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