Amnesty International (AI) has reported rampant human rights violations and other crimes under domestic law committed by multiple actors in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon.
Development Diaries reports that the organisation, in a new report, noted crimes committed by armed separatists, militias and members of the defence and security forces in the Northwest Region, mainly since 2020.
The report, titled With or against us: the population caught between the army, armed separatists and militias in north-west Cameroon, highlights the urgent need for protection for those denouncing the atrocities inflicted upon the population.
AI said it conducted two visits to Cameroon between November 2022 and March 2023, meeting with more than 100 victims, representatives of nonprofits, journalists, and commissioners of the Cameroon Human Rights Commission (CHRC).
The human rights-focused organisation also said in the report that government ministers did not respond to its request for meetings over the claims.
According to the report, on the night of 28 March, 2022, armed separatists attacked a Mbororo Fulani compound in the village of Mbokop-Tanyi.
‘The Amba Boys [the collective term for the armed separatists] burned down my house, with two of my children and my wife inside. They shot my wife and when she was down, they burned her along with my two children, aged seven years and six months, who were sleeping in the house’, AI quoted the man as saying.
It is understood, according to the report, that Mbororo Fulani militias have also been involved in killings and the destruction of homes in the Northwest region, in some instances at least with the help or the complacency of Cameroonian troops.
‘We call on Cameroonian authorities to investigate allegations of human rights violations and other crimes under domestic law committed in the context of the armed violence in the Anglophone regions, and to prosecute and punish those responsible for such violations in fair trials and before independent, impartial, and competent tribunals’, AI’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa, Samira Daoud, said.
Military forces in the Central African country have been fighting separatist groups since 2017 as they seek to prevent the forming of Ambazonia from the two English-speaking regions of the country.
Freedom House, in its 2023 Freedom in the World report, ranked the country as ‘not free’, scoring 15 out of a possible 100 points.
Development Diaries calls on the Cameroon government to investigate allegations of human rights violations and respect the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment which it ratified in 1986.
Photo source: Amnesty International
