23, January 2021

Larry King dies at 87 ⁰

Larry King, the suspenders-sporting everyman whose broadcast interviews with world leaders, movie stars and ordinary Joes helped define American conversation for a half-century, died Saturday. He was 87.

King died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Ora Media, the studio and network he co-founded, tweeted. No cause of death was given, but CNN had earlier reported he was hospitalised with COVID-19.

A long-time nationally syndicated radio host, from 1985 through 2010 he was a nightly fixture on CNN, where he won many honours, including two Peabody awards.

With his celebrity interviews, political debates and topical discussions, King wasn’t just an enduring on-air personality. He also set himself apart with the curiosity he brought to every interview, whether questioning the assault victim known as the “Central Park Jogger” or billionaire industrialist Ross Perot, who in 1992 rocked the presidential contest by announcing his candidacy on King’s show.

In its early years, “Larry King Live” was based in Washington, D.C., which gave the show an air of gravitas. Likewise King. He was the plainspoken go-between through whom Beltway bigwigs could reach their public, and they did, earning the show prestige as a place where things happened, where news was made.

King conducted an estimated 50,000 on-air interviews. In 1995 he presided over a Middle East peace summit with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He welcomed everyone from the Dalai Lama to Elizabeth Taylor, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Barack Obama, Bill Gates to Lady Gaga.

Especially after he relocated to Los Angeles, his shows were frequently in the thick of breaking celebrity news, including Paris Hilton talking about her stint in jail in 2007 and Michael Jackson’s friends and family members talking about his death in 2009.

King boasted of never over-preparing for an interview. His non-confrontational style relaxed his guests and made him readily relatable to his audience.

“I don’t pretend to know it all,” he said in a 1995 Associated Press interview. “Not, `What about Geneva or Cuba?′ I ask, `Mr. President, what don’t you like about this job?′ Or `What’s the biggest mistake you made?′ That’s fascinating.”

At a time when CNN, as the lone player in cable news, was deemed politically neutral, and King was the essence of its middle-of-the-road stance, political figures and people at the centre of controversies would seek out his show.

And he was known for getting guests who were notoriously elusive. Frank Sinatra, who rarely gave interviews and often lashed out at reporters, spoke to King in 1988 in what would be the singer’s last major TV appearance. Sinatra was an old friend of King’s and acted accordingly.

“Why are you here?” King asks. Sinatra responds, “Because you asked me to come and I hadn’t seen you in a long time to begin with, I thought we ought to get together and chat, just talk about a lot of things.”

King had never met Marlon Brando, who was even tougher to get and tougher to interview, when the acting giant asked to appear on King’s show in 1994. The two hit it off so famously they ended their 90-minute talk with a song and an on-the-mouth kiss, an image that was all over media in subsequent weeks.

‘Regular-guy’ approach became dated

After a gala week marking his 25th anniversary in June 2010, King abruptly announced he was retiring from his show, telling viewers, “It’s time to hang up my nightly suspenders.” Named as his successor in the time slot: British journalist and TV personality Piers Morgan.

By King’s departure that December, suspicion had grown that he had waited a little too long to hang up those suspenders. Once the leader in cable TV news, he ranked third in his time slot with less than half the nightly audience of his peak year, 1998, when “Larry King Live” drew 1.64 million viewers.

His wide-eyed, regular-guy approach to interviewing by then felt dated in an era of edgy, pushy or loaded questioning by other hosts.

Meanwhile, occasional flubs had made him seem out of touch, or worse. A prime example from 2007 found King asking Jerry Seinfeld if he had voluntarily left his sitcom or been canceled by his network, NBC.

“I was the No. 1 show in television, Larry,” replied Seinfeld with a flabbergasted look. “Do you know who I am?”

Always a workaholic, King would be back doing specials for CNN within a few months of performing his nightly duties.

