Cameroon authorities banned demonstrations after the opposition party Cameroon Renaissance Movement (Mouvement pour la renaissance du Cameroun, MRC) encouraged people to take to the streets over the government’s decision to call regional elections.

On September 11, 2020, the governors of the Littoral and Centre regions banned public meetings and demonstrations indefinitely. Three days later, Territorial Administration Minister Paul Atanga Nji, in a letter to the two governors and the governor of the West region, warned that law enforcement forces would break up unauthorized demonstrations. He said that the governors should arrest anyone organizing or leading demonstrations, claiming that protests would endanger lives during the Covid-19 pandemic. On September 15, the communication minister warned political parties that protests could be considered “insurrection” and that illegal demonstrations across the country would be punished under the anti-terror law.

“These steps are a thinly veiled attempt by the Cameroonian government to use the Covid-19 pandemic and the draconian anti-terror law as a pretext to quell the right to assemble,” said Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Cameroon’s authorities should protect and facilitate the right to assemble, not seek to curb it.”

These measures came after President Paul Biya announced on September 7 that Cameroon’s first regional elections would be in December. On September 8, Maurice Kamto, the MRC leader, called for peaceful protests on September 22 against holding the elections. Seven other opposition parties and civil society organizations have joined Kamto’s call for peaceful demonstrations. Opposition parties have multiple concerns that they cannot be conducted freely and fairly without reforming the electoral code and addressing the lack of security in the Anglophone regions.

Human Rights Watch conducted phone interviews between mid-August and early September with 15 leaders and members of opposition parties, as well as 5 representatives from civil society and human rights groups.

The Cameroonian government started lifting Covid-19 restrictions in May, allowing bars, restaurants, and nightclubs to reopen. In June, it allowed schools and other training centers to reopen, as well as churches and mosques. The efforts to target the opposition-led demonstrations over Covid-19 appear to be arbitrary, Human Rights Watch said. On September 16, the MRC issued a note providing guidance to all members and supporters who are planning to participate on September 22 on how to ensure peaceful demonstrations and curb the spread of Covid-19 by wearing a face mask.

Other opposition-led meetings and demonstrations have been banned in Cameroon in the last 18 months. In April 2019, the authorities banned a week of demonstrations planned by the MRC across the country. Local authorities recently prohibited two private meetings planned by the party in Maroua, Far North region, on August 9, and in Nkongsamba, Littoral region, on August 15, citing concerns around Covid-19 and general public order.

The Nkongsamba meeting was to be a private meeting at the party headquarters and should not have been subject to a public order ban. In Maroua, where the meeting was to be held in a hotel, the local authorities prohibited the meeting ostensibly on health grounds, although party leaders said they were taking preventive measures to avoid the spread of the Covid-19, including respecting the limit of 50 participants, as required by law. Party leaders told Human Rights Watch that authorities have allowed similar meetings in both cities by the governing Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement.

On September 19, the headquarters of the opposition party Cameroon People’s Party (CPP) in Yaoundé was surrounded by over 30 policemen and gendarmes. “The Yaoundé District Officer claimed that the CPP was holding a public meeting without declaration, but we informed him that we were holding our regular weekly meeting whose participation is limited to our members,” Edith Kahbang Walla, known as “Kah Walla,” CPP president said in a statement published the same day. “This is an umpteenth violation of the law and attempt to intimidate us.” After a standoff of about one hour, CPP members were allowed to leave.

Human Rights Watch has previously documented that Cameroon’s government has used the pandemic as a pretext to settle scores and punish the opposition. In May, the authorities arrested several volunteers from the Survival Initiative, Kamto’s fundraising initiative to respond to the health emergency, as they handed out protective masks and sanitizing gel in Yaoundé, the capital. They were charged with rebellion, then released on May 15.

MRC spokesperson Biboun Nissack told Human Rights Watch that the government’s recent ban on demonstrations “threatens to force our party underground.”

Cameroon’s constitution guarantees freedom of assembly. Cameroonian law requires organizers to notify local authorities seven days before a demonstration. While freedom of assembly is not absolute, and restrictions including those aimed at protecting public health are permissible, any such measures must not only have a legal basis but be strictly necessary and proportionate to achieve the objective and not discriminate against particular groups.

Broad, blanket bans such as that invoked by the Cameroon government, in particular in response to political organizing by opposition parties, do not meet these criteria. On March 16, United Nations human rights experts warned that “Emergency declarations based on the Covid-19 outbreak should not function as a cover for repressive action under the guise of protecting health, and should not be used simply to quash dissent.”

The anti-terror law, promulgated in December 2014 as Cameroon struggled to address the escalating threat posed by the Islamist armed group Boko Haram, has been widely criticized, including by Cameroonian and international rights groups and opposition parties, for its overbroad definition of terrorism, the provision of the death penalty, and for being used to silence the opposition, civil society, and the media.

This recent crackdown on freedom of assembly also follows a well-documented pattern of politically motivated arrests and prosecutions of opposition party members and activists, including MRC vice president, Mamadou Mota.

“When government authorities threaten to treat exercise of the right to peaceful protest as an act of insurrection, they are attacking the fundamentals of a society based on human rights and the rule of law,” Mudge said. “Basic freedoms and rights – guaranteed not only under Cameroon’s international obligations, but also in its constitution – are at risk, and if this crackdown leads to wider protests, the excessive use of force and ill-treatment could dramatically escalate.”

Culled from Human Rights Watch

The Vice President of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government says the announced regional elections by the French Cameroun dictator Paul Biya clearly show that the West is running out of patience with the Francophone regime in Yaoundé.

The exiled Southern Cameroons leader, however, cast doubt on the staging of the so-called regional election in Southern Cameroons and said the idea is to placate the United States and the European Union.

