The Economist - USA (2019-11-09)

TheEconomistNovember 9th 2019 41

1

O

n a plantationin Tiko, in south-west

Cameroon, Adeline rubs the gap in her

right hand where her index finger used to

be. She arrived in the town in July 2018, hav-

ing fled Ekona, 15 miles away. In that village

soldiers terrified civilians by burning

houses and shooting indiscriminately as

part of a crackdown on militias that want

the primarily English-speaking areas of

Cameroon to secede from the predomi-

nantly Francophone country. Adeline

hoped Tiko would prove a sanctuary.

It was anything but. A year ago Adeline

was tending to an oil palm in the plantation

when about 20 members of a separatist mi-

litia grabbed her, stuffed leaves in her

mouth and tied her to the tree. They

whipped her and cut off her finger. Her ap-

parent crime: working for the Cameroon

Development Corporation (cdc), a state-

run company. “As I close my eyes I see the

boys coming to get me,” says Adeline. “The

trauma is still there.”

Cameroon was until recently a stable

country in a fragile region. Today it is bat-

tling the jihadists of Boko Haram in the

north, dealing with an influx of refugees

from the Central African Republic in the

east—and, most devastatingly, the “Anglo-

phone crisis” in the west. Adeline’s is one

of hundreds of thousands of lives ravaged

by this conflict over the past three years.

Paul Biya, the authoritarian who has ruled

Cameroon for 37 years, had hoped that the

crisis would prove short-lived. So did for-

eign powers, which have been largely qui-

et. Yet the conflict shows no sign of ending.

The origins of the turmoil began a cen-

tury ago. After the first world war Britain

and France took over different parts of the

German colony of Cameroon. Upon inde-

pendence in 1960 and 1961 the larger French

territory joined the southern part of the

British one to make modern Cameroon.

It quickly became one of the most cen-

tralised countries in Africa. Today just 1%

of public spending is devolved to local gov-

ernments, versus more than 50% in Nige-

ria. The country is officially bilingual, but

the roughly 20% of people (4-5m in a coun-

try of 24m) who mainly speak English

claim decades of marginalisation. Prom-

ises of devolution have been broken.

In late 2016 frustrations boiled over.

First lawyers went on strike against the

erosion of the English-style common-law

system. Teachers soon joined the protests,

citing, among other things, the appoint-

ment of French-only speakers in class-

rooms. Protest groups organised “ghost

towns”: weekly shutdowns of towns such

as Buea, the capital of the south-west re-

gion, that continue to this day.

The government hit back hard. The in-

ternet was shut off for four months. Groups

organising the protests were banned and

their leaders arrested. In October 2017 sepa-

ratists responded by proclaiming the inde-

pendent state of “Ambazonia”, named after

Ambas bay in the south-west.

This led to a massive, violent escalation.

International ngos estimate that 3,000

people have been killed during the crisis.

But aid workers think the true figure is sev-

eral times higher. Both separatist militias

and security forces have committed atroc-

ities, but the Cameroonian army is be-

lieved to be behind most of the bloodshed.

Security forces have burned more than

220 villages in the Anglophone region, ac-

Cameroon’s Anglophone crisis

War of words

BUEA

A report from a forgotten conflict that has displaced 500,000 people

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