He found a new sort of celebrity as a plain-spoken natural on Twitter when the platform emerged, winning over more than 2 million followers who simultaneously mocked and loved him for his esoteric style.

“I’ve never been in a canoe. #Itsmy2cents,” he said in a typical tweet in 2015.

His Twitter account was essentially a revival of a USA Today column he wrote for two decades full of one-off, disjointed thoughts. Norm Macdonald delivered a parody version of the column when he played King on “Saturday Night Live,” with deadpan lines like, “The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the equator.”

King was constantly parodied, often through old-age jokes on late-night talk shows from hosts including David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, often appearing with the latter to get in on the roasting himself.

Broadcasting ambitions

King came by his voracious but no-frills manner honestly. He was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in 1933, a son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who ran a bar and grill in Brooklyn. But after his father’s death when Larry was a boy, he faced a troubled, sometimes destitute youth.

A fan of such radio stars as Arthur Godfrey and comedians Bob & Ray, on reaching adulthood, King set his sights on a broadcasting career. With word that Miami was a good place to break in, he headed south in 1957 and landed a job sweeping floors at a tiny AM station. When a DJ abruptly quit, King was put on the air — and was handed his new surname by the station manager, who thought Zeiger “too Jewish.”

A year later he moved to a larger station, where his duties were expanded from the usual patter to serving as host of a daily interview show that aired from a local restaurant. He quickly proved equally adept at talking to the waitresses, and the celebrities who began dropping by.

By the early 1960s King had gone to yet a larger Miami station, scored a newspaper column and become a local celebrity himself.

At the same time, he fell victim to living large.

“It was important to me to come across as a ‘big man,”’ he wrote in his autobiography, which meant “I made a lot of money and spread it around lavishly.”

He accumulated debts and his first broken marriages (he was married eight times to seven women). He gambled, borrowed wildly and failed to pay his taxes. He also became involved with a shady financier in a scheme to bankroll an investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination. But when King skimmed some of the cash to pay his overdue taxes, his partner sued him for grand larceny in 1971. The charges were dropped, but King’s reputation appeared ruined.

King lost his radio show and, for several years, struggled to find work. But by 1975 the scandal had largely blown over and a Miami station gave him another chance. Regaining his local popularity, King was signed in 1978 to host radio’s first nationwide call-in show.

Originating from Washington on the Mutual network, “The Larry King Show” was eventually heard on more than 300 stations and made King a national phenomenon.

A few years later, CNN founder Ted Turner offered King a slot on his young network. “Larry King Live” debuted on June 1, 1985, and became CNN’s highest-rated program. King’s beginning salary of $100,000 a year eventually grew to more than $7 million.

Covid-19 hospitalisation

A three-packs-a-day cigarette habit led to a heart attack in 1987, but King’s quintuple-bypass surgery didn’t slow him down.

Meanwhile, he continued to prove that, in his words, “I’m not good at marriage, but I’m a great boyfriend.”

He was just 18 when he married high school girlfriend Freda Miller, in 1952. The marriage lasted less than a year. In subsequent decades he would marry Annette Kay, Alene Akins (twice), Mickey Sutfin, Sharon Lepore and Julie Alexander.

In 1997, he wed Shawn Southwick, a country singer and actress 26 years his junior. They would file for divorce in 2010, rescind the filing, then file for divorce again in 2019.

The couple had two sons, King’s fourth and fifth kids, Chance Armstrong, born in 1999, and Cannon Edward, born in 2000. In 2020, King lost his two eldest children, Andy King and Chaia King, who died of unrelated health problems within weeks of each other.

He had many other medical issues in recent decades, including more heart attacks and diagnoses of type 2 diabetes and lung cancer.

Early in 2021, CNN reported that King was hospitalized for more than a week with COVID-19.

Through his setbacks he continued to work into his late 80s, taking on online talk shows and infomercials as his appearances on CNN grew fewer.

“Work,” King once said. “It’s the easiest thing I do.”

