A five-day meeting to resolve Cameroon’s three-year-long conflict began Monday. The unrest in the English-speaking regions has cost more than 3,000 lives and displaced over 500,000 civilians.
Dozens of Governors, traditional and religious leaders and other dignitaries clad in festive attire disembarked from a MAROUA BOUND CAMAIR flight in YAOUNDE, the nation’s capital. Their destination: the great national dialogue that began Monday.
Hundreds of Cameroonians from across the country and from the diaspora invited the government to solve the so-called Anglophone crisis, in which more than 3,000 people have died and around half a million uprooted since 2016.
The crisis which began three years ago on October 12, 2016, when lawyers and teachers began striking in the English-speaking SOUTHWEST and NORTHWEST regions.
The protesters claimed discrimination by the majority French-speaking government.
The government assured the protesters that it would initiate a national dialogue. It also promised to establish a commission to promote BILINGUALISM and MULTICULTURALISM.
Instead security forces carried out mass arrests to intimidate the protesters. One of President PAUL BIYA’S most important confidants, PAUL ATANGA NJI, even said at the time that there was no Anglophone problem.
The protesters “were busy bodies who could be manipulated with money from abroad,” NJI said.
Meanwhile CARDINAL CHRISTIAN TUMI, one of the most important religious figures in the country: “The reasons for the crisis lie in poor governance; people are not involved in decision making. And they are living in a centralized political system, the Jacobin system, which we copied from France.” Until today, France is interfering in Cameroon’s internal politics”, he said.
Decentralization is one of the critical words of the crisis. “The Anglophone problem is as old as a united Cameroon,” said Presbyterian priest THOMAS MOKOKO MBUE.
“Since 1961 there have been repeated calls and petitions for dialogue. But the government refused to listen.” Until it was too late MBUE said.
A year after the first strikes, separatists in the NORTHWEST and SOUTHWEST regions declared an independent state on October 1, 2017.
They called this earmarked state AMBAZONIA.
The date is symbolic. On this day in 1961, the FRENCH-ADMINISTERED EAST and the BRITISH-ADMINISTERED WEST united to form CAMEROON. Now, the AMBAZONIANS want nothing to do with the YAOUNDE GOVERNMENT.
The conflict is becoming increasingly brutal when young men, called AMBA BOYS, fight in the bush against the army. Schools, hospitals, entire villages were burnt down, and people were murdered, intimidated, abducted.
More frequently, the term ‘civil war’ is being used to describe the crisis with both sides, separatists, and army blame each other for the atrocities.
For president PAUL BIYA, however, one thing is already clear: “The future of our fellow citizens in North and Southwest is in our republic,” BIYA said at the end of his call for dialogue.
