Saturday, December 29, 2018

Conflagration welling up in Cameroon: Africa is deep asleep

Ochieng’ Ogodo

Journalist-Kenya

[NAIROBI] Something absurd, inimical to human civilisation – dynamite just welling up and a tap away from conflagration – is sweeping across Cameroon. It’s been a simmering pot of hatred that Africa seems to care less about. Yet, it has the potential of another African bloodbath of Rwandan proportion if not more.

Hostility

The hostile dispositions pitting Francophones and Anglophones in that country is teetering on the verge of a demonic outburst. The recent killing and public dragging of Anglophones in the Francophone - Bangourain - West Region is a signpost of bad moving to worse.
Francophones and Anglophones in the hotspot areas seems to have shed off restraint and refrain from hate speech and retaliation against one another – And the government led by Paul Biya (85 years in age) who has been Cameroonian President since 6 November 1982, after rising rapidly as a bureaucrat under President Ahmadou Ahidjo in the 1960s, is not working with all parties to have a dialogue and end the Anglophone crisis.

Stunning trends and turns

The stunning trends and turns of events in the Anglophone Northwest and Southwest Regions of Cameroon that is constantly degenerating into events with the potential magnitude of upsetting neighbouring Francophone Region of the West Region is real.
Hate crime, retaliatory ethnic conflict, indoctrination and violent extremism as a result of cross-regional attacks from armed separatist groups and villagers of affected communities if fast snowballing into an absolute dreadful explosion.
Just as people were about the usher in the 2018 December festive season, news from media and individuals trickling in from the areas were of an arson attack allegedly led by hundreds of armed men –about 300 in number - from Bangolan (in Babessi sub-division in the Northwest Region) targeting a village in Bangourain, a sub-division in the neighbouring Noun Division, which led to the destruction of dozens of houses – counted at least 85 affecting over 100 families – with the death of at least one person, several others wounded and abduction of at least 15 persons and resultant heavy material and financial losses of other infrastructures.

Retaliatory attack

In a retaliatory attack on 26 December residents of the affected neighbourhood in Bangourain, two persons suspected to be arsonists were apprehended, lynched, and their bodies dragged on the ground attached to motor bikes with chains.
This hate rhetoric from both sides is a sad reflection of bloody events that preceded the Rwandan genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi, where there was a mass slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda during the Rwandan Civil War, which had started in 1990.

Africa must act

This repugnant act is calling for a solution for hate crime; immediately from within and without Cameroon. Regardless of their ethnic, religious, political, ideological, cultural or economic denominations, there is need for an urgent action to ground sanity.
The stories from the impacted areas are horrible and foresight is urgent on the Cameroonian government, the Anglophone and Francophone west. But even more importantly, Africa as a continent swinging into a more serious engagement in more genuine peace-building processes.
The Cameroon government’s continued military operations in the Northwest and Southwest Regions that has fuel the inhuman crimes perpetrated by both the defense and security forces and the armed separatist groups needs to come to an end, and an immediate cease fire put in place.
Why should people who share so much in common and similarities and only separated by languages SAVAGELY turn on each other? Why have they taken leave from exercising restraint and avoiding involving themselves in actions that endanger human life, cause injuries, destroy private and public property, cause material and financial losses, and aggravate the already preoccupying tensions between the populace, government forces and separatist groups?
Has the Cameroon government lost legitimacy to initiate investigations into the happenings and seek justice where necessary, reparation, and reconciliation of parties to the conflicts?
Africa – a continent with so much stake in Cameroon - has to act (and fast) before we even think of global bodies such as The UN.

#ASEWACHO