11, August 2021
Southern Cameroons Crisis causing hardship for women 0
Cameroon President Paul Biya must let “peace reign” in the country’s troubled Anglophone regions, according to a former mayor and Catholic activist.
Elizabeth Kang, a leading member of the Catholic Women Association (CWA) spoke to Crux on the sidelines of the women’s convention for peace in Yaoundé.
“I am pleading on God Almighty to do to the Head of State as he did to Saul. Saul was a murderer and when he was going down to Damascus again to carry out his killing, God changed him and renamed him Paul, and he became a great preacher and wrote many books in the Bible. If our Paul today is Saul, God will change him back to the real Paul,” she said.
Biya has been largely blamed for the five-year conflict in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions where a separatist war has left over 4000 dead and forced more than a million people to flee their homes.
When Anglophone teachers and lawyers took to the streets in 2016 to protest the use of French in English-speaking schools and Common Law courts, Biya deployed the military, taking a hardline stance that escalated tensions, and morphed into demands for self-rule by the country’s English speakers.
Separatists have been fighting the military ever since, and violently enforced a school boycott that has left the regions’ children without an education for five years.
Kang says she believes that Biya has the power to bring the conflict to an end.
“The head of state of this country is the father of this nation. He has the authority to say ‘stop the killing, come my children, let us discuss this issue.’ For me, I hold him very responsible,” she told Crux.
“The head of state of this country has to make a statement to the effect that we are all his wives, we are all his children. … As one woman we want to cry out: Withdraw the army. The army too is dying. The mother of the soldier is wailing like me, the mother of the civilian. We are the same women wailing for our children.”
Kang is a witness to the daily horrors of war in her native Wum. Sometimes, the horrors are too close to home. Among others, her husband has had to spend time in the dreaded Kondengui Central Prison in Yaoundé.
“The first person I lost was my brother’s son whom I raised. Some armed people came and called him out of the house in my absence. In the morning, they had chopped off his ears. The second one was my son. They came and took him out at 5 a.m. [in front of] his wife beat him up and tore his left ear. The third one is my husband who was carried up to Kondengui. He stayed in Kondengui for nine months, and when the family head is not there, you know what that means. An entire family can go astray because the pilot of the house is not there. The other one was my neighbor’s son whose head was blown off by cartridges from unknown persons, and he died. I will not name my cousins that were slain in a whole village. Sometimes, people were carried in other villages and shot in Wum town.”
Holding back tears, Kang notes that women are paying a disproportionate price in the conflict, many of them “menstruating on leaves. The pride of a woman has been taken away. Women are delivering children in the bush, and under very bad conditions.”
The Catholic Women Association came up with various proposals to bring an end to the hostilities.
They called for continued and inclusive dialogue that addresses core issues around peace, solidarity and shared humanity in Cameroon; as well as the equal and permanent involvement of women peace mediators and negotiators in peace processes at all levels, while enforcing their protection at all times.
They also underscored the need to create additional centers for psychological support and trauma treatment, while at the same time making sure that the country’s disarmament and demobilization centers are made functional and responsive to the existing conflict.
“Peace has to reign,” Kang said simply, but added this will be contingent on Biya “calling the army to the barracks, the separatists dropping their guns, and genuine and sincere dialogue to address the root causes of the conflict.”
Source: Crux







The conflict had erupted in Cameroon’s Northwest and Southwest regions earlier in 2017 when protests against new government-appointed judges in the regions turned violent. As government forces responded with lethal force, tensions mounted and many English speakers in the predominantly French-speaking country started asking for independence. The ensuing conflict between separatist fighters and government forces has killed at least 3,000 civilians, according to Human Rights Watch. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates that at least 460,000 have been forced to flee the affected areas, with tens of thousands seeking refuge in neighboring Nigeria. The Catholic bishops said the government has been too violent in its response to those seeking to form an English-speaking state. Esua said Biya’s 2017 pledge effectively made clear that “anybody who identified himself with the Anglophone cause was considered a terrorist.” After two years of fighting between the two sides, Biya called for a one-week “Major National Dialogue,” held Sept. 30-Oct. 4, 2019. However, the president said the dialogue would not only consider the insurgency but also “issues of national interest such as national unity, national integration and living together.” Bishop George Nkuo, who has headed the Kumbo Diocese in the Northwest Region since 2006, said that approach was wrong because it didn’t address the urgency of the Anglophone problem. Nkuo said the forum should have been used to discuss the Anglophone problem and not all the problems of the nation. He said it was necessary to use that dialogue to revisit the root causes of the conflict as the only possible way of bringing forth a sustainable solution. And the causes of the problem, he said, are rooted in Cameroon history. Initially colonized by Germany in 1884, Cameroon would be divided between Britain and France after the defeat of the Germans in World War I. Britain got one-fifth of the formerly German territory, which it administered as part of Nigeria until 1961 — when through a plebiscite, the British Southern Cameroons (as the British administered entity of Cameroon was then called) voted to reunite with the part formerly administered by France (which had gained its independence in 1960). The two entities went into a federal structure of government, with each entity allowed to freely run its affairs in line with the systems inherited from the colonial powers. But in recent years, some people in the English-speaking regions had accused the central government of trying to quash their traditions.
