Many Francophone political elites from the ruling Beti-Ewondo clan have been publishing write-ups in favor of the current military operation in Southern Cameroons.  In a recent article captioned Les sécessionnistes, Enoh Meyomesse painted the people of Southern Cameroons as Biafra who escaped the Nigerian civil war and occupied Cameroonian land.  The Enoh Meyomesse document released with funding and support from the presidency of the republic in many ways resemble one of the articles for which Hassan Ngeze was convicted for genocide in the media trial at the ICTR.

Hassan Ngeze was not a soldier nor was he in the battlefield or even personally fired a single gunshot. The basis for his conviction was based on the ground that he defined the Hutu in ethnic terms thus providing those who perpetrated genocide in Rwanda an ideological base for crimes. The definition of the so-called “secessionists” in the Enoh Meyomesse article as Nigerians or Biafrans in an ongoing armed conflict formally declared by the head of state thus trickling the operation of the Geneva Convention VII 1949 which Cameroun ratified since 1963 provides President Paul Biya and all those involved in the prosecution of the war an ideological basis for the genocide and other crimes.

The article provides a nationality basis for the war as opposed to the so-called sovereignty basis.  The writer defined Southern Cameroonians as Nigerians, called them Biafrans, who settled in Cameroon or escaped from the Biafra war and sought refuge in Cameroon. He falsely attributed the alleged crimes against members of the armed forces of Cameroun on this category. He seeks to alert and mobilize the Cameroun nation to whom the “secessionist” is.

The Enoh Meyomesse article including others published by pro-Biya newspapers seeks to extend the conflict beyond the territory claimed by Cameroun and a larger conflict with Nigeria. It seeks to push the frontiers of the internationalization of the crisis which the formal declaration of war and the trickle of the 1949 Geneva Convention already did. The Judgment of the International Court of Justice between Cameroun and Nigeria did not settle the nationality question. If the secessionists are defined as Nigerians present in the supposed territory of the Southern Cameroons as the writer strongly asserts, then under international law, Nigeria will have a right to intervene to protect its citizens and its national minorities.

The ethnic nationalities in the border areas from the Niger Delta and the Gulf of Guinea right up to the North are of the same ethnic composition.  Neither the international boundaries nor international law can deny the people their ethnicity. On the contrary, international law protects them.

The Biya Francophone guerilla writer’s knowledge of history was so biased and truncated. On the basis of international law, alone, the legal effect of the Versailles Treaty was to vitiate the legality of Germany imperial possessions and placed them as wards of the international legal order that emerged after the First World War. In international law, German Kamerun as such no longer existed. The mandate system oversaw the enforcement of this international legal order leading to the Trusteeship system.

Prominent Southern Cameroons political elites had commented on the issue and pointed out the fact that Um Nyobe and the UPC initiated discussions with the leaders of the Southern Cameroons on or about 1952 with the intention of negotiating the establishment of a new nation of the Cameroons truly independent, progressive and free from imperial interest. Had Um Nyobe sought the reconstruction of the so-called German Kamerun, he would have been told that international treaty law under which the treaty of Versailles must be interpreted and implemented had renders all claims to that entity null and void and of no effect whatsoever. That explains why a claim over parts of Congo, Gabon, Chad that formed part of the German possessions were never contemplated nor even sustainable in international law. Although the efforts deployed by Um Nyobe and Southern Cameroons leaders were sabotaged, it was indeed his idea and that of these leaders to negotiate a form of union of equal, free and progress anti imperial peoples that was stolen, distorted and used as the rationale for the annexation and military occupation of the Southern Cameroons.

It is the humiliation and enduring effect of enslavement by a neo-colonial vassal puppet of French imperial interests in the Southern Cameroons that fuelled the present resistance which has been going on for the past 56 years and continuing.  The formal declaration of war by the puppet Paul Biya whose actions the Enoh Meyomesse justified and provided a genocidal motivation for the ongoing slaughter must not be construed to obviate the fact that we have been victims of armed aggression with exponential loss of lives, property and identity over the last fifty six years.

We of Cameroon Intelligence Report regrettably see a form of ethnic solidarity in the support of the ongoing wave of international criminality against the civilian population of the Southern Cameroons. With a few diehard genociders like Laurent Esso,  Isa Tchiroma, Cavaye Djibril, the ideologues of the genocidal ideology have identified themselves as persons coming essentially from one ethnic group. Paul Biya, Owona Nguini, the television Channel TV4, the Military High Command, and the CPDM crime syndicate.

We have often wondered why on earth a supposed professional conventional army will chose a border territory to declare an international armed conflict as Biya did. Military strategists would have advised against such a move as suicidal. From an in-depth analysis of the Enoh Meyomesse article, it is obvious that President Biya and his think tank must have defined the enemy along the lines proposed by this writer and decided to use Manyu as a launching pad to confront the enemy. Let us wait and see how this gamble will work out.

We have carefully considered the writings of many Camerounians who although not in favour of the independence option sought by Southern Cameroonians in their immense majority, nevertheless, like Um Nyobe in 1952 have provided alternative ways of resolving this conflict.   Paul Biya supported by the writer and many in his ethno-tribal crime syndicate have opted for a war of genocide against supposed foreign enemies identified as Nigerians or Biafrans. For this reason, the more than 1,500 Southern Cameroons armless civilian victims who have been killed, thousands more raped, maimed, abducted and interned in concentration Nazi-like military, paramilitary and civilian encampments are foreigners, and according to the Enoh Meyomesse and Paul Biya, do not desert the protection of international law, in particular the Geneva Conventions.  We have a message for them. They will be held accountable for these crimes.

We of the Cameroon Intelligence Report encourage and continue to encourage peace advocates not to despair despite the preponderance of support for the genocide of Southern Cameroons by French Camerouns power elite and supposed intellectual class.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

Chairman and Editor-in-Chief