2019-11-09_The_Economist

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TheEconomistNovember 9th 2019 41

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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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