12, January 2018

Trump cancels British trip amid fears of being unwelcome ⁰

US President Donald Trump has canceled plans to visit Britain next month to attend the opening of a new US embassy in London over fears he will not be made welcome and would be greeted with mass protests, reports say.

Sky News and the Daily Mail both reported on Thursday US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will take Trump’s place at the event scheduled for the end of next month. Trump was expected to make his first trip to the UK since entering the White House and had originally been scheduled for a full State Visit including a Royal banquet at Buckingham Palace but this was later downgraded to a “stripped-down” trip that did not involve getting the full “red-carpet” treatment from the Queen.

One senior source suggested to the Daily Mail that Trump had cancelled the trip because he was unhappy about the arrangements and the scale of the visit.

Trump had previously expressed concern about the likelihood of mass protests in a potential trip. Last year he told British Prime Minster Theresa May that he did not want to go ahead with a visit until the British public supported it.

The intention was to repeat the success of Barack Obama’s visit to Britain in 2011, but critics pointed out the convention was to wait for a President’s second term in office before being granted the honor.

The prospect of mass protests were raised last month after the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn urged his followers to turn out in force if Trump visited the UK to send him a ‘clear message’. More than a million people signed a petition last year calling for the state visit to be cancelled.

Downing Street has declined to comment but reports suggest No 10 was aware the visit has been postponed.

Source: Presstv

12, January 2018

4 dead in two Boko Haram attacks in Cameroon ⁰

Four people were killed and two others kidnapped in separate overnight attacks in the far north of Cameroon, blamed on the Islamist group Boko Haram, sources told AFP on Thursday. Three of the victims were “slaughtered” in Kolofata, a town which borders Nigeria and that has seen a spate of attacks blamed on the jihadists, said a source close to the security services.

A security officer in the region confirmed the information to AFP, and that two people were also abducted. In a second overnight attack, Boko Haram fighters are believed to have killed one person and injured another in nearby Ashigashiya, also by the Nigerian border, said the security officer. The jihadists also burned some 60 boxes of grain and motorcycles, he added. The attacks come after Cameroon and three other West African states launched a major offensive against the jihadist group in Borno state, in north east Nigeria this week.

Cameroon soldiers, along with troops from Chad, Nigeria and Niger, are targeting a Boko Haram faction led by Abubakar Shekau in the Sambisa Forest, and another led by Mamman Nur, on and around Lake Chad.

According to the Nigerian military, scores of jihadists have been killed and hundreds of others have been forced to surrender in recent days. Boko Haram began its bloody insurgency in Nigeria in 2009, seeking to install an extremist Islamic state in the country. The militants began cross-border attacks in 2014, and have regularly carried out raids in Cameroon, killing, looting and kidnapping villagers.

Since 2014, Cameroon has been fighting a military campaign against the group, including cross-border operations with Nigerian troops. But the group is estimated to have killed some 2,000 civilians and soldiers, and abducted more than a thousand people, in the last four years. Across the region, violence committed by Boko Haram has killed at least 20,000 and displaced more than 2.6 million people.

Source:AFP

12, January 2018

Nigerian Foreign Minister confirms arrest of Ambazonia leaders in Abuja ⁰

A human-rights lawyer representing English-speaking Cameroonian separatists said Thursday the group had been arrested by Nigeria’s secret service and were being held “illegally”, calling on the government to probe their disappearance. Femi Falana Femi Falana said Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, the president of the anglophone separatist movement in Cameroon, and nine others were detained at a hotel in Abuja last weekend. “Armed operatives of the State Security Service (Nigeria’s secret service) invaded the venue, abducted our clients and took them away to an undisclosed place,” he said. The intelligence agency has denied any arrests but rumours have swirled about the men’s possible whereabouts.

