By Ntumfoyn Herbert Boh (Yindo Toh)*
Washington, 8 December 2016 - Riot police and paramilitary forces shot into crowds of protesters
Thursday killing more than ten people in the town of Bamenda, the capital of
the English-speaking North West Region of Cameroon and a stronghold of
Cameroon’s main opposition political party, the Social Democratic Front (SDF).
 |
| TWO OF THE VICTIMS |
Many more people are
believed to have been "disappeared".
As the sun set Thursday,
video posted on social media showed troops patrolling the main streets of
Bamenda on foot or in the open backs of pickup trucks - firing aimlessly into
the air and sometimes towards buildings.
A dozen lorry loads of
gendarmes numbering several hundreds of troops drove through the western town
of Bafoussam just before darkness headed for Bamenda, according to online
reports citing Canal+, a Bafoussam-based private broadcaster.
One audio recording
posted on the Cameroon Online WhatsApp eGroup claimed that the troops coming
from Bafoussam are trainees, well known for putting down demonstrations by
employing only the worst forms of brutality and savagery.
The student soldiers
are currently in training at the Koutaba Military Camp based in the outskirts
of Bafoussam. Their mission, according to citizen journalists online, is to
raid Bamenda under the cover of darkness and perpetrate as much killing and
violence to completely intimidate the protesters, and to do so at a time of day
(darkness) when their acts cannot be recorded and shared via social media.
Photos and video of some
of the ten victims killed in Bamenda Thursday and posted on social media
suggest that several of them were executed outright or were killed execution
style.
One of the horror
pictures shows one of the victims who was arrested, stripped naked, tortured
and then executed by firing a bullet up either his anus or his genitals,
ripping through his manhood. Another showed a young man who was executed by a
lone bullet fired into one of his nostrils.
Another picture showed
eight young men arrested, stripped of their shirts and made to lie facedown on
the road with riot police and gendarme officers patrolling not far away from
them.
Social media accounts hold that the eight were later executed while lying
on the road and their bodies were carted away by their executioners, apparently
also instructed to cover up for their crimes by moving the bodies away from the
scene of execution.
State television
confirmed the fear that the government was carting away and burying people
without informing their families when its French language newscast said only
two had been killed.
On one video, a group of
young men who had converted a piece of plank into a stretcher are seen rushing
an injured teenager to a nearby hospital. Voices in the video explain that the
teenage victim was standing outside the entrance of their family home when he
was shot, point blank, execution style.
Yet another video posted
by one of the many citizen journalists struggling Thursday to document the
executions (at great risk to themselves) showed a military pickup truck,
picking up and carry away the remains of someone that had been killed and had
been lying in the street just minutes before.
Cameroonian security
forces and the dreaded secret or political police are known to “disappear”
protesters and opponents of Mr. Paul Biya, the president of Cameroon for 34
years already. He is more likely than not to seek another eight-year term in
presidential elections expected to hold in 2018.
 |
| CORPSE OF BAMENDA UNIVERSITY STUDENT AKUM JULIUS |
Democracy and human
rights activist, Tapang Ivo Tanku, quoted “unconfirmed reports” on social media
as alleging that a police station had been burnt down by angry protesters in
Bamenda after they stormed it earlier on Thursday to decry the killing of young
men in Bamenda.
Video posted online
showed
young people outside that police station, screaming their grief and
calling for justice. Pointing at the remains of another young man, shut dead
and still lying in the street outside the police station, the protesters said
the victim had been killed by gunfire coming from that police station.
One of
the protesters raised the lifeless body of the victim, leaned the upper part of
the remains from waist up against his legs, and screamed into the phone camera
“we want justice”.
Yet more video showed a
crowd stumbling on another young man who had been executed or killed execution
style. A few voices in the video identify the victim by his first name,
apparently, Divine.
