21, November 2018
US: Trump stands by Saudi ally despite Khashoggi murder 0
President Donald Trump said the United States would not punish its Saudi ally for the gruesome murder of US-based columnist Jamal Khashoggi, despite conceding that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may have known of the killing.
Defying pressure from US lawmakers to impose tougher sanctions on Saudi Arabia, Trump said he would not cancel military contracts with the kingdom. Such a “foolish” move would only benefit Russia and China, said the US president, whom critics accuse of exaggerating the importance of those weapons sales to the American economy.
Trump said US intelligence agencies were still studying the evidence around Khashoggi’s murder and who planned it.
“It could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Trump said in a statement.
“We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” he said. “The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia.”
The gruesome murder of Khashoggi, who vanished after being lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, has hugely embarrassed Washington.
The killing torpedoed a powerful PR campaign led by the crown prince to show that the conservative Islamic state has embarked on a new reformist path.
It also threw into question the White House strategy to make MBS, as the royal prince Mohammed Bin Salman is widely known, its main partner in the tinderbox region.
After offering numerous contradictory explanations for Khashoggi’s disappearance, Riyadh said last week he had been killed and his body dismembered when “negotiations” to convince him to return to Saudi Arabia failed. It said allegations the prince had ordered the killing were false.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in Washington on Tuesday that Turkey was not entirely satisfied with the level of cooperation it was receiving from Riyadh on Khashoggi’s murder and may seek a formal United Nations inquiry.
Republican and Democratic leaders of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee said they had asked Trump for a second human rights probe over Khashoggi’s killing.
Similarly, Representative Francis Rooney, a Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Washington should apply the so-called Magnitsky Act to those responsible for Khashoggi’s death. The law freezes US assets of human rights violators and prohibits Americans from doing business with them.
Saudi prince ‘involved’ in murder
Trump has for weeks resisted accepting mounting evidence of Saudi government involvement in the Khashoggi killing – and accusations that MBS ordered the hit.
However, with The New York Times reporting that the CIA has definitively concluded that Prince Mohammed was involved, the focus turned to whether Trump would punish his Saudi partner or find a way to let it slide.
In his statement, released by the White House press office, Trump took the latter option, saying that the US-Saudi relationship was more important than the possible involvement in the crime of Prince Mohammed.
He noted that Saudi King Salman and the crown prince “vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr Khashoggi”.
“The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region,” he said.
Trump acknowledged a strong push in Congress for the United States to sanction MBS and take other action against the Saudi leadership.
“I will consider whatever ideas are presented to me, but only if they are consistent with the absolute security and safety of America,” he said.
“Mr. Trump bizarrely devotes the FIRST paragraph of his shameful statement on Saudi atrocities to accuse IRAN of every sort of malfeasance he can think of. Perhaps we’re also responsible for the California fires, because we didn’t help rake the forests – just like the Finns do?” Zarif wrote on Twitter.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, REUTERS)
21, November 2018
History will slaughter the men squeezing Southern Cameroons children to death 0
More than 4000 Southern Cameroons men, women and children have died in the territory now known as the Federal Republic of Ambazonia ever since the Biya Francophone regime in Yaoundé declared war against the English speaking minority-though the UN Office in the Sub Saharan region under strong French government influence enthusiastically puts the figure at 400. No UN official has visited the Southern Cameroons since the Francophone genocidal campaign started. The bourgeoisie Commonwealth Secretary General, Patricia Scotland only spent some few hours in Buea under heavy security provided by French Cameroun soldiers. Meanwhile, the killing of Southern Cameroons women and children continues almost daily.
Fifty-seven years after the so-called reunification of the two Cameroons, there is not an iota of development in the Ambazonia territory by successive French Cameroun governments. So, wherever you go in the Southern Cameroons, there is mud in the rainy season and dust in the dry season. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat. With French government backing within the African Union and the United Nations Security Council including the European Union, the Ambazonian exiled Interim Government headed by Dr Samuel Ikome Sako is denied the platform to make the Southern Cameroons case as regards the massive killings and torture orchestrated by the Biya Francophone regime to the international community. At the same time, the UN human rights wing dominated by the French, has blocked or delayed a range of political actions against the Paul Biya regime by its continues release of patronizing statements such “The violence in the Anglophone regions has led to massive internal displacement – at least 436,000 people are believed to be internally displaced, while more than 30,000 have fled to Nigeria since September last year.”