Nigeria’s foreign minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, on Wednesday told reporters he had met the security agencies and said questions remained about the identity of those detained. “I don’t know whether to call it an arrest or it could be people just called in for questioning or whatever. The investigations are ongoing,” he said after a cabinet meeting. Falana, however, called for his clients to be either released from “illegal custody” or charged within 48 hours, threatening court action “to secure the enforcement of their fundamental rights to personal liberty”. The leaders have not been in contact with their families or legal team, he said, adding he had “confirmed” the government in Yaoundé had asked Abuja to repatriate the men. “Our clients are not illegal immigrants in Nigeria as some of them have been granted political asylum by the federal government while others have valid permanent resident status in Nigeria,” said Falana.

On October 1, the breakaway Anglophone movement issued a symbolic declaration of independence for “Ambazonia”, claiming autonomy over English-speaking regions in the country. Cameroon’s President Paul Biya fiercely opposes secession and has met the agitation with a crackdown, including curfews, raids and restrictions on travel. Thousands of refugees have flooded the border into Nigeria to escape the violence. International monitors say at least 20 and possibly 40 people have been killed in clashes since late September, though the Biya government fiercely disputes the death toll. The Anglophone minority dates to the emergence of Cameroon in 1960-61, as France and Britain wound down their colonies in west Africa.

www.vanguardngr.com

11, January 2018

Ambazonia Crisis: Roman Catholic Bishops Fail to See Eye to Eye ⁰

“It was like I was watching a horror movie” is how the bishop of Mamfe diocese in Cameroon’s South West Region described the scene he saw in the village of Kembong village.

Mgr Andrew Nkea had visited the village in the wake of the deaths of four soldiers late December, killed by unknown assailants (although the government claimed they were secessionists). In a retaliatory move, Cameroonian soldiers had incinerated the whole village.

“I saw more than 20 houses burnt down by soldiers and one dead body still lying there, being fed on by dogs and chicken,” said Nkea. Of the village’s 5,000 or so residents, only 30 remained, all huddled in the house of the area’s priest because “they had nowhere else to go.”

The December attack is the latest in an ongoing crisis – pitting Cameroon’s English speakers (who make up 20 percent of Cameroon’s estimated 24 million people) against the Francophone-dominated government – that now risks exploding into a full-scale civil war.

With Anglophone Cameroonians having long complained that they are being marginalised, resentment burst into the open a year ago with teachers and lawyers in the English-speaking part of Cameroon taking to the streets to protest against the use of French in their schools and courts.

What started as a teachers’ and lawyers’ strike has escalated into a full-blown political crisis, with many in the English-speaking regions now calling for secession.

In fact, on October 1, 2016, secessionist leaders in the English-speaking part of the country announced a nominal declaration of independence, provoking a muscular reaction from Cameroon’s security forces, with the ensuing clashes leaving at least 17 people dead according to the government (although opposition leaders claimed at least 100 died).

Rift between Anglophone and Francophone bishops

The crisis has drawn sharp lines between Catholic bishops from the English-speaking and French-speaking parts of the country.

Anglophone bishops described the killings as “a growing genocide” and published a long and detailed statement on Oct. 4 in which they decried a “warlike atmosphere” of killings, looting and arson carried out by “young people” and acts of “brutality, torture, inhuman and unjustified treatment meted out” by the “forces of law and order”.

But the characterisation of the crisis as genocide was not shared by the bishops from the other regions of the country.

Archbishop Samuel Kleda of Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, who is president of the country’s Episcopal Conference issued a statement condemning the violence, but refusing to use the inflammatory language of his Anglophone colleagues.

“In the name of our common citizenship, brotherhood and humanity, the defence of legitimate interests must go hand in hand with social harmony, which is what is being sought … Violence, regardless of its source, does not build, it destroys,” said Kleda.

The archbishop pointed out that all regions of Cameroon face problems which, he said, can be resolved through dialogue, arguing that decentralisation would resolve many regional problems in Cameroon, including the Anglophone problem.

That drew sharp criticism from the clergy in Anglophone Cameroon who have always seen the ‘Anglophone Problem’ as one that is unique.