The remains of Divine showed that his jaws had been slashed
from the mouth right up to just before his ears with a knife or some other
sharp object. Bullet wounds on his left leg, through the jeans trousers he was
wearing and one on his face left little doubt that the victim had died of his
gunshot wounds.
Born on the Wrong Side
of the River Mungo, Charged with the Crime of Not Being Francophone, and
Executed
The worst has happened
in Bamenda, screamed a headline on the online news portal, Cameron Journal,
published by a Texas-based Cameroonian-American.
Young people are being
killed in Bamenda, wrote Innocent Chia, a Cameroonian journalist and blogger
now based in Chicago, USA, and author of an online blog, The Chia Report.
“Many watched this
morning how… police fired straight at me. God Almighty did another miracle. The
bullet was diverted to my feet and only wounded both feet”, wrote Mancho Bibixy
on social media.
Mancho Bibixy is the
young man who has become the face of the ongoing protests in Cameroon after he
brought his own coffin to the first protest march in Bamenda and stood in it to
make his speech.
 |
| MANCHO; AFTER CHEATING DEATH |
Mancho Bibixy told the
crowd at a Bamenda town road junction – Liberty Square, made famous by the
killing on that spot in 1990 of six young people who had joined demonstrations
calling for the end of one party rule - that he had come to the rally ready to die
and had taken the time to buy the coffin for his own funeral.
His feelings are shared
by millions of people who have nicknamed the ongoing protests in Cameroon
"The Coffin Revolution".
The “sole crime” of the
young people killed, wrote Mr. Chia, “is that they were born on the wrong side
of the River Mungo and happen to speak English, not French”. The Mungo River
serves as the borderline between English and French-speaking Cameroons.
Cameroonians based in
the United States will be appealing the administration of President Barack
Obama next Saturday, 10 December 2016. At a grand rally outside the White
House, they will also be appealing to the U.S. Congress, the United Nations and
the rest of the civilized world to help put an end to the horrors unfolding in
Bamenda and across most of English-speaking parts of Cameroon.
The rally (outside the
White House, holding from noon to 2pm) was scheduled before the events of
Bamenda and was intended to drum up support in the United States for the
restoration of the independence of Southern Cameroons.
 |
| ARRESTS |
Birth of MoRISC to
Champion the Restoration of Independence
A federation of
organizations has been freshly constituted to mobilize international support
for the restoration of the independence of Southern Cameroons. Known as the
Movement for the Restoration of the Independence of Southern Cameroons
(abbreviated MoRISC), it brings together members of leading opposition party,
SDF based in the Washington, DC, Metro Area, and leaders of pro-independence,
pro-democracy and pro-human rights organizations.
The movement is focused
more on independence for Southern Cameroons, but the anger overflows into
demands for Cameroon’s long-serving dictator, Paul Biya, to step down.
“It is time for
you (Paul Biya) to pack and go”, chanted a group of Cameroonians living in
France, who on Thursday staged a protest march down several blocks of streets
in the French capital, Paris.
“Tell Paul Biya and his
bunch of killers and criminals that they will have to account for all the
innocent Southern Cameroonian lives they are destroying”, a Washington-based
Cameroonian-American activist, Chrstimas Ebini, wrote Thursday on the Cameroon
Online WhatsApp eGroup. “Tell him to get his forces out of Southern Cameroons”,
he added.
The feeling that there
is a conspiracy by French-speaking Cameroonians to hold their English-speaking
citizens in a relations of black-on-black colonial domination has been
strengthened by the fact that trade unions of lawyers and teachers in the
French-speaking parts of the country have not shown any solidarity with their
colleagues, despite the violent attacks they have suffered at the hands of
security forces.
 |
| BAMENDA DEC 8 2016 |
Prime Minister, Cabinet
Ministers and Others Airlifted to Safety
Social media is
overloaded with horrific pictures and videos of the tragedy unfolding in
Bamenda, where earlier Thursday, the Prime Minister of Cameroon, Philomen Yang,
several members of his government and sympathizers of the ruling Cameroon People’s
Democratic Movement (CPDM) held a rally in an attempt to show support for the
present unitary state of Cameroon and opposition to the growing
pro-independence movement.
