KIDNAPPING OF PUPILS HIGHLIGHTS GROWING INSECURITY IN CAMEROON
▶ Residents who do not support the anglophone separatist movement fear for their own and their children’s safety
The video has a grimly familiar feel – on a wobbly, hand-held camera, a kidnapper questions dozens of children abducted during a raid on a school in West Africa.
As the lens pans on to their terrified faces, he warns that they will not see a classroom again any time soon.
But this latest kidnapping is not the work of Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group notorious for using school abductions as a weapon of war.
It took place in Nigeria’s French-speaking neighbour Cameroon, where a campaign by armed English-speaking separatists is now spiralling out of control.
The 79 children were abducted, along with their head teacher and a driver, from a school in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s English-speaking North West region on Monday.
It was blamed on local members of Cameroon’s anglophone separatist movement, who want independence from the francophone-majority government.
Unlike Boko Haram, which wants to create an African caliphate by force, the separatists are actively courting the backing of the West and the UN.
But even their own supporters were alarmed by Monday’s mass kidnapping, which has echoes of Boko Haram’s abduction of almost 300 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in 2014.
The pupils were released yesterday morning in the nearby town of Bafut after negotiations with church leaders, but moderate anglophones fear it is yet another sign the conflict is plunging Cameroon’s English-speaking enclaves into all-out lawlessness.
One resident of Bamenda told
The National he lived in daily fear of separatists conducting more abductions.
“Only a few hours after the abduction we had someone suspicious-looking knocking on the family’s door and asking if the school next door to ours was a government-run one or not,” he said. “People in my neighbourhood are hiding children in their houses for their own safety.”
An estimated 600 people have already died in the fighting, which has caused more than 245,000 people to flee their homes. A further 20,000 have crossed the border and are now refugees in Nigeria.
Soldiers have been accused of burning down scores of villages and killing military-aged men. The separatists have been claimed to kidnap and behead soldiers and intimidate locals into supporting their campaign.
Schools have long been in the front line of the violence, which was sparked partly by plans two years ago by Cameroon’s French-speaking president, Paul Biya, to increase the number of francophone teachers in anglophone areas.
Since the proposal, separatists have tried to enforce a mass school boycott, threatening and occasionally abducting teachers who open their schools in anglophone areas.
But Monday’s mass abduction is the first time that large groups of schoolchildren have been targeted.
In the video, the pupils repeat the phrase: “I was taken from school last night by the Amba Boys, I don’t know where I am.”
The “Amba Boys” is the nickname for the separatists, a mix of dozens of militias whose goal is a separate state called “Ambazonia”.
Last night, Mr Biya, who has just won elections securing him a seventh term in the office he has held for the past 36 years, sent troops to hunt for the missing pupils and appealed to the rebels to lay down their arms.
“They need to know that they will face the rigour of the law and the determination of our defence and security forces,” he said.
Samuel Fonki, a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon, said he had been mediating with the kidnappers, who had told him that they wanted all schools shut down.
In the hostage video, the kidnapper also tells the pupils that rather than staying at school, they should “fight the struggle in Ambazonia”. In the anglophone regions, where support for independence is now high, many are convinced the kidnapping was staged by Mr Biya to discredit the separatists.
Reports circulated on social media claimed to have identified the kidnapper shown in the video as a member of the Cameroonian security forces.
Chris Anu is “secretary of state for communications” with the self-declared independent Ambazonia government, a movement based in the US that supports the separatists.
“This was not the work of our boys. Why would they be naive enough to do something like this?” Mr Anu said to The National from Texas.
“It is right that we have campaigned for schools to be shut down over the past two years but at the start of this new school season we decided it would be best to let children go back for the sake of their education.”
His claims did not convince some Cameroonians who, despite supporting the separatist cause, say the armed wing of the campaign has been hijacked by criminal gangs and jobless youths looking to make money.
Some other kidnappings by separatists have already led to ransom demands.
“To my mind, this kidnapping looks like the work of the Amba Boys,” said another anglophone resident.
“There is good and bad in their ranks, but many of them are illiterates without any educational background, and they are being controlled by people from abroad who have no grip on their activities.
“In the cities at the moment the security is not too bad, but in the countryside it’s completely lawless. Right now it’s getting very difficult to tell who is a genuine Amba fighter and who is a criminal operating under their banner.”
He said that despite the claims of some separatist groups that the boycott on schools was over, the security situation meant many parents still felt it unsafe to send their children to school.
His son, who was at secondary school in Bamenda, had not attended all term, while his three younger children who were at primary school had been absent for the past two years.
“The brunt of this war is being suffered by those on ground zero,” he said.
“This whole principle of stopping people from going to school has to stop – otherwise we will end up with a free Ambazonia where every educated person has fled.”
It’s getting very difficult to tell who is a genuine Amba fighter and who is a criminal operating under their banner RESIDENT Anglophone region of Cameroon