and political situation in the country.

Cameroon Concord News was reliably informed that many of the Bekora indigenes slain during the attack have been buried in a shallow grave by some members of the Rapid Intervention Battalion, BIR.

We gathered that the Southern Cameroonian that was burnt alive was seen receiving a phone call but left in search of network when the Francophone army soldiers stormed the locality. Elsewhere, unknown gunmen reportedly set fire on the residence of Minister Victor Mengot at Mbinjong village in the Manyu County. No group has so far claimed responsibility for the act.

By Rita Akana in Mundemba

Russia plans to dispatch its new cruise missile-launching warship to the Mediterranean to join the country’s naval task force in the region.

Russia’s Chief of Staff of the Black Sea Fleet Rear Admiral Viktor Liin told reporters on Friday that the Vyshny Volochok warship, which has already been added to the country’s Black Sea Fleet, will join the Russian Mediterranean Squadron.

The commander noted that the warship will take part in navigational assignments and combat training, adding, “All of this will be part of preparations for further missions in the Black Sea and in the Mediterranean.”

The Vyshniy Volochok is Russia’s newest warship equipped with Kalibr-NK cruise missiles designed for strikes at sea-based and land-based targets, Russia’s TASS news agency reported.

The multifunctional warship is capable of carrying high-precision missiles and is equipped with state-of-the-art artillery as well as anti-aircraft and radio equipment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in May that the country plans to deploy a permanent naval standing force, including submarines and warships with Kalibr long-range cruise missiles, in the Mediterranean Sea.

Russia’s naval presence in the Mediterranean comprises a combination of ships from its Black Sea Fleet and Northern Fleet in the Arctic Ocean. The task force is mainly aimed at countering possible aggressive activities of NATO in the region, bolstering Russia’s defensive measures for its Black Sea borders and launching strikes against terrorist targets in Syria.

In December 2017, Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, approved a deal to extend the lease of a Mediterranean base used by the Russian Navy in the Syrian port of Tartus for 49 years and modernize the facility.

Source: Presstv

US President Donald Trump says he regrets naming Jeff Sessions as attorney general, as pressure on the White House grows from a special counsel’s probe into possible campaign collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice.

After The New York Times reported that Trump pressured Sessions to reverse his recusal from overseeing the Russia probe in March 2017, the US president confirmed his unhappiness over that decision in a tweet.

He quoted a Republican lawmaker as criticizing Sessions for not telling the president before becoming attorney general that he would have to recuse himself from the investigation.

“There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!” the lawmaker, Trey Gowdy, said.

“I wish I did!” Trump said in his tweet.

Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Sessions, who he hand-picked last year as the country’s top law enforcement official, as the probe into Russian election meddling, and possible obstruction, bores in on the White House.

On Sunday, Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said the investigation could ultimately result in an impeachment effort in Congress over alleged obstruction by the president.

“Eventually the decision here is going to be impeach, not impeach,” Giuliani told CNN in an interview.

The president has made clear he believes Sessions, a former senator who was active in the Trump campaign, should be helping him fight the probe, rather than standing to the side.

The Times reported Wednesday that Trump’s push for Sessions to reverse his recusal has become a focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

The episode could put Sessions, whom Mueller’s investigators interviewed in January, in the position of being a witness against the president in the obstruction side of Mueller’s investigation, according to the Times.

Trump has gone on the offensive, seeking to paint the Mueller investigation, the Justice Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as biased against him, and is now calling the Mueller probe “illegitimate” and “rigged.”

Last weekend, he tweeted 14 times about the investigation, alleging that Democrats were behind what he called the “plant” of a law enforcement informant in his campaign.

Giuliani said Trump and his team have to take the fight to the public with an eye to a possible impeachment fight.

“”Members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, are going to be informed a lot by their constituents. So, our jury is the American — as it should be — is the American people,” he said on CNN.

(Source: AFP)

THE parade featured singing schoolchildren and goose-stepping soldiers. A giant presidential portrait was wheeled along the boulevard. To some observers it must have looked like a comic sketch about an event staged by an African dictator. But no one dared snigger. The celebration of Cameroon’s national day on May 20th was lorded over by President Paul Biya, who at 85 is Africa’s oldest head of state.

He hoped the parade would show national unity. But it hinted at a deep fissure dividing Cameroon. In the country’s two English-speaking regions a simmering uprising has been met by brutal repression. As members of the main opposition party, the Social Democratic Front, marched past the president they showed their indignation. Placards were banned, so the marchers pulled up their shirts to expose pictures taped to their bodies of people tortured, mutilated or murdered by the government.