According to eyewitness
reports, the ruling party ferried hundreds of youngsters from neighboring
French-speaking regions to attend the rally in Bamenda, after a similar attempt
to stage a rally Tuesday in Buea, the former capital of British-administered
Southern Cameroons until it gained independence on 1 October 1961, flopped completely.
On Monday December 5 , the leader of the SDF, Ni John Fru Ndi led a monstrous demonstration
in Buea, attended by several thousands to show support for independence and to
protest against human rights violations against students of the University of
Buea and lawyers from the English-speaking part of Cameroon who, along with
teachers have been on strike to protest marginalization.
 |
| SDF RALLY IN BUEA DECEMBER 5 2016(Fru Ndi) IN WHITE |
The two strikes have
since shown as much sympathy for independence as do many in the ranks of the
opposition SDF. At the Buea rally on Monday, one singer who tried to sing the
anthem of Cameroon at the start got shouted down by thousands others: “No
anthem. No anthem.”
The United Nations
General Assembly voted on 21 April 1961 to grant independence to the
English-speaking part of the Cameroons, then known as British Southern
Cameroons. The French-speaking part of Cameroon (eight of the current ten
regions of the country and accounting for 80% of the population) gained
independence from France on 1 January 1960, more than a year and a half before
the English-speaking part of the country.
Shortly after troops
started firing into crowds of demonstrators and killing people on Thursday in
Bamenda, angry mobs took to the streets, chasing after those who had come to
town to show their support for Mr. Biya and the unitary state he leads.
According to social media accounts, the irate crowds even targeted the Prime
Minister and ministers, raising barricades on roads leading from the Ayaba
Hotel in downtown Bamenda where the Prime Minister was reportedly forced to
hunker down for a couple of hours before being airlifted out of the town in a
military helicopter.
One of his cabinet
ministers, Paul Atanga Nji, who serves as the special security adviser to
President Paul Biya, was reportedly also chased after by angry protesters, some
of whom reportedly attacked him physically. On one video posted on social
media, showing someone arriving the Bamenda Regional Hospital in the regalia of
the ruling party, a footnote claimed that Mr. Atanga Nji was hurt in one of his
eyes by the angry mob.
Sources say Mr. Atanga
Nji also had to airlifted into safety in a military helicopter from the Bamenda
Regional Hospital after mobs reportedly burnt down his car parked outside the
hospital. The protesters also lowered the Cameroonian flag on the grounds of
the hospital and, in its place, raised the flag of Southern Cameroons. Two days
earlier, similar flag lowering and hoisting of the Southern Cameroons flag had
been reported in Kumba, in the English-speaking South West Region.
Two weeks ago, Mr.
Atanga Nji, a former convict who has currently been charged with embezzling
public funds by the government-created anti-corruption court, was the object of
strong ridicule on social media after he claimed in an interview on state
television that there was no problem of marginalization of Cameroon’s
English-speaking minority (20% of the country’s 22 million inhabitants).
 |
| BURNING RULING PARTY REGALIA |
As Bamenda settles into
an uneasy calm Thursday night, most social media postings from residents in that
town repeat a message that rang through most posts in the day. By ordering
executions in Bamenda Thursday, Mr. Biya has declared war on Southern
Cameroons, citizen journalists kept repeating Thursday on social media.
END
Please, share this
report with your representative in Congress, your Member of Parliament or the
National Assembly, your Senators, with Media Outlets in your country, with
Human Rights Organizations… and add your name to several petitions online to
denounce the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the
colonialist government of Cameroun against citizens of Southern Cameroons.
* The writer is a veteran Cameroonian journalist
with years of pro-democracy and human rights activism under his belt who
know lives in the United States.
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