(AP)

23, January 2021

Kondengui: CRTV’s Gervais Mendo Ze at death’s door ⁰

The family of the former general manager of the Cameroon Radio and Television, Gervais Mendo Ze has declined to say what his ailment is as the one time cabinet minister was again taken to a Yaoundé hospital late Tuesday.

A family source recently revealed that the severity of Mendo Ze’s illness had been shrouded in secrecy by the Biya Beti Ewondo regime.

The former chartered member of the ruling CPDM crime syndicate had always suffered some kind of sickness ever since he was arrested and detained at the Kondengui High Security Prison on allegations of embezzlement and fraud.

Cameroon Intelligence Report gathered that Mendo Ze had kidney problems and the latest bout of his illness is related to a heart condition.

There has been so many local media reports that Gervais Mendo Ze was on the mend but we will never really know the true extent of the illness troubling the man who now weighs barely 45 kilograms.

The French Cameroun political elite can no longer stand up, sit down on his own or lift his elbow to take a sip of water. He spends his days lying down, with a barely audible voice.

Some concerned barons of the so-called essingan clan have written to his blood relation-President Paul Biya and one of those letters carried the title “Mr. President of the Republic, remember Professor Gervais Mendo Ze”.

By Rita Akana in Yaounde

23, January 2021

Why Yaoundé is obsessed with hosting the Afcon ⁰

“Ithink [the] 2022 [Africa Cup of Nations] has the power of taking Cameroonian sport to another level,” says Njie Enow, sport editor at state-owned Cameroon Radio Television.

The central African country is desperate to host the continent despite the many challenges it has faced since being given the right to stage the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon). They were stripped of that right when they were deemed unprepared, but given the 2021 edition instead.

And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, pushing the men’s continental showpiece to 2022. The country’s readiness to host the Afcon is being tested in the African Nations Championship – the Afcon for home-based players – that started on 16 January 2021, and will go on until 7 February.

The country, initially slated to host the competition in 2019, was found to be unprepared by the Confederation of African Football (CAF). This after the confederation decided to increase the number of participating teams from 16 to 24. Cameroon were awarded the rights to host in 2014 when only 16 teams were expected to take part. The country’s stadiums could handle that. Now, with 24 teams in the competition, there were doubts about their capacity to handle the expanded version. Cameroon was, however, adamant that they still could successfully host the competition.

Afcon heralds glory days

The country’s obsession with hosting the continental competition might be motivated by the benefits it derived from it in the past. It hopes for a replication of these advantages. Cameroon hosted the competition in 1972. And two stadiums were built then: the Ahmadou Ahidjo Stadium (named after Cameroon’s first president) and Douala Reunification Stadium. And, until 2016 when the country hosted the women’s edition of Afcon, these were the only facilities to meet international standards.

Now that the country has an opportunity to host another Afcon, the government has built footballing infrastructure in many regions. Five of the country’s 10 regions now have over 30 stadiums and training pitches to be used for the Afcon. “We want to be one of the best in Africa,” says tournament manager, Michel Dissake Mbarga.

Moreover, with improved facilities, the country’s football fraternity – league strength and competitiveness – improves. This results in local teams performing better in continental competitions.

“With the construction of these arenas, and the boom in football, came in greater glory for Cameroonian clubs – Canon of Yaoundé, Tonnerre of Yaoundé and Union of Douala. Canon used to set up at the Ahmadou Ahidjo Stadium, while Union set up at the Reunification Stadium,” Enow said.

Cameroonian clubs dominated continental football after the 1972 Afcon hosting. Canon lifted the CAF Champions League in 1978 and 1980 while Union won it in 1979. Tonnere won the 1975 CAF Cup Winners’ Cup.

‘A vehicle to heal a wounded nation’

But this Afcon could do more than just improve the country’s infrastructure, it could also be a vehicle to heal a divided and wounded nation.

On a cold grey night on 5 February 2017, in Cameroon’s Southwest region’s capital, Buea, there were countless groups of Cameroonians watching their national team play in the Afcon final. This despite the Anglophone region being involved in calls and actions for secession.

Buea, the centre of the Anglophone community, had just seen its university students beaten up and some raped because they called for school reforms. This later escalated to a call for separation from the country’s Francophone majority, who make up 80% of Cameroon.

However, Vincent Aboubakar’s 88th minute goal, which gave Cameroon a 2-1 win over Egypt in the final, changed the atmosphere from anger to joy and fanfare. There even was the clacking of pots and pans in celebration throughout the national territory, even in English-speaking regions.

That victory served as a good propaganda tool for President Paul Biya. Cameroon’s Anglophone region had recently been protesting and calling for their own state, saying they are being marginalised by the country’s Francophone majority.

Cameroon, then, won the Afcon at just the right time. President Biya ordered the trophy to be paraded in the capital towns of Cameroon. There was a similar national tour of the Indomitable Lions’ Afcon trophy in 1984 when he faced an attempted coup.

“Sports and politics are intertwined. Periods of sports domination always have helped in consolidating political power,” said Enow.

The Afcon as a pacifier

Cameroon has spent large sums of money to host the tournament. When Dissake was asked why the country did so despite its many problems, he said: “What one should know is that… the head of state decided to offer to the Cameroonian youth more than 30 high-level sports infrastructure. It is for the exploitation of the Cameroonian youth. Nobody will take it away after the Afcon.”

His thoughts are affirmed by the President of the Cameroon Football Federation. “It’s an opportunity to thank the government of Cameroon, especially the head of state for all the efforts that have been put. People don’t imagine what effort it is to build stadiums, to ameliorate infrastructure: roads, hospitals…” Seidou Mbombo Njoya told the press after CAF postponed the 2021 Afcon to 2022.

Using sport, especially major tournaments, to pacify an angry nation is nothing new. Many authoritarian leaders across the globe have done this. The overall mission for Biya is to win back the hearts of Cameroon’s youthful majority. Cameroonians aged 37 and below have known just one president. And under his leadership, the country has been battered by ethnic divisions and conflicts.

Suppressing a coup in 1984, two years after his rise to power, Biya bent the political system to his will. He won the 1992 elections amid controversy, and got re-elected in the 1997 poll effortlessly when the opposition boycotted. He won another term in 2004. He is now in his seventh term as president.

The country’s economy, which has been ailing since the 1990s, is now made worse by a separatist war being fought in the west. This is a nightmare for the president because his failures are laid bare. His leadership, then, is desperate to give Cameroonians the Afcon competition in hopes that they will be pacified and the country “healed”.

Source: New Frame

23, January 2021

CRTV: Ashu Nyenty and the rise of nauseating political sycophancy ⁰

There is an African proverb that says that only a fool tests the depth of a river with both feet. Despite the availability of wisdom to help many in society, there is always a fool who, out of greed, will want to test the fury and frustration of a people impoverished and emasculated by corrupt authorities. The latest tragedy of a man attempting to rewrite history is a certain scum journalist who is vertically and horizontally challenged and goes by the name Ashu Nyenty. To seek relevance, political and career promotion, he took to Cameroon’s national broadcaster, CRTV, recently to insult the sensibilities of 25 million Cameroonians by uttering insulting flattery upon a public failure and a monument of embarrassment. Ashu Nyenty spewed that Paul Biya, a man responsible for running a prosperous nation to the ground, is a blessing to his people and Cameroonians are lucky to have him as their head of state.

In the video, which is now viral, Ashu Nyenty justified his qualifications as a half-baked clown on a national platform with a megaphone and nothing constructive to say. Because Ashu Nyenty only cares about himself and represents such falsehood and shameless political and career ambition at a time when the Butcher of Mvomeka is killing thousands of Southern Cameroonians, we, of the Cameroon Concord News Group will focus on his person. He must know that his sycophancy and disgracefully deranged support and flattery of a first-rate criminal is intolerable.

Cameroonians hardly suffer fools gladly and their reaction towards the Ashu Nyenty Comedy of helplessness speaks to the anger in many Cameroonian minds. The current anti-Ashu Nyenty alliance now in Cameroon is a remarkable testimony to his capacity to inspire revulsion from his words of dishonesty, absurdity, and flattery. He is a disgrace and has irresponsibly and purposefully put the lives of his family members in the county of Manyu in the Southern Cameroons at risk. Ashu Nyenty is also now an embarrassment to all GHS Mamfe alumni and he must be treated as such.

Even if one concedes Ashu’s right to free speech and opinion, one must marvel at his motive for such carelessness in act and repugnance in words considering he suffered the ignominy of being expelled from the University of Yaoundé for deception and delinquency. His subsequent mutation and reappearance at the University of Buea with an alteration to his name did not safe him as he was apprehended and expelled again. His deception, as witnessed in his now famous video, is not a fluke but a character flaw. His dismissal from The University of Buea was reported in the Weekly Post by Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai who is now Cameroon Concord News Group’s Editor-in-chief and Chairman.

Cameroonians are cursed to have such inept calamities passing as PhDs and journalists. It is entirely clear that Ashu Nyenty possesses a questionable intellect and a warped mind. He counts his English during his boring shows on CRTV and presents with neither finesse nor structure and has set the record for having videos on YouTube with less than 20 views after ten months.

Ashu Nyenty, one way or another, will go down in infamy as a man who took flattery to the gutters and septic tank of journalism for calling a dying diaper-wearing demagogue a blessing. If any doubts were left about Ashu Nyenty’s place of dishonour in history for his sightless surrogacy, they have now been erased. The video is an almost unimaginable buffoonery and inexcusable idiocy in insinuating that Cameroonians are blessed to have a stationary and brain-dead clown as their leader.

Many journalists and critics in Cameroon have all but abandoned their professional standards because the CPDM poison has spread far beyond their ability to ignore. Journalism and standards in public office and the truth in Cameroon are in intellectual and moral life support. Several distorted and stunted Anglophone comedians are holding briefs for the CPDM crime syndicate. They have popped up around Yaoundé and on social media in recent years, each seemingly more irritating than the other but this intellectual lilliputian called Ashu Nyenty is fast becoming the worst of them all.

Today, in what is meant to be a channel for candour and facts to the people of Cameroon, CRTV is a shameless public relations department of the CPDM crime syndicate. It is a dull caricature of twenty-first century broadcasting, characterised with mediocrity and rotten to the core with criminality, meaninglessness, and incompetence. Unfortunately, in a country where the best brains have been killed, are in prison or in exile, one must accept the reality that the chaffs are now running the show with astonishing ineptitude. And so, we are cursed with the Ashu Nyenty(s) of this world.

Media illiteracy in Cameroon is a huge problem but the media’s ability to inspire disgust by airing absurdity, falsehoods, CPDM nonsensical adulation is curiously astonishing. How many killings of Southern Cameroonians can people like Ashu Nyenty tolerate, excuse, and ignore? How much injury by Biya and his thugs to the Cameroon political space does he quantify and qualify as a blessing?

Cameroonians watched in disbelief and horror as the pint-sized so-called journalist inspired revulsion in his short video of feigned flattery of a monster whose own close collaborators agree in private that he is an abject failure. Calling his sickening utterances in the video intellectual and professional is grossly immoral and irresponsible.

Is his goal to speak truth to power or to flatter those in power? Is his goal to stand by the principles of the law he claims to have studied or to seek relevance and career promotion? A few hundred miles away in Accra and Abuja, journalists and the press are holding their respective governments responsible. The Cameroon government has always been lucky that in a country where poverty has stripped nearly all its citizens of their dignity, honesty has been dumped into the latrines.