French Cameroun military helicopters with aerial intelligence from the French government and tactical intelligence from the President Buhari regime in Abuja, Nigeria have carried out several attacks on camps hosting innocent Southern Cameroons women and children fleeing the conflict both in Cameroon and Nigeria. An American missionary, Charles Wesco Trumann was recently killed by Cameroon government forces on lame and ridiculous reason that he was a CIA agent helping the Ambazonian Restoration Forces. Several Southern Cameroons medical doctors and university professors have been killed and many have fled the territory into French Cameroun. The French government and now Saudi Arabia are supplying the Paul Biya regime with sophisticated weapons and the French Cameroun army onslaught against the English speaking people of Southern Cameroons is almost every day: it is the most malicious killing of the black race in mankind’s history since the slave trade. Yet, very little appears about it in the international media due to the political packaging of the French backed French Cameroun military campaign conducted under the cover of fighting Southern Cameroons terrorists and Ambazonian separatists which have no authorization from both the AU or the UN.
In covering up for its crimes in Southern Cameroons, the Francophone regime announced a 12 billion FCFA reconstruction aid to victims of its own atrocities and ever since the Commonwealth Secretary General, Patricia Scotland left Yaoundé, nothing has been heard about that plan. The Francophone army has targeted every sector in the Southern Cameroonian life including: villages, fishing boats and farmland. A farmer and his three sons were killed by Cameroon government forces as they were returning home from their farm in Ekona. A Roman Catholic priest was killed in Muyuka after Holy Mass. At the time of writing this report, another Roman Catholic priest, Rev Father Cosmas Omboto Ondari was killed by Cameroon government forces in Kembong in Manyu. I travelled home incognito for the burial of the late Rev Father Alex Sob and I stood in the cemetery during his final funeral rites and heard an old woman from the Legion of Mary shouting that, “I want to speak to the late John Ngu Foncha who took us to these French speaking people.”
The war in Southern Cameroons is a war against Ambazonian children on many fronts. Firstly, it was a policy to assimilate them by imposing the French language upon them and enslaving them with no jobs after university education. That failed woefully as many like myself migrated to the West. The second phase is what we are seeing now and it involves military attacks with financial support from Paris and Beijing.
After the Eastern Regional Crisis in 1953 which heralded the quasi federal status for British Southern Cameroons, Southern Cameroons parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. To be more accurate, the French Cameroun phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of in Southern Cameroons. Southern Cameroons had reached a stage where the people were hoping for a royal visit by Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain after our traditional rulers were invited during the Queeen’s trip to Calabar in Nigeria. After 57 years following its forged reunification with French Cameroun, Southern Cameroons with its abundant natural resources is among the world’s bottom.
Many schools in Southern Cameroons have been targets in the French Cameroun-led blitz and several hundred of the children are living in the bushes with their grandparents suffering from malnutrition, dysentery and malaria. The French Cameroun government officials have been blocking shipments of foodstuff and cloths coming from the Southern Cameroons Diaspora to the suffering Ambazonian population. When I questioned a Francophone custom officer at the Douala Port, he in a typical ruling CPDM party pattern responded that most of the materials arriving the Douala Port had been banned by the government for health and safety reasons.
The UN staffers in Yaoundé and Abuja with the help of French diplomats have developed a special relationship with Cameroon government officials with many using the Francophone lobby within the UN system to get promotions and appointments into more lucrative UN jobs and positions. Consequently, the prospect of any public expression of a rebellion within the UN bureaucracy as regards to the war in Southern Cameroons is completely absent and non-existent mindful of the fact that the UN under Antonio Guterres is slowly but surely in the process of destroying an entire African English society. History will slaughter men like Paul Ghogomu, Philemon Yang, Chief Tabetando, Elvis Ngolle Ngolle, Victor Mengot, Patrick Ekema, Peter Mafany Musonge, Paul Tasong and Paul Atanga Nji including other Southern Cameroonians responsible for the killings currently going on in Southern Cameroons.
For how long should Southern Cameroons women and children including the old and the blind be exposed to such vicious French Cameroun military punishment for something they have never done before the UN listens to the Ambazonia Interim Government? Only a corrupt mind can tolerate what is being done to the Southern Cameroons people. Yet no resignation is expected from Southern Cameroonians serving in the Biya regime. History will indeed slaughter them!! By the time the international community will wake up from its sleep to put a stop to this senseless war going on in Southern Cameroons, ten thousand lives would have been lost in the cause of nothing, fuelled by French geopolitical calculations in the Gulf of Guinea and French government support for ruthless dictators in Francophone Africa.
By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai