124 - The Merciless Wars of Africa, III: Battling for Ambazonia
U.S. authorities yesterday arrested three citizens of Cameroonian origin for conspiring to raise and send funds to militants trying to carve a new nation – Ambazonia – out of that tightly-ruled West African country.
The U.S. Department of Justice said that the perpetrators solicited and raised funds for supplies, weapons, and explosive materials to be used in attacks against Cameroonian government personnel and security forces. They also sponsored kidnappings and ransoms to extort further funds for the separatist cause.
Ambazonia is the name that English-speaking Cameroonians now call the future state that they seek to establish after breaking with the rest of Francophone-dominated Cameroon. Of Cameroon’s 28 million people, about 20 percent speak English as their first language. For decades, Cameroon has marginalized, even discriminated against, its Anglophone minority.
Since 2017, Africans in the western corner of Cameroon have battled the country’s security forces in support of the Ambazonian cause. More than 4,000 combatants and civilians have lost their lives. At least 720,000 persons in the region are internally displaced, with 20,000 or more fleeing into neighboring Nigeria.
Africa’s newest civil conflict embroils the sections of Cameroon that borders on southeastern Nigeria’s Taraba, Benue, and Cross River states. Cameroon’s English minority has long complained about being deprived of equal employment opportunities and given only inferior schooling. The state, President Paul Biya, its autocratic long serving and often absent leader, and his military and police forces are accused of systematically preventing English-speaking Cameroonians from enjoying essential freedoms and basic human rights. Biya, now 89, has ruled repressively since 1982. He resides much of each year in Switzerland, often in the Hotel Intercontinental in Geneva, sometimes in a villa near Lausanne, rarely in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital.
Biya’s Cameroon has long given preferential treatment to his French-speaking compatriots, especially in the nation’s civil service, in the diplomatic corps, in the security services, and in terms of the provision of infrastructural improvements and educational opportunities. English-speakers have been compelled, they say, to assimilate into a dominant French culture. Biya, ruling from Yaoundé, in the French-speaking center of the country, concentrates the power and resources of the nation in majority areas, neglecting the Anglophone region, failing to pave its roads, construct bridges, erect proper schools, and more. The residents of Buea, the English-speaking region’s major city, have long argued unsuccessfully for better services and for English-speaking officials to be sent to their region from Yaoundé.
In 2017, after police fired on Anglophone protesters, killing a number who had grown tired of the Francophone teachers, bureaucrats, and magistrates posted to their areas without being able to speak the region’s language, aroused militants struck back. English-speaking Cameroonians had been complaining for years about the poor hand that English speakers had been dealt when the two Anglo-French separately administered UN Trust territories of Cameroon (once the German colony of Kamerun) had been bundled together in 1961. French and English are both official languages.
The Anglophone militants gained support throughout 2018 and their clandestine movement now numbers about 2,000 guerillas. In 2018 and 2019 they engaged in hit-and-run assaults on governmental facilities. They destroyed bridges and blocked roads. The insurgents kidnapped French-speaking small-town officials and killed police officers. They declared that they were Ambazonians seeking to secede from the Cameroon proper. They created a flag and a website, and now attempt to end French-speaking Cameroonian control of their portion of the country.
Armed with homemade guns and, allegedly, taking instructions from English-speaking Cameroonian exiles in Nigeria, Europe, and North America, the Ambazonian rebels are hunted down by Israeli- and American-trained cadres who constitute Biya’s shock troops. Soldiers have burned homes and buildings in more than 100 English-speaking villages, shooting and detaining civilians and sometimes executing hapless persons caught in the crossfire during their ruthless searches for separatis[EB1] ts.
In town after town near the Nigerian frontier concrete houses and stores are riddled with bullet holes; many communities have been abandoned. The government also turned off the Internet in the Anglophone area for several months. Residents have fled their rubber, banana, and palm oil plantations, reducing the nation’s agricultural output and impoverishing vast reaches of the Anglophone zone. (Cameroon’s western forests provide abundant refuge for secessionists as, farther north in the country, they give cover to Boko Haram, Nigeria’s Islamist insurgency movement.)
Cameroon’s state anti-separatist security force is stronger, better armed, and better trained than the secessionist shock troops. But those guerillas have ample support within the Anglophone zone and can move back and forth across the porous Nigerian border.
Yet, the separatists are losing access to new arms and to the cash with which to provision their rebellion. As a result, the government has this year been able to contain the insurgency and prevent it from spreading from rural areas to the larger cities and towns. Its partial success in the field has also led opponents in the diaspora, like the men arrested yesterday, to redouble their efforts to raise funds and buy arms for the dissident cause. On social media, diaspora activists have been promoting fundraising campaigns for assault weapons and other firearms, and there is an increasing, if uncoordinated, effort to deliver such materiel to those willing to fight the Cameroonian government.
Cameroon is also battling Boko Haram in the northernmost part of the nation. It has sufficient security personnel to cope with both the Islamists and the Ambazonians. But firepower and killings will hardly eliminate the secessionist surge. Governance reforms are required, but Biya is unlikely to approve them. Until he leaves, the drive for Ambazonia will thus keep western Cameroon aflame.