Father Gerald Jumbam said that by lumping the ‘Anglophone Problem’ with all other problems in the country, Kleda was ignoring a key historical fact: that English and French-speaking Cameroons were two countries that had decided to come together and that that they had come together under agreed terms which have been jettisoned to the disadvantage of Anglophones.

In a lengthy missive to Kleda, Jumbam wrote that by virtue of their history, Anglophone Cameroonians “cannot be loyal subjects to the despicable and tyrannous Yaoundé government. Archbishop, you speak of decentralisation and you offer us it as the best gift you think fitting for the resolution of this crisis? We are determined to decline a gift so laden with spurious promises and deceitful propensities.”

Church leaders in Anglophone Cameroon have also accused the president of the National Episcopal Conference of failing to as much as acknowledge the ‘Anglophone Problem’, let alone condemn the arrests and detention of Anglophone leaders and the “grotesque campaign of human savagery and barbarism perpetrated on the people of Southern Cameroons by the government.” Instead, they said, the Prelate seems to be toeing the government line by reducing the ‘Anglophone Problem’ to just another Cameroonian problem.

Cardinal Christian Tumi, one of Cameroon’s most revered clerics who comes from the English-speaking part of Cameroon, says that such corrosive representation of the problem must be discontinued. “I would say that the others should keep quiet when the bishops of [English-speaking] Bamenda Ecclesiastical Province write because they know better what is happening.”

Genesis of a crisis

French-speaking Cameroon obtained independence from France in 1960, with British Cameroons obtaining independence in 1961. Both sides agreed to reunite following an 11 February 1961 plebiscite, but they did so under a federal system of governance that guaranteed the survival of the political, cultural, educational and judiciary legacies of both sides inherited from the colonial masters.

Just three years after that reunification, English speakers began feeling they were being marginalised.

In a confidential letter to Cameroon’s first President, Ahmadou Ahidjo, Professor Bernard Fonlon, a senior official of the ruling KNDP party in the then Southern Cameroons (now the English-speaking part of Cameroon) summed up this feeling: “Since we came together, the KNDP has hardly done more than stand by and look on. For, talking sincerely, can we name one single policy in any field – economics, education, external affairs – that has been worked out jointly by the two parties? Can we point a finger at one idea that took birth in the KNDP and was welcomed and implemented by this government?

“There is disillusionment; discontent and frustration are sinking and spreading. There is nothing so calculated as to wring and crush the human spirit, before a lofty enterprise, as to know what should be done and yet to have to stand by impotent and see the opposite taking place. This desperation has become explosive.”

Even then, a controversial referendum scrapping the federal system in 1972 meant that whatever protections the federal constitution gave English speakers were simply destroyed.

Anglophone Cameroonians believe that the agenda has always been that of annihilating their identity as a people, which is why their simmering discontent exploded in late 2017.

www.indepthnews.net

11, January 2018

15,000 Southern Cameroonian Refugees Flee to Nigeria Amid Crackdown ⁰

More than 15,000 Cameroonian refugees have fled to Nigeria amid a crackdown on Anglophone separatists, the United Nations (UN) refugee agency and Nigerian government officials said on Thursday.

The once-fringe English-speaking movement in majority French-speaking Cameroon has gathered pace in the last few months after a military crackdown on protests, leading it to declare independence in October for a breakaway “Ambazonia” state it wants to create.

The move poses the biggest challenge yet to the 35-year rule of President Paul Biya, who will seek re-election this year, and the violent repression he has unleashed has driven thousands of people from English-speaking regions across the border into Nigeria.

More than 8,000 refugees have been registered in the southeastern state of Cross River alone, said Antonio Jose Canhandula, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) representative in Nigeria, at a briefing in Abuja.

A further 6,700 or so Cameroonian refugees have crossed into neighboring Benue state, said Sadiya Umar Farouq, the head of Nigeria’s National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons, citing Benue officials.

