A senior Southern Cameroons official with the Ambazonia Interim Government has slammed as treasonous all West Cameroonians serving with the Biya Francophone regime in Yaoundé.

“Serving the interest of the French Cameroun regime is treason, and resistance and the use of weapons and the Big Rubbergun will continue until the liberation of the Ambazonian homeland,” Tabenyang Brado, Secretary of the Economy, said in a conversation with our US Bureau Chief Enowtaku Ebanghatabi Christelle

“The Federal Republic of Ambazonia will not fall in the face of French backed French Cameroun foreign threats and will remain a home for resistance,” Tabenyang Brado opined, adding that, “The Southern Cameroons struggle will not be torn apart and that the Federal Republic of Ambazonia will no longer be a French Cameroun colony.”

The Ambazonia front line official also stressed that five years into its formation, the Ambazonia Interim Government now led by Vice President Dabney Yerima has become much stronger and still challenges the Biya Francophone regime and its military apparatus deployed to Southern Cameroons.

Five years into a deadly separatist conflict in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions, hopes of finding a negotiated settlement seem more distant than ever as both the government and secessionist rebels dig in, according to civil society activists.

It’s a conflict marked by spikes of extreme violence that invariably target civilians. The latest high-profile incident was last month, when government soldiers killed nine people in Missong village, in the anglophone Northwest region.

Rights groups accuse both the security forces and secessionist fighters of serious abuses that include extrajudicial killings, rape, kidnapping, and torture.

The root of the conflict is the central government’s historical marginalisation of the two English-speaking regions, the Northwest and Southwest, home to about 20 percent of the population.

But the dynamics of the violence have changed with the growth of a lucrative “war economy”, typically involving kidnapping and the broader extortion of the civilian population. The political and economic spoils of the war have reduced the incentive to find a negotiated settlement.

By Isong Asu with files from Enowtaku Ebanghatabi Christelle and The New Humanitarian