Last October, Paul Biya (86), the second longest serving president of Africa, won the elections in Cameroon with more than 70% of the votes. The octogenarian, who has been in power for 36 years, will continue in office at least seven more, despite the complaints of the opponent Maurice Kamto, who appealed the elections and unsuccessfully claimed their nullity.

THE CONFLICT IN AMBAZONIA

One of the most difficult scenarios for the president is the conflict with the self-proclaimed Republic of Ambazonia, in the West and English-speaking region, with three million people. Up to now, the president’s policy has been based, above all, on military actions in favor of the defense of a unitary and centralized state in Yaoundé, against the groups in favor of independence that denounce what they consider to be privileges of the French-speaking part. The conflict, which has its origins in the colonial division of the continent and the incorporation in 1961 of the former South Cameroon, occupied by the British, to Cameroon, of French exploitation, has caused the death of hundreds of people, including an American missionary killed in October, and the displacement of tens of thousands since 2016.

“WE NEED PEACE AND THE UN INTERVENTION”

Christians are not exempt from constant confrontations either. In fact, they have been the object of one of the last actions by the independence militias, which in early November kidnapped 80 students from the Presbyterian school in Bamenda. Although the students have been released, “we need peace and the UN intervention”, says a Methodist Christian in Cameroon, who has agreed to speak with Spanish news website Protestant Digital, preferring to keep his identity anonymous. “Many people die every day, homes and villages are burned, there are famished people and also those who take refuge in Nigeria. We do not have a voice in our country”, he adds.

PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS

Up to 50 primary and secondary schools and Christian hospitals have been affected by the conflict, according to the secretary of communication and information of the Council of Protestant Churches of Cameroon, Gustav Ebai, who has lost four relatives in the clashes. The military has also kidnapped four churches to turn them into barracks. “The government of Ambazonia, which controls most of the Northwest and South west, has placed a group of soldiers in the school until the crisis is resolved”. “There are often shootings between different forces, and a stray bullet can kill a minor”, explains the Methodist believer. Because of this tension, the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC), published a statement last October, in the community bank holiday. “Given what the English-speaking community is going through at this time, we cannot have a celebration while many of God’s children are being killed, suffering or living as internal or external refugees”, says the text signed by the Reverend Fonki Samuel Forba, of the PCC. “The emphasis should be placed on supplying the Working Fund for the Mission, to allow the church to continue assisting our pastors and brothers displaced by the armed conflict that has brought pain and suffering to many”, the document adds.

CAMEROON RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY

53% of the population in Cameroon is considered Christian, according to the Joshua project. Of these, about 39% are Catholics, 22% Protestants and just over 33% belong to other denominations. The sources consulted explain that “Cameroon is a country of religious tolerance. There is freedom of worship. Most of the Christians in the country are Catholics, Presbyterian, Baptists and Evangelicals, but there are also Pentecostal groups that are growing”. In addition, “the main challenge is to meet, and this has made it difficult for the church to have a strong voice in the country”. According to Central African missionary of Assemblies of God in Cameroon, Adongo Augustin Atilas, “believers are not united and live much more the syncretism and its ritual practices, especially when there is a birth or during the mourning after a funeral”. Ethnic religions represent the third largest group of people in the country, with almost 22% of the population. The second group is Islam (24%), especially in the Northern part of the country, which lives in conflict because of the presence of Boko Haram and Fulani shepherds. “Muslims and Christians have no problem in Cameroon. They live well and sometimes can share views on Jesus, although it is a taboo for some Muslims. They can visit you at night to pray and study the Bible, but they will never go to church”, Atilas says.