There are also at least 350 refugees in the states of Taraba and Akwa Ibom, said Tamuno Dienye Jaja, deputy comptroller general of the Nigeria Immigration Service.

The refugees are mostly children, women and the elderly, with very few young men, the officials said.

“Certainly there are more, how many more we are not able to state,” said the UNHCR’s Canhandula.

“They are still coming, and they are coming daily,” he said. “It is a crisis.”

More food assistance, education and social services are needed, particularly as a number of the women are pregnant at a young age, were are all issues, Canhandula said.

Nigeria’s Farouq pledged the government’s support.

“We are going to do all that we can to bring some kind of relief,” she said.

Nigerian and Cameroonian officials have met to discuss the refugees and those talks are ongoing, she said, although she declined to give details.

The separatist movement, including armed radical elements, has strained bilateral relations between the two countries.

Last week, Nigerian authorities took 12 leaders of the separatists, including the chairman of the self-declared Governing Council of Ambazonia, into custody after they gathered for a meeting in a hotel in the Nigerian capital Abuja, people familiar with the matter said.

Cameroonian troops last month crossed into Nigeria in pursuit of rebels without seeking Nigerian authorization, leading to diplomatic wrangling behind the scenes.

The unrest in Cameroon began in November, when English-speaking teachers and lawyers in the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon that neighbor Nigeria, frustrated with having to work in French, took to the streets calling for reforms and greater autonomy. French is the official language for most of Cameroon, but English is spoken in the two regions.

Source: Reuters

11, January 2018

Bundes: Merkel warns of big obstacles in way of forming coalition govt. ⁰

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that there are still “big obstacles” in the way of forming a “grand coalition” between her conservatives and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Merkel said Thursday in final hours of negotiations between the SPD and her alliance of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party — the Christian Social Union (CSU) — that the two top parties had yet to surmount major differences before they could declare there were common grounds to form another coalition government.

She said her alliance would “work constructively to find the necessary compromises but we are also aware that we need to execute the right policies for our country.”

SPD leader Martin Schulz also talked about “big obstacles” that remained in the way of a final deal between the two parties, although he was upbeat that such an agreement could finally come through.

Schulz said his party and the Merkel-led alliance had “broad agreement on the fundamentals of European policy,” adding that the SPD wanted to gain assurances from Merkel that a new coalition government would be committed to work for the progress of the European Union.

EU policies are among main bones of contention between Merkel and SPD leaders while the two sides also disagree on immigration, social welfare, tax and other issues.

There is also a possibility that SPD’s mid-rank members could manage to block the initiation of coalition talks with the conservatives, a scenario which would leave Merkel with her last option to form a minority government.

Merkel’s failure in reaching a coalition deal with the Greens and the Liberals following the September elections prompted the German president to call on the SPD to revise its previous decision to go into the opposition. However, opinion polls suggest Merkel’s chance of surviving a full fourth term in office is grim as the veteran leader’s approval rating is falling, mainly due to her controversial asylum policies, which many say have helped the rise of the far-right in Germany and fueled the current political limbo.

Source:Presstv

11, January 2018

Abuja’s silence of the Lamb and the Ambazonia situation report ⁰

Tens of thousands of Ambazonians throughout Western Europe, South Africa, Canada and the USA have planned to march and attend rallies to show their support for the Interim President of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia, His Excellency Sisiku Ayuk Tabe and his top aides arrested in Abuja, Nigeria last week. The leaders of the newly created republic grouping Southern Cameroonians have been placed in solitary confinement in the Nigerian capital city.

Ambazonians will be demanding the release of their leaders by the Buhari administrations and an end to detention without trial and of solitary confinement. In French Cameroun, the Biya Francophone regime has announced through state sponsored media organizations that Nigeria handed the Ambazonian leaders to Yaoundé since Friday last week.

