Cameroon: Civilians need better protection against violence

he Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has accused the conflict parties in the civil war in the minority regions of Cameroon of a lack of respect and of failing to protect the protect the civilian population. “One year after the declaration of independence of the English-speaking provinces, we are witnessing a mass exodus of the Anglophone minority. The people are trying to escape from the escalating civil war. The international community must show more efforts towards a political solution to the conflict – and there must be measures to protect the civilian population more effectively,” explained Ulrich Delius, the STP’s director, in Göttingen on Monday. At least 276,000 people have already fled the violence. The human rights organization urged the Cameroonian authorities not to try and keep the civilians from fleeing because of the presidential elections on October 7, 2018.

On October 1, 2017, independence advocates had symbolically proclaimed a new state of “Ambazonia”, consisting of regions that had been marginalized for decades. Yesterday, the authorities imposed a two-day state of emergency in the English-speaking areas for fear of protests by independence activists.

For 85-year-old President Paul Biya, the mass exodus is problematic – as he is hoping that the voters will re-elect him for his seventh term of office on October 7, 2018. Biya has been playing down the escalating civil war for months, stating that the situation in the Anglophone regions is to be seen as normal. However, those who are fighting for an independent state of Ambazonia are trying to show that it is not possible to hold credible, free, or independent elections in the embattled areas.

“The mass exodus is a clear sign that the civilian population is not convinced that the human rights violations will come to an end,” Delius emphasized. As many as 246,000 people have fled from the two Anglophone regions in the north and the south-west of Cameroon to other parts of the country, and another 30,000 people have sought refuge in neighboring Nigeria. “The main goal must be to protect the civilian population. They should not be kept from leaving the embattled regions,” Delius stated. Since mid-September 2018, soldiers had repeatedly kept civilians from leaving the southwest of the country by force of arms and by means of roadblocks. The authorities of the Anglophone regions of northwestern Cameroon ordered that refugees should only be allowed to pass the checkpoints if they provide the address of someone who is prepared to accommodate them.

Header image: UN Photo/Marco Castro via Flickr