 POLITICAL INTERFERENCES

The increasing conflict in recent years has mainly generated two political reactions to the religious fact: indifference and suspicion, depending on the point of view from which one looks. “The government does not care about anything, it has no solution for the problems of the people, nor is it prepared to listen to the weeping of the masses”, explains the Christian Methodist. Atilas believes that “Christians in Cameroon are not free to express their beliefs and are threatened by the bad government of the country”. “We knew that there would be fraud in the elections since the beginning. Biya organized the vote, counted the ballots, registered them and proclaimed the results, despite being also a candidate. What can you expect?” Lately, politics has also become part of “the prominent churches” of the country. In fact, according to the Catholic newspaper La Croix, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Catholic leaders, have created an alliance with representatives of the Muslim community to mediate in the conflict. It is estimated that about one hundred pastors of the PCC have fled from the southwest and Northwest regions, because of the conflict.

evangelicalfocus.com

The Southern Cameroons Interim Government has warned Ambazonians in the Diaspora that the humanitarian crisis in the country, already the worst in Africa, will deteriorate as 2019 approaches, more than a year after the French Cameroun President-Dictator, launched an intense military campaign of helicopter strikes and ground attacks which are still ongoing.

Acting President Samuel Sako Ikome told Cameroon Intelligence Report that the food and medical assistance provided to Southern Cameroons refugees both in French Cameroun and in the Federal Republic of Nigeria by international organizations including the UN has been insignificant. The Ambazonian leader wondered aloud why the UN was maintaining a kind of silence of the lamb as regards to the genocide going on in Southern Cameroons particularly the massacres that took place in Nkambe and Bali.

French Cameroun troops deployed to Southern Cameroons to crush the Ambazonia revolution and to reinstall Francophone dominance in the territory have killed hundreds of innocent Southern Cameroons civilians. The aggression initially consisted of a scotch the earth policy, was later coupled with numerous curfews and destruction of towns and villages by Cameroon government forces.

In his ill-disguised attempts at deceiving the international community, President-Dictator Paul Biya recently signed a decree creating a National Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Committee (NDDRC) for organizing, supervising and managing the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of ex-fighters of Boko Haram and armed groups in Southern Cameroons willing to respond favourably to his so-called peace appeal by laying down their arms. The 85 year old also appointed a French Cameroun surrogate, former governor Fai Yengo Francis to head the commission.

In response, Ambazonia Self-Defence and Restoration Forces Council (ASC/RF), the command and control system prosecuting the war against French Cameroun rejected the so-called disarmament committee. Since the onset of the President Biya imposed war, the Ambazonian Restoration Forces with support from the Southern Cameroons Diaspora, has been defending the Southern Cameroons nation against the brutal aggression.

The war is estimated to have left some 4000 Southern Cameroonians dead and more than 437,000 caught in the crossfire.  Hundreds of Ambazonians have fled their homes, according to UN data; many now trapped in the bush are now facing starvation.

More than a year into the war, Biya and French Cameroun have achieved neither of its objectives. Yaoundé wrongfully thought at the start of the invasion that the war would take no more than a couple of weeks. The situation has worsened in French Cameroun in recent days due to a broad economic collapse following a CAF decision to strip the Biya regime of the right to stage the 2019 African Nations Cup finals. CAF confirmed the unanimous decision after a meeting of its executive committee in Accra, Ghana.

In its recent report on Cameroon’s public expenditure management, the World Bank revealed that the institutional mechanisms to implement the program-budget approach launched in 2013 is still far from achieving expected results.

According to the report, since 2013, the Parliament has approved each year a program-centered 3-year budget for all departments. Each department develops its own programs (about 3) and sets objectives and indicators (two to three per program). However, World Bank said, most indicators are not suitable or operational.

Elsewhere in his comments to Cameroon Intelligence Report, Acting President Sako Ikome said the Interim Government was in an urgent need of financial donations to help the resistance and suffering Southern Cameroonians in 2019.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

The road to Buea, in Cameroon’s anglophone southwest region, is lined with abandoned banana and rubber plantations. Traffic is flowing, cars and yellow taxis interspersed with the occasional armoured pick-up full of elite soldiers clad head to toe in Israeli gear, positioned back to back with rifles at the ready to shoot rebel “Amba Boys” hiding out in the bush.

