A delegate representing the Southern Cameroons National Council (SCNC) has called for the UN to send a Special Rapporteur to investigate human rights abuses in his country “before another Palestine episode is born in West Africa.”
Ngala Nfor made the appeal in an open letter to the Human Rights Council currently meeting in Geneva, citing ongoing cases of arbitrary arrests and detentions of students, human rights activists and journalists in Southern Cameroons.
“The most recent violation occurred on November 27,” he told Human Rights Tribune, “during a peaceful student protest at Buéa University.” The students were protesting the imposition of francophone students who had not passed the prescribed exam for a new Faculty of Medicine. “Troops were brought in from la République du Cameroun and the consequence was that five students were killed and many others wounded.”
A bid for secession
Although Cameroon diplomats attending the Council meeting and others at the Mission in Geneva declined to go on record, they insisted there is no human rights problems between Francophone and Anglophone Cameroon. They pointed out that the head of the Mission is Anglophone and that several government ministers are as well. “This is a bid for secession,” said one, “it has nothing to do with human rights.”
But according to Amnesty International’s annual report for 2005, the Southern Cameroons have been subject to arbitrary and unlawful detentions, harsh prison conditions, lack of English interpretation and systematic torture and ill-treatment, sometimes resulting in death.
The SCNC is a member of UNPO, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization which groups indigenous peoples, occupied nations, minorities and independent states from Abkhazia to West Papua, New Guinea, to try and find non-violent solutions to the conflicts that face them.
Masters of our own destiny
At the UNPO General Assembly meeting in Taiwan the end of October, a resolution was adopted calling for the South Cameroon people to be “masters of their own destiny” and for the African Union to “adopt a road map for the decolonization of the former UN Trust territory.
Southern Cameroon has been subjected to different colonial experiences, first as a part of German Kamerun (1885-1916), and then jointly administered by the British and French after World War I. The British administered their portion as an integral part of Nigeria. Following a UN plebiscite in 1961 Southern Cameroons voted for reunification with French Cameroon rather than integration into Nigeria. Thus began the story of the two linguistic Cameroons united in an UN-sponsored federation.