It is now painfully clear that Ashu Nyenty is seeking political favours within the high office of the CPDM crime syndicate, but he must heed the warning of Shakespeare that “this above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day”. Ola Rotimi wrote in The Gods are not to Blame “if crocodiles eat their own eggs, what would they do to the flesh of a frog?”. Let him look at the Kondengui Maximum Security Prison and reflect on those words.

It is not hard to understand why so many in the Cameroons have chosen not to go along with the CPDM’s core principles of theft, deception and flattery designed to keep a dying despot in office. Ashu Nyenty must know that a career that is complicit in undermining the values of integrity and academic uprightness does not mean much.

Unfortunately, Paul Biya refuses to accept the reality of his considerable failures and thrives on flattery and criminality. Ashu Nyenty must have been told this, so, human specimens like him are determined to create an alternate reality in which a war criminal and prolific embezzler is a blessing.

The values of journalism and the law which he purports to represent are being undermined by Paul Biya and he will pay a steep price for his moment of madness in that video.

There are countless lessons to be learned here, including uncomfortable questions about the quality of education and persons delivered from universities in Cameroon and the place of integrity and honesty in Cameroon’s public life. Ashu Nyenty has become a public irritant with a mind foolishly immature and incapable of sound intellectual judgment.

Ashu Nyenty’s unashamed audacity is made more painful and pathetic because this is the time Cameroon needs men and women with brains and integrity. For a man with a PhD attached to his name, he is an embarrassment. He has tested the depth of the dangerous waters of the Cameroons with both feet, the price for his ignorance, provocation and stupidity is huge and he would pay sooner rather than later.

By Isong Asu

London Bureau Chief

Cameroon Concord News Group

23, January 2021

Southern Cameroons Crisis: Hundreds missing in Fako County after raid by BIR ⁰

Hundreds of Southern Cameroonians are feared missing after elements of the Rapid Intervention Battalion raided Tiko, Mutengene and Limbe late on Thursday in a move to protect visiting football teams participating in the African Nations Championship.

The BIR soldiers arrived Fako County on military trucks and started shooting into the air, causing people to flee and arresting dozens, witnesses said.

The Francophone dominated army targeted popular neighborhoods including residential areas in Tiko, Likomba, Mutengene and Limbe and in the outskirts of Buea – where more than a thousand Buea University students are said to reside.

Territorial Administration minister, Paul Atanga Nji said on Tuesday that the Biya Francophone government will take tough measures against Southern Cameroons Self Defense Forces who killed security forces.

The Minister of Defense Joseph Beti Assomo also said there was credible intelligence that Ambazonia Restoration Forces were planning to sabotage critical telecoms infrastructure to sabotage and disrupt the Total African Nations Championship (CHAN) 2020 football tournament in Limbe.

Meanwhile, the Vice President of the exiled Southern Cameroons Interim Government, Dabney Yerima condemned the so-called French Cameroun “callez callez” and has reportedly ordered the Ambazonia Intelligence Service to carry out a full audit of the Biya regime recent action in the Fako County.

Residents living in the Likomba area told Cameroon Concord News that they heard gunfire late on Thursday, and that the Cameroon government military operation lasted for more than five hours.

By Rita Akana in Buea

22, January 2021

Zimbabwe boss accuses Cameroon of WITCHCRAFT after dead bat is found on pitch of African Nations Championship opener ⁰

ZIMBABWE have accused Cameroon of WITCHCRAFT after a dead bat was found on the pitch of their African Nations Championship opener.

The discovery was made before the game in Yaounde, which tournament hosts Cameroon won 1-0.

Zimbabwe boss Zdravko Logarusic accused Cameroon of WITCHCRAFT after finding a dead bat on the pitch.

A photograph, via Goal, showed Zimbabwe’s Croatian boss Zdravko Logarusic kneeling next to the bat’s carcass, which was on the centre spot of the halfway line.