Mile 16, a busy area of Buea, is on edge. The previous day, the “Amba Boys”, who are fighting to create a nation called Ambazonia, separate from majority francophone Cameroon, had snuck past the heavily-armed soldiers of the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR). They dragged a couple of drivers from their cars, torched the vehicles, then dashed back into the bush. All in broad daylight.

On the surface at least, all is quiet again. In Mile 17, locals are selling phone credit, loaves of bread and carefully-arranged piles of plum tomatoes. Schoolchildren in blue uniforms walk by, a supposed sign that what some call the “anglophone problem” and others call “the war” is subsiding. Semantics can have a blurring effect, but the numbers don’t lie. Caught in the crossfire, more than 437,000 people have fled their homes, according to UN data, many now trapped in the bush. Hundreds have died.

Many here will tell you the conflict is not a simple matter of English versus French, not in a land of more than 250 languages that uses “Camfranglais” as a lingua franca. Whatever the language, frustration with the seemingly eternal regime of president Paul Biya – in power 43 years, if you count his terms as prime minister and president – is a nationwide affair. But the colonial heritage of a distinct system has made the anglophone uprising the most organised and potent threat to the recently re-elected president’s cast-iron grip on power.

Kidnappings

The brutal response mainstreamed separatist sentiment that had been simmering since the early 1960s, when the British-administered Southern Cameroons were denied independence, folded instead into newly-independent francophone Cameroon. In the nearly six decades that have followed, the country has had only two leaders: old-school tyrant Ahmadou Ahidjo and the post-modern, diplomatically-savvy Biya, described as a “strong autocrat” by one uneasy foreign envoy in Yaoundé. Over that time, anglophones have been subjected to the steady creep of assimilation into a heavily-centralised francophone system.

Funded by anglophone exiles in the US and Europe who had fled repression, thousands of locals armed with homemade muskets organised themselves “block by block” – in the words of Cho Ayaba, a separatist leader who spoke to The Irish Times by phone from Norway – to defend their communities.

Viewed as protectors by many, the “Amba Boys” have, however, been guilty of atrocities, chopping off the fingers of plantation workers on state-owned farms, torturing teachers defying a school boycott and killing those suspected of collaborating with the military. “Like a lion eating its own cubs,” says one preacher, who does not support the “Amba Boys”, even if he believes in independence “in my spirit”.

Then there are the kidnappings, most notably November’s Boko Haram-style seizure of 78 schoolchildren and three staff members from a Presbyterian school in Bamenda, in the northwest – a controversial subject here. It took place during a strictly-enforced dusk to dawn curfew, causing many to question how the large group cleared checkpoints on their 19km journey to the town of Bafut. In Yaoundé, the consensus among diplomats and other international observers is that the separatists, who have denied involvement, are guilty. But in Buea, where people speak of “real Ambas” and “government Ambas” – agents provocateurs sent in to stir trouble – the jury is still out.

‘Sneaky terrorist’

“The question is how could 81 people be marched off in a heavily militarised area under curfew?” says Fabris Kehdinga, a journalist with the Guardian Post, an anglophone daily. “On the ground people are blaming the government. The people are fed up of the government. The government has failed.”

Kehdinga is one of the few people in Buea who spoke on record. In November, anglophone journalist Mimi Mefo Takambo was arrested on charges of fake news for sharing a report on social media suggesting government forces were responsible for the recent shooting of an American missionary on the outskirts of Bamenda. A government statement claims the autopsy revealed pellets came from a “sneaky terrorist”. Joined by phone after her release, Mefo is still shaken. “The impression they were trying to give is that I was supporting terrorism. I was just doing my job, reporting what was happening on the ground,” she says.

Mefo has been targeted by both sides for her reporting, one of many caught in the middle of the conflict. Human rights lawyer Agbor Balla Nkongho, director of CHRDA, was jailed for eight months after leading the peaceful protests that sparked the conflict. But he has also received death threats from separatists, most recently for helping religious leaders to organise a yet-to-be scheduled peace conference aimed at kickstarting dialogue. Separatists believe the event is a stealth attempt to seek a federalist solution. He still lives in Buea. “If I leave, people will lose hope,” he says.

