Day: October 19, 2021

Cameroon’s French-speaking towns on the border with the English-speaking western regions are creating militias to stop separatist incursions. The militias say separatists are entering French-speaking towns to steal food and weapons for their movement or acting independently as armed criminals.

Cameroon’s military on Monday said it held several top security meetings in the capital, Yaounde, to examine the spillover of the separatist crisis from the English-speaking western regions to French-speaking areas.

Cameroon’s defense minister Joseph Beti Assomo said the military will never allow fighters to transfer the peril they cause in the English-speaking Southwest and Northwest regions to French-speaking border localities. He said he is reinforcing the military presence and increasing financial and material means to stop the separatists from entering French-speaking towns and villages.

Speaking on state radio, Assomo did not disclose the number of troops deployed to stop the separatists.

The military says French-speaking regions infiltrated by separatists include Mbouda, Galim, Babadjou, Babisenge, Foumban, Foumbot and Bafoussam. Two of these places, Foumbot and Bafoussam, are large commercial areas.

The military says there have been at least 60 attacks by separatist fighters in French-speaking localities with dozens of lives lost.

On social media, separatist groups have denied that fighters are looting. But they acknowledge attacks on several military positions, saying that they do so to seize weapons.

Rigobert Nchinda, a cattle rancher who relocated from Galim to Mbouda, said last week that suspected separatists seized five cows and money from him.

Nchinda said civilians live in total fear. He says many people are deserting border villages because of the recent frequent attacks and looting by suspected separatists. Business is at a standstill. To speak the truth, those of us remaining in border localities with English-speaking regions are not comfortable with rising insecurity caused by separatists who are infiltrating, Nchinda adds.

Defense Minister Assomo said civilians should assist the military by reporting suspects and strangers in their localities.

François Franklin Etapa is the most senior government official in Bamboutos, the district where Galim is located.

Etapa said militia groups have been created in all villages and towns on the border with the English-speaking Northwest to stop the incursions.

Etapa said Bamboutos is facing repeated assaults from secessionists because of its geographical location, near English-speaking regions. He said separatist attacks have dampened the spirits of civilians. He said he has decided to create vigilantes in all villages to help fight separatists who cross over from the English-speaking areas to commit atrocities in French-speaking border areas.

Etapa said people should not think that by promoting vigilantes, the country is handing over its duty of protecting citizens to militias. He said the militias should collaborate with traditional rulers, community leaders, the administration and the military by reporting strangers and armed men in the towns and villages.

Civilians and NGOs already contribute food and money to assist the militias. Many of the militiamen go out with locally made guns, machetes and bows and arrows to face intruders.

The military also says vigilantes should signal troops when armed men are spotted in the towns and villages.

Cameroon’s separatists have been fighting since 2017 to create an independent English-speaking state in the majority French-speaking country’s western regions.

The conflict has cost more than 3,000 lives and forced 550,000 people to flee to French-speaking regions of Cameroon or into neighboring Nigeria, according to the United Nations.

Source: Voice of America

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who died Monday, is being remembered in Africa for peacemaking, supporting the fight against AIDS and sounding the alarm against war abuses.

Cameron Hudson, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, recalled that Powell was the first U.S. official to declare genocide in the Sudanese region of Darfur and was deeply involved in the peace agreement ending Sudan’s longest-running civil war, which paved the way for South Sudan independence.

In 2004, Powell testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the violence in Darfur, an area plagued by deadly clashes for decades, and used the term, “genocide.”

“That was the first time that word had been used in that conflict, and it really became a rallying cry around the world and certainly within U.S. activist communities. And you saw the United States get even deeper involved in the conflict there,” Hudson told VOA on Monday.

Powell also played a leading role in negotiations that ended the civil war in Sudan that lasted more than two decades.

“You saw the creation of a Sudan office in the State Department under Colin Powell,” Hudson said. “You saw his personal involvement in the negotiations culminating in the 2005 signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Nairobi (Kenya), which Colin Powell traveled to and bore witness to as guarantor of that.”

And while Powell’s legacy is often intertwined with his promotion of the war in Iraq, Hudson said he is remembered in Africa differently.

“I think that Colin Powell reflects that there was a very, very strong peacemaking element within, certainly, his State Department at the time,” he said.

“If … you look at what happened with the Bush administration when they came to office, there were civil wars going on in Liberia, in Sierra Leone, in Congo, in Angola and in Sudan,” Hudson said. “And by the end of that first term in government, all of those civil wars had some sort of peace agreement. That wasn’t by accident.”

Powell traveled to Africa in 2001 — stopping in Mali, South Africa, Kenya and Uganda — on a mission the State Department described as the “engagement of this administration and the secretary personally in Africa and Africa policy.”

The visit drew media criticism accusing Powell of ceremoniously lecturing Africans on democracy and transparency.

But many African leaders had a different view.

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told the Nigerian newspaper Punch that Powell embodied Black culture across the Atlantic.

“He was not just an African American. He was an African American who understood Africa,” Obasanjo said.

Under Powell, the Bush administration put into place several aid programs to fight diseases and help build economies. Many of those programs remain.

Since 2003, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has distributed more than $85 billion globally for HIV/AIDS assistance, with most of the aid distributed in Africa.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation, created by the U.S. Congress in 2004, is an independent U.S. foreign assistance agency aimed at fighting global poverty. Much of its work is done in Africa.

Niger political analyst Moustapha Abdoulaye described Powell’s death as a major loss, not just for the United States but for the world, because of his personal and professional qualities.

Brook Hailu Beshah, a former Ethiopian diplomat and currently a political science professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, recalled personal encounters with Powell.

Powell was a “person who put America before self, open and respectful to opinions of others, humble and reasonable,” Beshah said.

Source: Voice of America