Pro Yaoundé political commentators have also opined that President Biya teleguided the commando operation from Etoudi without the knowledge of the Nigerian Head of State, Retired General Buhari. We of Cameroon Intelligence Report can now reveal that President Ayuk Tabe and his senior advisers including top aides are still in the Nigerian capital Abuja.

We want Ambazonians to understand that Nigeria even under the late General Sanni Abacha had better human rights record than La Republique du Cameroun. Lawyers representing the Ambazonian leadership have completed the necessary procedures and the legal battle is expected to begin tomorrow or latest Monday.

Information circulating in Francophone Cameroun that the DSS carried out the operation without the knowledge of President Buhari is simply not true. Unlike Biya who sleeps for Martin Belinga and Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh to run the country for him, President Buhari is a former army general and a micro manager.

For those who do not know, when President Buhari took office, his top priority was to get his own man as head of the State Security Services (SSS) known today as the Department of State Services (DSS). Consequently, President Buhari made a recall appointment to active service involving Lawal Musa Daura his kinsman from the same village who had long retired to replace Ita Ekpenyong Ekong from Cross River State. It is evidently clear that President Buhari is by extrapolation the Head of the DSS.

Cameroon Concord News Group is keeping a watchful eye on the developments in Abuja and we will keep our readers posted as soon as we get any latest development.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

11, January 2018

Armed robbers steal millions from Ritz Paris hotel ⁰

Axe-wielding robbers stole jewelry on Wednesday possibly worth more than $5 million from a store in the famed Ritz Paris hotel, police said.

Five thieves carried out the heist at the luxury hotel in late afternoon. Three were arrested while two others got away. There were no injuries.

“The loss is very high and remains to be assessed,” one police source said. Another put the figure at 4.5 million euros ($5.38 million), but said that a bag had been recovered possibly containing some of the loot.

The hotel first opened in 1898 and was the first Paris hotel to boast electricity on all floors and bathrooms that were inside rooms.

A picture shows the facade of the Ritz luxury hotel in Paris on January 10, 2018, after an armed robbery. (By AFP)

Armed heists targeting jewelry stores are not uncommon in the ultra-chic avenues near Place Vendome in central Paris where the Ritz is located.

Place Vendome, with its opulent window displays of jewelers and high-end watchmakers, has been the scene of several audacious daytime raids.

Security had been boosted in the area, which also houses France’s Justice Ministry, in 2014 after several daring armed raids on Place Vendome in which jewels worth between 420,000 and two million euros were seized.

The landmark Paris Ritz hotel re-opened its palatial doors to guests in 2016 after nearly four years of renovations and a major fire.

The hotel founded by Swiss entrepreneur Cesar Ritz in 1898 is storied as the lodging of choice of Marcel Proust, Charlie Chaplin, Coco Chanel and Ernest Hemingway, who has a small bar named after him.

In more recent history however, the Ritz has become known as the place where Britain’s Princess Diana spent her last hours before a car accident in a tunnel in the French capital while being pursued by paparazzi.

(Source: Agencies)

11, January 2018

The people of Ambazonia on the brink of destruction: Can anything save Southern Cameroons ⁰

Ambazonia, which in the beginning had avoided being sucked into the civil war that is slowly but surely developing in Cameroon, has now become the site of the biggest humanitarian disaster in the over one year crisis.

The Manyu County – home to about 2 million residents – has been subjected to a near ceaseless military campaign in recent weeks by Cameroon armed forces. Cameroon Concord News London bureau chief, Asu Isong traveled home in December to observe the determination of Ambazonians in building Africa’s newest democracy.

The people of the Ossing Kingdom knighted him as a Sessekou in a historic ceremony. Sessekou Ashu Isong covered the onslaught in Egbekaw village and the attacks on a Gendarmerie Post in Mamfe.

He says Cameroon government forces have killed hundreds of Ambazonian civilians in the last three weeks alone. As more talks for dialogue get underway in Abuja-Nigeria where the leadership of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia is being held and Southern Cameroons teeters on the brink of being totally annihilated, we take a look at what’s on Sesseku Asu Isong’s dairy.