The tactician had a piece of paper next to the bat which read ‘Witchcraft in Cameroon’.

Whether it was intentional or not, Zimbabwe ended up suffering defeat at the Stade Ahmadou Ahidjo in front of Fifa president Gianni Infantino.

Cameroon’s Salomon Banga popped up 18 minutes from time to score a winning overhead kick to send the quarter-full stadium of home fans into raptures.

But despite accusing Cameroon of witchcraft before kick-off, Logarusic was upbeat at the final whistle.

The Zimbabwe gaffer told Caf: “We will try our best to see how things go.

“We have tried our best as the technical team to give most players in the top flight a chance to prove themselves.

“We will certainly try our best. We need to improve in every area of the game and hopefully we will be in better shape as a team.

Source: The Sun

22, January 2021

Biya Francophone regime aims to curb Amba attacks on telecoms infrastructure ⁰

Cameroonian authorities say they are on high alert following threats by separatists to sabotage telecommunications infrastructure and disrupt the Total African Nations Championship (CHAN) 2020 football tournament in Limbe in the restive English-speaking part of the country, ITWeb reported, citing a memo sent to military chiefs in the region.

Minister of Defence Joseph Beti Assomo said there was credible intelligence that “separatist terrorists” were planning to sabotage critical telecoms infrastructure.

Source: Telecompaper

22, January 2021

Southern Cameroons Crisis: Atanga Nji vows to respond to killing of security forces ⁰

Cameroon’s Minister of Territorial Administration, Paul Atanga Nji said on Tuesday the government will take tough measures against separatist rebels who killed security forces in the country’s volatile English-speaking region of Northwest.

“These people who killed security forces and innocent civilians will be tracked down in their latest hideouts. In their own interest, they should surrender to the police and gendarmerie before we come for them. There will be no escape,” Nji told reporters while visiting a military checkpoint in Matazem that was attacked by armed separatists.

At least, 12 members of Cameroonian security guards have died in attacks by separatists since the start of January, according to security reports. The number of civilian casualties is not known.

“The good news is that some of the assailants and accomplices of the attacks have been arrested. What is going on now is the last of the resistance because the terrorists have lost strength and speed,” Nji added who regularly refers to separatists as “terrorists.”

Armed separatists have freshly intensified attacks in the region that was relatively calm in December, according to security sources.

Armed separatists and government forces have been embroiled in an over three-year-old bloody conflict in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions of Northwest and Southwest where separatists want to establish an independent nation they call “Ambazonia.”

Source: Xinhuanet

21, January 2021

Biden should give Biya 48 hours to step down ⁰

US President Joe Biden is aware that the Biya Francophone regime in Yaoundé has a history of reckless aggression against its own citizens and particularly the English speaking minority. Biden is also well informed of the Biya’s regime deep hatred for free speech, democracy and the rule of law and has for more than two decades helped French sponsored groups linked with French business interest to destabilize the Central African Republic.

We of the Concord News Group are of the opinion that US President Biden should begin his foreign policy project in Africa precisely in La Republique du Cameroun where an 87-year-old dictator is slaughtering his own citizens in great numbers.

President Biden should follow the George Bush example that brought freedom and dignity to the Iraqi people by issuing an ultimatum to Paul Biya and his gang of Beti Ewondo army generals to step aside within 48 hours or face military action.

A genocide being perpetuated by Mr Biya’s military is going on in the English part of the country now known as Southern Cameroons-Ambazonia. To stop it, the current US administration should be decisive. The level of barbarism by the Francophone dominated military and pro Cameroon government militias as they pursue their war and scorch earth policy to completely annihilate English speaking Cameroonians is alarming.