A view of the Catholic cathedral of Kumbo, in Cameroon’s English-speaking Northwest Region In 2016, four Catholic bishops in the English-speaking regions accused Biya’s government of trying to strangle their culture. “Anglophone Cameroonians are slowly being asphyxiated as every element of their culture is systematically targeted and absorbed into the Francophone Cameroon culture and way of doing things,” they wrote at the time. Nkuo said the 2019 dialogue should have revisited these historical perspectives to come up with the right answers to the problem. The current archbishop of Bamenda, Andrew Nkea Fuanya, criticized the format of the dialogue, saying it didn’t involve the appropriate representatives of the English-speaking regions. “That wasn’t a dialogue at all,” Fuanya told NCR. Esua was invited to participate in the dialogue. “To be frank, it was a monologue,” he said. “In a dialogue, you take two people to dialogue. And in a dialogue, you have different opinions. You have to listen to the other person and the other person listens to you, and gradually you come to an agreement.” “Ninety percent of the participants at the National Dialogue were all government people, or people with government allegiance, but the real persons with whom you had to dialogue were not there,” said Esua. Separatist leaders weren’t part of the dialogue. Sesseku Ayuk Tabe, the recognized leader of the movement to form a new country of Ambazonia, was arrested in 2018 and is now serving a life sentence. “You couldn’t talk of a dialogue if these people weren’t there,” Esua said of the separatist leaders’ absence at the negotiating table. Nevertheless, the dialogue came up with a number of recommendations, including the adoption of a special status for the two Anglophone regions, the immediate relaunch of certain airport and seaport projects in the regions, the rapid integration of ex-combatants into society, and a hastening of decentralization of power away from the central government.









24, August 2021
Southern Cameroons Bishops call for an end to the conflict: Our people are tired of living in uncertainty 0
“We deplore the violence, insecurity, kidnappings, torture and senseless killings, sometimes of innocent people and children”, emphasized the Bishops of the Bishops’ Conference of Bamenda Province (BAPEC) in a statement published on Sunday, August 22nd, in which they renew their appeal for the end to the long conflict in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon.
The BAPEC members appeal to all armed groups to “end the violence with immediate effect and work towards a peaceful solution to the conflict”. “Our people have suffered enough and are tired of living in uncertainty and fear”, said the bishops, who praised the commitment of the priests who “stood by the people entrusted to them with pastoral care and have made and continue to make heroic sacrifices in this time of crisis”.
On August 20, a seven-year-old student at the St. Theresa Catholic Primary School in the Kumbo diocese of Cameroon was killed by a stray bullet in a gun battle between Cameroonian soldiers and separatists near the school.
On Sunday, August 22nd, a female parishioner was killed and a pastor was wounded during a service in the Presbyterian Church in northwest Bali.
A military patrol was ambushed by separatists. In the exchange of fire, stray bullets killed the women and wounded the pastor.
The conflict in the Anglophone regions in the southwest and northwest of Cameroon has been dragging on for more than four years and has intensified since the separatists symbolically declared the independence of the two areas that have been grouped into one in Ambazonia on October 1, 2017.
The separatists chose the date of October 1st to commemorate the independence of the English-speaking area from the United Kingdom in 1961. The French-speaking part had gained independence from France in 1960. The creation of a single bilingual state was then decided in a referendum. However, residents of the English-speaking regions complain that they are discriminated against in legislation and in education compared to French speakers.
The conflict has already claimed more than 3,500 lives and forced more than 700,000 people to flee their homes.
Source: Agenzia Fides