The Biya regime has evacuated a cream of jailed CPDM politicians including the former general manager of the Cameroon Airlines Yves Michele Fotso abroad for treatment reneging on a promise to end medical tourism Mr Biya made during the last presidential poll won by Prof Maurice Kamto.

The Yaounde regime is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on foreign medical trips to France, Switzerland, Morocco and the Republic of South Africa most of which are unnecessary. Highly placed government officials and army generals who travel abroad are mostly treated by Cameroonian doctors in France and in Switzerland.

Cameroon Intelligence Report gathered that President Biya has already made a decision for former Prime Minister Chief Inoni Ephraim to be ferried to Europe for treatment. It remains a national shame that Mr Biya has never consulted in a hospital in Cameroon.

President Biya has been leading the medical tourism industry in Cameroon by example wasting Cameroonian tax payer’s money in hospitals in Germany and in Switzerland and encouraging his acolytes, friends and family members to go abroad on frivolous medical trips.

There are a sea of Cameroonian doctors in Europe and the US and critics have accused the Yaounde crime syndicate of failing to address the brain drain by improving working conditions and health centres.

Mr Biya has always said his government’s hard-earned cash would not be spent on treating officials overseas but spends more than nine months in a year at the InterContinental Hotel in Geneva with his private medical staffs.

Cameroon has everything and is one of Africa’s oil producers but most of its citizens live in poverty. Mr Biya took office in November 1982 and promised to tackle corruption and waste. But what the leader claims to have achieved in his 37 years as head of state ranges from plain fiction to the most absurd.

By Chi Prudence Asong

Separatist factions demanding the release of their leaders have begun locking down the north-west and south-west regions and urging a boycott of a ‘back to school’ campaign supported by the Francophone-led state and civil society groups. 

Thousands of people have already fled their homes in cities like Bamenda, Buea and Kumba – at the epicenter of the conflict. Some have sought to hide out in the bush to escape the wrath of both the security forces and armed separatists. 

The military court ruling in the case of Julius Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, the president of the self-proclaimed Ambazonia and several, sparked renewed fears of an escalation in the violence.

As many as half a million people have fled their homes in the Anglophone regions since a crackdown on anti-government protests by English-speaking lawyers and teachers deteriorated into an armed separatist struggle in 2016.

Separatist lockdowns have occurred frequently and schooling has been disrupted in the three years since the crisis started. A Swiss effort to bring the Anglophone separatists and Francophone-led government together for peace talks is still in the early stages.

Solomon Amabo@solomon_amabo

Who is fooling who? Governor NW Region Cameroon says those fleeing violence with pots, mattresses, tables etc are students who are returning from vacation. The reality is the fear of a lockdown imposed by pro-independence fighters. How many lies will the rogue regime tell?

Lockdowns spark fear

Travel agencies in the cities of Bamenda and Buea have been crowded and chaotic as residents try to make arrangements to leave, mainly by road. Fares have doubled or even tripled in some instances.

Celine Tanui bought bus tickets for a trip to the city of Bafoussam in West Region, where she plans to enroll her three children in school. “The sentencing of Julius Sisiku Ayuk Tabe has worsened things here in Bamenda.”

Tanui said she was shocked by the court ruling and the separtists’ vow that schools will not resume until they are released.  “I have to carry my kids to the West so that they should go to school there,” she told DW.

The exiled chief of staff of the self-declared Ambazonian interim government, Elad Kizito told DW the lockdown was already in place in various villages. “The Republic of Cameroon is trying to use the school resumption to deceive the international community that everything is normal and that things have been normalized in the so-called Anglophone region.”

People who supported the Anglophone struggle are happy with the lockdown, while those who “live on the crumbs of the Republic of Cameroon” are disgruntled with it, Kizito said.

“Yes, it’s painful, it’s hard for the people. But we have made provision for those who are in dire need to be served in hospitals, childcare or emergencies.” Emergency services would be available in major centers such as Buea, Bamenda and Victoria,” he told DW. 

What about those fleeing? “Those are not people who are not happy with the lockdown, those are people who have experienced the brutal terrorist republic militia in their houses. They now don’t want it anymore and they are leaving.”

Three years of no school

Eighteen-year-old Quiniva and her younger brother were among hundreds of people waiting for transport out of the region at Bamenda Motor Park.