So far, as a result of the on-going Cameroon government military campaign in the English speaking regions, an estimated 20,000 people have been killed, over 280 towns and villages have been burnt down, over 120,000 people are seeking refuge in Nigeria and further afield, over 1million people are internally displaced or living in bushes and over 3,000 persons incarcerated in prisons and detention facilities. It is also reported that over 4.5. Million people are at risk of famine. One thing we know for sure is that Mr Biya and his military and private militia will be held accountable for these crimes.

Reacting to the sad situation in the former British Southern Cameroons, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States Congress introduced on 8 September 2020, Resolution 684 on the crisis in the Cameroonian regions of the North-West and South-West and was adopted on 1 January 2021.

Resolution 684 condemned the abuses committed by state security forces and armed groups in the northwest and southwest regions of Cameroon, and affirmed that the United States continues to hold the Government of Cameroon accountable for safeguarding the security and constitutional rights of all its citizens, regardless of region, religion, or political opinion. In addition, it urges all parties to the conflict in Cameroon, the Government of Cameroon, U.S. foreign relations entities, and members of the international community to take specific steps to resolve the ongoing civil conflict in Cameroon.

The U.S. Congress was also critical of France’s action in the conflict. “…France maintains considerable interests in Cameroon, including significant economic and security cooperation, but has not sufficiently used its influence to stem atrocities committed in English-speaking regions or to support stronger international action to seek a resolution to the conflict,” Resolution 684 said.

While not exonerating Southern Cameroons Self-Defense Forces, Cameroon Concord News Group also know that Mr Biya’s government is doing everything through its private militia (popularly known as Atanga Nji Boys) to commit atrocities and link them to Southern Cameroons self-defense groups, so as to evoke international sympathy. Only an independent fact-finding mission can establish the facts and thus far, Mr. Biya’s government with French government support has resisted all requests by independent humanitarian organizations to visit English speaking Cameroon.

In passing resolution 684, the US Congress abundantly made the case for unleashing US forces against the regime in Yaoundé. Human Rights Watch confirmed that nothing has been heard from deportees that were transported by two known flights from the United States to Cameroon, on October 13 and November 11. The flights reportedly carried 57 and 37 Cameroonians respectively.

All peaceful efforts to put an end to the crisis in the English-speaking region, which is now in its fifth year, have failed again and again and again because the international community is not dealing with peaceful men.

President Biden needs to tear down the apparatus of terror in Yaoundé that continues to kill, girls and women continue to be raped, villages continue to be burnt down, and a force of occupation continues to occupy and terrorizes a people for speaking the English language.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

21, January 2021

Southern Cameroons Crisis: Abuses on both sides have made talks difficult ⁰

The United Nations recently called for an investigation after Reuters reported that Cameroonian soldiers opened fire on fleeing civilians during a weekend raid, killing up to nine people.

Three witnesses told Reuters that soldiers entered the village of Mautu in the South West region – at the heart of a separatist insurgency – raided homes and shot civilians as they ran for cover under nearby cocoa bushes.

The Cameroonian military denies wrongdoing. It said it was conducting a raid on separatist positions when it came under fire and had killed what it labelled “terrorists”.

“Deeply concerned & saddened by the attack on Mautu … that claimed the lives of many civilians. I call for an investigation into this attack,” said the head of the U.N.’s Central Africa office, François Louncény Fall, on Twitter.

Britain also expressed concern.

“There must be an urgent and impartial investigation, and the perpetrators must be brought to justice,” the British High Commission in Yaounde said on Twitter.

For four years the army has clashed with Anglophone separatist fighters among the forests and cocoa farms of western Cameroon. Over 3,000 people have died in the violence, which has intensified since the start of this year.

The witnesses said they saw nine dead people, including a child and an old woman. None of the dead was a separatist fighter, they said.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said it was treating four people from the village, all with gunshot wounds: a young child, two elderly patients and a young woman.

International players have long called for peace. Abuses on both sides have made talks difficult.

Sunday’s attack comes as three soldiers face trial for their alleged involvement in the killing of 21 civilians last year in a village in the North West region.

Source: Reuters