Defence spokesman Col Didier Badjeck believes the government is back in control, harking to recent raids in which dozens have been “neutralised”. Denying accusations of civilian killings, he rails against human rights groups like Amnesty (which has documented abuses on both sides). But eyewitnesses, who have fled devastated villages like Wum in the northwest and Mbonge in the southwest, tell the same story over and over again to The Irish Times. The locations change, but the grief and terror remain the same.

In hiding

The conflict ebbs and flows, each fresh horror masked by a hyper-vigilant semblance of normality. At the foot of Mount Cameroon, in the neighbourhood of Federal Quarters, a man and a woman are sitting in the shade of a tree. The woman flinches as I approach, gathering her toddler in her arms. “If I talk they will come here and they will shoot me,” she says, looking nervously at passing cars. “The government will come to my house.”

But the man stands up, offers me a seat. John (not his real name) is a man with nothing to lose.

His mother, father, three brothers and two sisters fled the village of Ekona after their houses were burned. Now they are all hiding in the bush. “They are scared of the military. People were shot without any reason,” he says. “On market days they come back to the village for food then leave immediately.” He is supporting the entire family on his meagre cleaner’s salary.

In his view, the “Amba Boys” were protecting their communities. “Those boys got arms and were prepared to defend themselves. The military shot them. They had to retaliate,” he says. “From there the president named them terrorists. When he said that, he declared war on his own people.”

“I’m no more afraid of anything,” he says, chin raised defiantly. “I believe in independence.”

Culled from The Irish Times

Special counsel Robert Mueller is accusing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of lying to federal investigators in the Russia probe in breach of his plea agreement. The extraordinary allegation could expose Manafort to a lengthier prison sentence   and potentially more criminal charges.

The torpedoing of Manafort’s plea deal, disclosed in a court filing Monday, also results in special counsel Robert Mueller’s team losing a cooperating witness from the top of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign who was present for several key episodes under investigation. That includes a Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer he was told had derogatory information on Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The move signals a return to the acrimonious relationship Manafort has had with the special counsel’s office since his indictment last year. Before his plea agreement, Manafort aggressively challenged the special counsel’s legitimacy in court, went through a bitter trial and landed himself in jail after prosecutors discovered he had attempted to tamper with witnesses in his case.

In the latest filing, Mueller’s team said Manafort “committed federal crimes” by lying about “a variety of subject matters” even after he agreed to truthfully cooperate with the investigation. Prosecutors said they will detail the “nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies” in writing at a later date to the judge.

Through his attorneys, Manafort denied lying, saying he “believes he provided truthful information” during a series of sessions with Mueller’s investigators. He also disagreed that he breached his plea agreement. Still, both sides now agree they can’t resolve the conflict, and U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson should set a date to sentence him.

Manafort, who remains jailed, had been meeting with the special counsel’s office since he pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to obstruct justice. He cut that deal to head off a second trial after being convicted last summer of eight felony counts related to millions of dollars he hid from the IRS in offshore accounts.

Both cases stemmed from his Ukrainian political work and undisclosed lobbying work he admitted to carrying out in the U.S. in violation of federal law.

As part of his plea agreement, Manafort pledged to “cooperate fully, truthfully, completely, and forthrightly” with the government “in any and all matters” prosecutors deemed necessary. That included his work on the Trump campaign as well as his Ukrainian political work, which remains under investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Prosecutors there are looking into the conduct of longtime Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig and former Republican congressman and lobbyist Vin Weber to determine whether they violated federal law by failing to register as foreign agents with the Justice Department. None of the men has been charged with any crimes.