Dabney Yerima made a mockery of the French Cameroun ruling CPDM crime syndicate saying French Cameroun political elites and their military are more loyal to France than to their own people.

Paul Biya recently announced the first regional elections in December, including Southern Cameroons in the grip of a revolt.

The indirect elections on December 6 in the country’s 10 regions will put in place councils provided for in a 1996 constitution in a move towards decentralisation but not yet implemented.

These councils will also be elected in Southern Cameroons where a nearly three-year-old insurgency has claimed over 35,000 lives. 

Southern Cameroons is home to a large minority of English speakers in a country where French speakers are the overwhelming majority — a situation that is the legacy of the decolonisation of western Africa by France and Britain more than six decades ago.

Years of resentment at perceived discrimination against British Southern Cameroonians led to the declaration on October 1, 2017, of the independence of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia, triggering a crackdown by the Francophone authorities.

The 87 year Biya who has been in power for nearly four decades has promised Southern Cameroonians a special status in a bid to quell the unrest.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

The French Cameroun regime has more loyalty to France than it has to its own French speaking Camerounian people, according to the Vice President of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government.

Dabney Yerima made the comment in a conversation with the Cameroon Concord News Group on Monday.

“French President Emmanuel Macron’s remarks that he pressured La Republique du Cameroun leader Paul Biya to release Prof Maurice Kamto was a clear indication that France still has a colonial attitude towards French Cameroun” according to Vice President Yerima.

On Feb. 22, a video went viral on social media showing the French president telling a Cameroonian activist in Paris that he had pressured Biya to release opposition leader, Maurice Kamto from jail.

“It’s pretty clear that there is a genocide going on in Southern Cameroons and Biya is behind the torture and brutal murder of thousands of Southern Cameroonians but Paris has erected a stone wall against any international effort geared towards ending the war in Ambazonia” Yerima added.

“The President Macron’s meeting with the French Cameroun activist in Paris was an acceptance that the French government is interfering in French Cameroun internal affairs” the Ambazonian leader concluded.

By Isong Asu

On September 8, U.S. Senators Jim Risch and Ben Cardin, joined by an impressive bipartisan group of cosponsors, introduced a resolution calling for an end to the violence in Cameroon and for inclusive dialogue to address the underlying political tensions that are at the root of the conflict between the state and anglophone separatists. They are the latest in a large and diverse group of senior U.S. officials who have worked to highlight the crisis in Cameroon. Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Tibor Nagy has engaged in direct and personal diplomacy aiming to influence the situation. Congresswoman Karen Bass, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, has been resolute in condemning abuses, and has worked on a bipartisan basis to clearly communicate U.S. concerns and support for peace talks to Biya’s government, including in a resolution introduced in the House of Representatives last year. The Trump Administration removed Cameroon from the list of countries eligible for trade benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, and has scaled back military assistance to the country.

But Cameroon is a case in which concern in Washington does not translate into effective influence. In Cameroon itself, little political progress has been made as various factions grapple for control of the talks and sometimes competing lines of effort stop and start.  Meanwhile, the people of Cameroon continue to suffer despite calls for a ceasefire in light of the COVID-19 crisis.

Just this week, the army launched a new campaign in Bamenda, ostensibly to bring law and order to the city. The BBC reported that the operation involved house-to-house searches, seizures of citizens’ property, and even indiscriminate shooting. Residents of the city largely stayed home, caught between the government and separatists who have called for citizens to stay home as a form of protest, in an all-too-familiar impossible situation. This summer the Norwegian Refugee Council named Cameroon the world’s most neglected displacement crisis, noting that half a million people have been forced from their homes.

It can be painful to reckon with the limited capacity of the United States, or of any external power, to bring seriousness of purpose to urgently needed political dialogue. But ultimately civil conflicts with political roots cannot be resolved without domestic will and leadership, and Cameroon’s ossified political class has thus far failed to muster either. But the efforts of U.S. officials still matter. Should those vital domestic ingredients emerge, the United States is well-positioned to support a process that prioritizes the urgent needs of civilians and gives all parties in a tremendously diverse country greater opportunity in the future.

Source: Council for Foreign Relations

The main opposition leader of Cameroon, Maurice Kamto, has called mobilizations on September 22 to call for the departure of the president, Paul Biya, a day after he approved December 6 as the date for the holding of the first regional elections in the country.

Kamto’s Movement for the Renaissance of Cameroon (CRM) has pointed out that the protests have been called at the national level, after the opposition warned against the call for elections without a ceasefire in the Anglophone majority regions, the scene of a conflict for several years.

Thus, the spokesman for Kamto, Olivier Bibou Nissack, stressed that September 22 will be the day of the « revolution in Cameroon ». « Paul Biya must go, » he added, as reported by the Cameroonian newspaper ‘Journal du Cameroun’.

The date chosen coincides with the one that, three years ago, marked the beginning of peaceful demonstrations in the two regions with an English-speaking majority to demand reforms in the face of what the population denounced as a situation of discrimination in the country.

Both the CRM and the Social Democratic Front (SDF), led by John Fru Ndi, had stressed that they will not go to the polls if there is no ceasefire declaration and Kamto himself threatened to call for mobilizations in the event that a date was set for the vote.

The aforementioned protests by the inhabitants of these regions, once British colonies but who decided to join French Cameroon due to its alleged marginalization by the central government, led to harsh repression as a result of the self-proclamation of the independence of Ambazonia on October 1, 2017.

Since then, armed groups have proliferated and support for separatists, until then quite marginal, has grown. The Government has responded with harsh repression, during which human rights organizations have accused the security forces of committing atrocities.

The conflict has already left some 3,000 dead. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are already 60,000 Cameroonian refugees in Nigeria, while another 679,000 have been displaced within the country.