Policeman killed in fresh anglophone Cameroon violence
YAOUNDE — A policeman was killed on Sunday by presumed separatists in a restive English-speaking region of Cameroon, where the situation remained extremely tense yesterday, sources told AFP.
No further details were released about the incident in Dian, in Cameroon’s Southwest Region, but other officers may have also been killed, an official added.
“According to some information, other police were killed but we are still looking into this,” the official said, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Reports of multiple killings also circulated on social media.
Witnesses said panic had gripped several schools, including in Buea, the main city in the Englishspeaking southwest, and in Muyuka and Tiko.
“We are leaving the campus because people in the city are saying that separatists are in the area,” said a student at Buea University.
“I am on my way to take my children out of school,” said an official based in Kumba.
Over the past year, there has been mounting tension in Cameroon’s Southwest and Northwest regions - home to anglophones who account for about a fifth of the West African nation’s population of 23 million.
English-speakers complain they have suffered decades of economic inequality and social injustice at the hands of the French-speaking majority.
On October 1, the breakaway anglophone movement issued a symbolic declaration of independence for “Ambazonia”, claiming autonomy over Englishspeaking regions in the country.
Calls for independence or greater autonomy have been firmly rejected by President Paul Biya.
His government has led a crackdown on the separatist drive, imposing night-time curfews, restrictions on movement, raids and body searches.
Separatists yesterday also called on social media for English-speaking cities to be shut down, to protest the alleged arrest of leaders in neighbouring Nigeria.
Ten separatists, including Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, the president of the anglophone separatist movement, were detained at a hotel in Abuja earlier this month, according to a human rights lawyer. A senior Nigerian intelligence official has denied the claims.
Meanwhile, suspected militia fighters killed four Congolese soldiers in a hit-and-run attack on a military post in troubled Kasai-Central province’s capital, Kananga, U.N.-funded radio reported on Sunday.
Fighting between the Kamuina Nsapu militia and government forces over the past year and a half has displaced over 1 million people in Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kasai provinces. Millions more have been hit by a severe humanitarian crisis.
Citing U.N. sources, Radio Okapi, which is supported by Congo’s peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO, said the assailants attacked a military post near Kananga’s airport in the early morning hours before disappearing into the surrounding bush.
Local authorities were not immediately reachable for comment on the attack.
More than a decade after the end of a 1998-2003 war in which millions of people died, mostly from hunger and disease, militia attacks are on the rise across the vast, mineral-rich nation.
The violence comes amid a political crisis linked to President Joseph Kabila’s refusal to step down when his mandate expired a year ago and has raised concerns that Congo could again slide into all-out war.—AFP.