In December 2017, I made a three weeks trip to Ambaland for family and municipal purposes. If ever my commitment to help liberate and build The Federal Republic of Ambazonia was in doubt, this trip quenched that indecision. As I arrived at the ugly obscenity which is flippantly called Douala International Airport, my repulsion at the place turned to resentment. The structure is anything but an international airport.

In the twenty-first century, it is acceptable that there is no bureau de change, only men whistling at you and gesturing that they have local and foreign currency to peddle and purchase. The shops are prehistoric and half empty with vendors wearing facial expressions of people who have never been trained in dealing with the public and don’t really want to be there.

As we waited for our luggage to arrive, I dashed down to the little boy’s room and was in for the mother of all shocks. I went in and visited all the cubicles much to my bewilderment, there weren’t any toilet papers. As I left the indignity to take the long drive to Buea in pain, I noticed a young lady outside the door rationing the little toilet rolls the Biya regime could offer. It was shameful and disgusting and I said to myself never say you have seen it all.

The thought matured that the place wasn’t fit for purpose. Whilst waiting for my luggage, it dawned on me that many of the so-called leaders in La Republique du Cameroun where I had landed had studied and lived in the developed world. Many of them frequently visit other countries that have invested in people and infrastructure to enjoy good facilities. But with all the material wealth that the country possesses, only destitution and insufficiency are engraved on the faces of the people and their surroundings.

As we collected our bags and headed to Buea, I asked myself how we, as a people from Ambazonia, have accepted for fifty-seven years this marriage of inconvenience. I asked myself how and why people in this country under this insanity called a government have come to accept the intolerable. During that long drive, I kept pondering and deliberating with myself how a country so rich with natural resources and intellectuals can be so underdeveloped and unacceptably backward.

As I went to bed that night, I came to the decision that these people have been sold falsehoods for too long that they couldn’t do anything about their situation. They have been lied to for too long that things just have to be a certain way. The mindset of the people has been programmed to accept inaccuracies about their destinies.

As I crisscrossed Ambaland during my stay and saw the misery that has been perpetrated on my people by our political partners in French Cameroun, I agreed with many that the time for change has come.

Above all, what pleased me was the fact that the MINDSET of the people in Ambaland has changed. Our people back home now believe that if it’s to be, it’s up to them and that bequeathed me an enchanted satisfaction that no matter the obstacles we are going to face over the coming years, we will prevail, and our dream will one day be a reality in Buea.

Sessekou Asu Isong

Next on the Sessekou’s dairy is his encounter with two Gendarme officers in the Manyu County who instead of controlling his car documents at a checkpoint, begged for money to buy food.

11, January 2018

Ambazonia risks wider destabilization as Cameroon army begins operation to crackdown businesses ⁰

With the arrest and killing of hundreds of Ambazonians in the Manyu County this week, the Biya Francophone regime has taken a step closer to provoking a violent insurgency in the Southern Cameroons territory by embarking on an economic crack down. As tensions rise, both the Cameroon administration and the Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia have succeeded to push Nigeria further into the British Southern Cameroons conflict

After the massive seizure of cocoa, rice and the destruction of fuel largely imported from Nigeria, Tuesday the 9th of January 2018 witnessed the Cameroon armed forces intensified their actions on motorbikes. More than 200 motors bikes were confiscated in Mamfe Central sub constituency.

Cameroon Concord News learned that road blocks were erected from the High Court Junction in Mamfe town right to the Customs office. All the bikes that were forcefully collected from their riders were transported using an army truck to a military camp in Besongabang.

The leadership of the Francophone dominated army reportedly auctioned some of the bikes to raise money for the purchase of food stuffs and drinking water for the starving soldiers. The Manyu constituency in the Federal Republic of Ambazonia now risks wider destabilization with this current Cameroon army economic crackdown on Southern Cameroonians.

By Judith Fon