As part of his plea deal, Manafort also forfeited many of his rights as well as his ability to withdraw the plea if he broke any of the terms. In return, prosecutors agreed to not bring additional charges against him and to ask a judge for a reduction of his sentence if he provided “substantial assistance.”

But with prosecutors saying he breached the agreement, Manafort now faces serious repercussions such as the possibility of prosecution on additional charges including the 10 felony counts prosecutors dropped when he made the deal.

Manafort already faces up to five years in prison on the two charges in his plea agreement. In his separate Virginia case, Manafort’s potential sentencing under federal guidelines has not yet been calculated, but prosecutors have previously said he could face as much as 10 years in prison on those charges.

He is scheduled to be sentenced in that case in February. His co-defendant Rick Gates, who spent a longer time on the campaign and worked on the Trump inaugural committee, has not had a sentencing date set yet. He continues to cooperate with Mueller.

(AP)

A pro Biya Francophone Attorney General on Thursday November the 22nd charged the leader of the Ambazonian republic and nine others with terrorism.  The Yaoundé Military Tribunal held a secret hearing with what is now known as the Nera 10 in the absence of the abductees’ lawyers and the Southern Cameroons leaders were transferred afterwards to the Yaoundé Principal Prison, in Kondengui.

The Southern Cameroons Interim Government’s spokesman, Hon. Chris Anu reported that eyewitnesses saw nine of them as they went through protocol at the Kondengui high security prison. Chris Anu added that “If anything, the event is a clear indication that Yaoundé has no intentions to release the leaders of our revolution in spite of the calls for their immediate and unconditional release.”

The French Cameroun judge who earlier met with the 85 year old Biya privately at the Unity Palace leveled the charge against President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe the interim head of state of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia including nine of his top aides. Cameroon Intelligence Report understands that several detained Ambazonian activists are facing the same charge. A well-placed source in Yaoundé hinted this reporter that President Biya has ordered another Francophone judge to begin the trial on December the 6^th.

No human rights activist or legal representations were allowed outside or inside the Yaoundé Military Tribunal where the so-called preliminary hearing took place. The International Crisis Group including many humanitarian organizations has criticized the abduction and illegal extradition of the Southern Cameroons leaders from Abuja, Nigeria.

The Southern Cameroons Acting President Dr Samuel Ikome Sako has also been quoted as saying that President Sisiku Ayuk Tabe is not a terrorist but a great leader who has fought for years against French Cameroun colonial rule in the Federal Republic of Ambazonia.

Elsewhere, Cameroon military said on Friday that it has killed at least 43 armed Ambazonia separatists’ fighters. The Biya regime army spokesperson also observed that troops destroyed at least three camps in several operations since Thursday in Bali village in the Mezam administrative area and Abu village in the Fundong administrative area in the North West region. The military reportedly seized a huge consignment of guns, ammunition, machetes, motorcycles and drugs.

The military added that they found the separatist hideouts after tracking one of the gunmen suspected of kidnapping 79 students and three staff members from a school on Nov. 4. La Republique du Cameroun and Southern Cameroons are both experiencing deadliest-ever socio-political crisis and the worst since the war to crush the UPC uprising, when the two territories were governed by the late President Ahmadou Ahidjo. More than 4000 Southern Cameroonian civilians have died in the ongoing violence including some 1600 Cameroon government army soldiers. The Southern Cameroons war has also claimed the lives of a sea of foreign and local missionaries.

The protests against French Cameroun dominance were triggered by a proposed system overhaul by Anglophone teachers and lawyers. Recently, former United States Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Affairs, Herman Jay Cohen again noted that the ongoing war for territorial control between French Cameroun and the Federal Republic of Ambazonia is unwinnable by either side, and therefore recommended that the protagonists should approach the current Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Affairs, Ambassador Tibor Nagy, to begin a mediation process to end the imbroglio. The former diplomat and scholar who brokered a peace deal to end the Eritrean versus Ethiopia war in 1991, among others, made the statement in a recent tweet on his official Twitter handle @CohenOnAfrica.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai with files