The conflict started in October 2016, when English-speaking lawyers took to the streets complaining that legal documents were not being translated from French and that English-speakers were discriminated against. The country has been officially bilingual since its two constituent parts voted to form a federal republic after gaining independence in 1960 and 1961. But English-speakers, who make up less than a fifth of the population, say their regions get less than their fair share of public money and that the government forces them to use French in schools, courts and other public institutions.

Mr Biya’s government responded by arresting activists and cutting off the internet in English-speaking regions. In doing so it fanned secessionism, transforming peaceful protests into a vicious war, with kidnappings and beheadings. Atrocities have been committed by both sides. More than 100 civilians have reportedly been killed, as have more than 40 members of the security forces.

Peter Henry Barlerin, America’s ambassador to Cameroon, says April proved the bloodiest month. He accuses the government of authorising “targeted killings” and the “burning and looting of villages”. Thousands of people have fled, many of them across the border into Nigeria.

The strife is also affecting the fight against Boko Haram, a jihadist insurgency that has spilled over from Nigeria into neighbouring countries. The dense swamps that surround Lake Chad in northern Cameroon give the jihadists cover. Elite Cameroonian soldiers, who are among the most effective fighters in the region, have been removed from Lake Chad and redeployed to English-speaking regions in the south.

There are few signs that Mr Biya is trying to find a peaceful solution. For much of the year the ageing president reportedly rules Cameroon from a luxury hotel in Switzerland, a country he likes to visit with his wife Chantal (known for her designer dresses and signature hairstyle).

In March Mr Biya called his first cabinet meeting since October 2015 and gave a speech that sounded as if he had already hit the campaign trail for the presidential election scheduled for later this year. Mr Biya has not yet said whether he will stand, but if he does run it would be for his seventh term in office.

In any case, the government is wasting no time clearing his path. Ahead of senatorial elections in March it arrested several journalists and opposition activists. On May 25th seven activists were convicted on charges of rebellion and acts of terrorism. They were given jail sentences of 10-15 years. Cameroon’s war over words seems likely only to intensify.

Source: The Economist

A 73-year-old Amnesty International volunteer appeared in court in France on Wednesday charged with helping two underage Africans illegally enter the country, the latest case involving activists assisting migrants on the move through Europe.

The trial of pensioner Martine Landry is the first of its kind in France involving a member of Amnesty.

It comes a day before three activists — two Swiss and one Italian — appear in court for helping a group of migrants cross from Italy to France through a pass in the Alps in April.

Landry is the coordinator of Amnesty’s refugee response in southeast France. She risks up to five years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros ($34,700) if convicted of illegally assisting two Guinean youths in July 2017.

She is accused of helping the pair, both aged 15 according to Amnesty, cross back into France after they were arrested and returned to Italy during a raid on the home of olive farmer and activist Cedric Herrou, where they had been sheltering.

Landry claims that she did not help the teens re-enter France after they were turned back at the border by Italian police.

The white-haired campaigner said she stepped in only after they crossed onto French soil and took them to the police to register for asylum.

‘Solidarity is not a crime’

Her case, like that of the Alps campaigners, has become a cause celebre among critics of President Emmanuel Macron’s tough stance on migration.

Several dozen activists gathered outside the courthouse in the city of Nice holding banners reading “Solidarity is not a crime”.

In April, MPs voted to soften laws criminalising acts of solidarity with illegal migrants, to exempt those who provide them with free food, shelter or medical care.

Helping migrants illegally cross the border remains a crime, however.

Amnesty condemned the case against Landry.

“Dragging a compassionate pensioner before the court on these surreal charges makes a mockery of justice. Acts of solidarity should be promoted, not punished,” its senior campaigner on migration, Maria Serrano, said in a statement.

The three activists on trial Thursday in the Alpine town of Gap are accused of helping a group of migrants reach France after dozens of anti-immigrant campaigners blocked another pass on the trans-alpine migrant trail.

They face up to 10 years in prison and fines of 750,000 euros each as well being banned from France if convicted.

NGOs have contrasted the treatment of the campaigners with that of “Spiderman” Mamoudou Gassama, the illegal Malian migrant who was fast-tracked for French citizenship this week after rescuing a young boy hanging from a balcony in Paris.

“A few symbolic gestures mask a policy of repression and expulsion,” said migrant support campaigner Michel Rousseau.

(AFP)