8, August 2020
More Than 100 Boko Haram, Captives Surrender Along Cameroon-Nigeria Border 0
More than 100 Boko Haram and their captives, almost all Nigerians, have fled the group in the past two weeks, according to the Multinational Joint Task Force fighting the Islamist militants.
Thirty-four-year-old Nigerian Kharim Kalga is among 109 people who have surrendered to the task force since late July.
Kalga said he has not seen his two wives and five children in the two years since he joined the Islamist militant group because they kept him captive.
He said he was living in poverty when Boko Haram fighters promised to give him a motorcycle to earn money for his family, so he joined the group. He said he was forced to steal cattle and millet from villages surrounding the militant group’s camp in Nigeria. Kalga said he surrendered to the military because Boko Haram did not fulfill its promise to give him a motorcycle.
The task force is holding the former Boko Haram fighters and captives at their base in Cameroon’s northern town of Mora, near the border with Nigeria.
Among them are 45 Nigerian and three Cameroonian former fighters, 45 Nigerian children and 16 women who were being used as sex slaves.
Commander of the Multinational Joint Task Force Major General Ibrahim Manu Yusuf said the Nigerians are all from Borno state, a Boko Haram stronghold.
A campaign calling for Boko Haram members to surrender and be pardoned has helped in the fight, Yusuf said.
“As professional armies, we always open this window for those who wish to come up and surrender,” he said. “You know the narrative in the Boko Haram enclave is that if you come out, soldiers will kill you, and based on the way they are being treated, the way they are being managed, they kept calling on their other colleagues to turn over themselves.”
The governments of Cameroon and Nigeria will decide whether the former Boko Haram members will remain in Cameroon or go back to Nigeria.
Rehabilitation center
Meanwhile, the former militants were handed over to the Cameroon Center for Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration.
The Mora-based center was created in 2019 to rehabilitate 100 ex-militants at a time, but currently hosts more than 250. Center director Oumar Bichair said he needs more resources to rehabilitate the increasing numbers fleeing Boko Haram.
The government of Cameroon should provide more housing and workers, especially psychosocial caregivers, Bichair said, adding that the center also needs more workers who can train ex-fighters with skills such as farming, carpentry, and raising fish and livestock.
The Multinational Joint Task Force fighting the Islamist militants is made up of troops from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria.
The U.N. says the decade-long conflict with Boko Haram has left 30,000 people dead and displaced more than 3 million throughout the region.
Source: VOA
8, August 2020
Outrage after Southern Cameroons detainee dies chained to French Cameroun hospital bed 0
An avalanche of condemnation from human rights advocates has followed new of the death of a Cameroonian detainee under shocking circumstances.
Tangem Thomas Nganyu, 57, a former monk and metal sheet engineer died at the Yaounde Central Hospital on Wednesday, chained to his hospital bed, his lawyer, Barrister Nicodemus Amungwa Tanyi said.
“Tangem died in chains to the satisfaction of the prison and justice administrators,” the lawyer said.
Tangem was one of hundreds of English speakers arrested in the wake of a bloody conflict in the country’s two English speaking regions of the Northwest and Southwest, where armed separatists have been fighting since 2017 to create an independent Anglophone state called Ambazonia.
NEGLECT CLAIM
Reports say he was arrested in Buea, in the Southwest region over three years ago and whisked to an overcrowded maximum security prison in the capital where he fell ill.
Tangem’s family said prison authorities neglected his illness until late last month when he was rushed to the hospital after his condition deteriorated.
Images of him cuffed to a hospital bed despite his poor health inundated social media platforms prior to his death.
The Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (CHRDA) condemned the poor treatment of the detainee who it said was arbitrarily arrested and detained in very poor conditions, leading to worse state.
“CHRDA is concerned about the fact that he was unable to get proper medical attention, a right enshrined under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Cameroon Criminal Procedure Code,” the organisation said in a statement.
“We call on Cameroonian prison authorities to provide better medical services to inmates and not subject them to any form of inhumane and degrading treatment,” CHRDA said further.
Tsi Conrad, one of the detainees of the Anglophone crisis currently serving a 15-year jail sentence, said Tangem died from pain and misery.
“Without judgment, he prayed to go home. Three years behind bars in a dungeon of pain, hope made way for delusion. For nothing, Pa Tangem Thomas died in body but his soul now looks from above at his foe,” Tsi wrote from jail.
The government is yet to make an official statement about what observers describe as inhumane treatment.
JOURNALIST’S DEATH
Tangem’s death comes barely two months after the government confirmed that another detainee of the Anglophone crisis, Samuel Ajiekah Abuwe alias Samuel Wazizi, died in military custody in Yaounde.
Police arrested the journalist on August 3, 2019 in the South West region. He was transferred to military custody on August 7 then ferried to the nation’s capital Yaoundé six days later, according to the military.
Though he died on August 17, 2019, his death was only confirmed in June. The military also denied accusations that he was tortured to death, saying he died “as a result of severe sepsis.”
Commentators say the two deaths show the precarious conditions which some inmates arrested in connection to the socio-political crisis in the Anglophone regions are going through in detention facilities across the country.
The two English speaking regions of Cameroon have remained volatile since a peaceful demonstration by teachers and lawyers, over perceived marginalisation, morphed into an armed conflict in 2017.
Over 3,000 civilians and hundreds of security forces personnel have been killed in the Anglophone regions since the crisis started, according to Human Rights Watch.
The UN estimates that at least 700,000 others are internally displaced.
Source: Daily Nation