“I paid for a ticket. They gave us assurance that a car is coming. For several hours, we have been in the park – no trace of any car coming,” she said. The need to continue her education – three years of missing out on school prompted her to pack up.

DW asked the North West Region Governor Lele Lafrique Tchoffo Deben Adolphe about the boycott of the “back to school” campaign. “Showing them on Facebook, those devilish messages that people abroad who are not facing the realities – sending their children to school, enjoying life, celebrating marriages, going to the graduation of their children, showing on Facebook, asking our children here not to go to school.,” he said.

The fear of violence, said Quiniva, is constant.

“We need to go to Yaounde because we are scared of the military because the military doesn’t only attack you outside of the house. They even come and break into your home and attack you. So, nowhere is safe,” she told DW.

The separatists too are feared in the region by the people they represent.

“We are also afraid of the “Amba Boys.” We don’t feel secure because the “Amba” themselves also kidnap people, they kidnap students, they kidnap teachers – and even cut off fingers,” Quiniva said.

Separatist violence grips anglophone western Cameroon

‘Most neglected crisis’

A coalition of human rights groups on 26 August made a submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council, calling on it to urge Cameroon to end the violence in the regions, attend to the people in need of humanitarian assistance, and investigate human rights violations. 

The statement by Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada, the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) comes ahead of the 42nd regular session of the Human Rights Council, which takes place from 9 to 27 September.

“The crisis in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon is the most neglected in the world and increasingly neglected from within as journalists fear for their lives,” Yonah Diamond, legal council to the RWCHR, is quoted as saying in the statement.

Atrocities linked to Cameroon’s security forces came into focus on 27 August, when seven soldiers were due to go on trial for killing two women and two children in the Far North. The  soldiers were identified in a video footage of the incident that went viral in mid-2018.  

Amnesty International has documented human rights violations in Cameroon’s Far North and Anglophone regions

Amnesty International has documented cases of human rights violations committed by security forces in Cameroon for years.  Such violations, according to the international human rights watchdog, are taking place in the Far North in particular and at a lower level in the Anglophone south-west and north-west regions. 

“Not all of the security forces are massively violating human rights. They are playing a very important role in protecting the population. But there are several cases of torture, of extra-judicial killings, of arbitrary arrests that we have regularly denounced,” Samira Daoud, Amnesty’s Deputy West  and Central Africa Deputy Regional Director, told DW.

“This trial of soldiers for the killing of women and children in the Far North, for us, is a very important step because it is an admission that these violations are indeed occurring.”

“Cameroonian authorities need to draw a line and show that no army personnel responsible for atrocities will now escape from prosecution.”

Source: Deutschwelle

Cameroon Intelligence Report has gotten evidence that the Biya regime is planning to eliminate the Ambazonia leader Sisiku President Ayuk Tabe and his top aides currently being held at the Kondengui High Security prison in Yaounde.  The French Cameroun regime noted for a widespread campaign of assassination plots across Africa and Europe reportedly recruited the services of some Francophone medical doctors assigned to Kondengui by the Ministry of Public Health to kill the Southern Cameroons leaders.

As part of the French Cameroun diabolic harsh ploy to stifle the Ambazonia revolution, our senior chief intelligence officer in Yaoundé also revealed for the first time that he believes Yaoundé has successfully silenced General Ivo Yenwo, General Elokobi Daniel Njock and General Ekongwesse who all hail from Southern Cameroons.

The Ambazonia leader “cheated” death when the late French Cameroun minister Martin Belinga Eboutou failed to handover the money paid by the Biya regime to the Nigerian Secret Service boss for the Abuja-Nera mission.

The late Minister Martin Belinga Eboutou and Minister Paul Motaze were allegedly responsible for masterminding two major operations that claimed the lives of Captain Guerandi in Burkina Faso and Bishop Balla of the Bafia Diocese.

The families of both men had long suspected that Biya was responsible for the murders. French Cameroun lately hired gangsters in the Kondengui prison to carry out the recent killing of Southern Cameroons detainees during the riots as a way of hiding the Cameroon government’s involvement in the crime.

Yaoundé has used its diplomatic missions and criminal networks to engage in terror and assassinations home and abroad so as to retain a degree of plausible deniability for its actions. Several Bassa military officials who were raised up in the Southern Zone of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia have been contracted to carry out the killings of Southern Cameroons leaders.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai with files from Sama Ernest