An obsession with power, prestige, and life of profusion within the African continent has had a negative impact upon Cameroon’s security praxis. Active conflicts such as the Anglophone crisis and Boko Haram insurgency have tarnished the reputation of the previously stable Cameroon. Civil war has engulfed the country’s English-speaking northwest and southwest since 2017, with its rich cultural heritage and envied stability being left in distant memory. With this, countless breaches of human rights have ensued - rendering democracy a dystopian ideal and human freedoms a simple play on words.
THE ANGLOPHONE CRISIS
Cameroon’s English speaking northwest and southwest regions have always been aware of the inequalities leveraged against them by their French-speaking counterparts. However, in recent years, a continued lack of political representation and suspicious constitutional tampering have riled the Anglophone minority. This has in turn led to the mobilization of resistance movements and demands for the creation of the independent state of Ambazonia within the Anglophone southwest. The siphoning off of profits from resource-rich Ambazonia’s burgeoning cocoa, coffee, and oil industry to party officials in the capital of Yaoundé has also intensified sentiment towards the incumbent regime. This has left militia groups such as the Tigers and Red Dragons engaged in a rural insurgency, attempting to convert their desires of independence into a reality.
A COLONIAL LEGACY
Spates of violence between the security forces loyal to President, Paul Biya, and the Anglophone minority must be understood as a product of colonialism and continued imperial arrogance. First Germany, then France and Britain, had their pickings at what we now identify as the ‘Republic’ of Cameroon. In the post-World War 1 paradigm, Cameroon was divided between the allied forces, splitting German-administered Cameroon into two. The years of Anglophone autonomy were short-lived. The economic strain of the empires coupled with Kwame Nkrumah’s pioneering rally for independence led to a wave of decolonization in the 1960s, resulting in the eventual reunification of the state. This left the Anglophone population outnumbered, with their desires of independence unanswered. These manifestations of colonial intervention have stoked the conflict at present, by facilitating an unequal Francophone representation at the national assembly, and leaving the English speaking minority in second place.
CONSTITUTIONAL MANIPULATION
Authoritarian incumbents throughout the African continent (and more broadly in the world), rely on a number of strategies to remain in office. This is important to them, since “out of office often equates to out of pocket”, due to the lack of social security schemes and compensation afforded to previous leaders. Paul Biya leans upon an armoury of retrenchment strategies - the most important and impactful being constitutional manipulation. The Cameroonian constitution is contradictory, to say the least- with the separation of powers being compromised through continued constitutional amendments.
Article 37 (2) of the Cameroonian constitution implies that the government possesses three impartial arms; the legislative, judicial and executive. However, article 37 (3) of the revised 2008 constitution suggests that the President is the sole guarantor of judicial independence, inhibiting any sense of separated governmental powers.
Separated powers, especially guaranteeing an independent judiciary, are necessary for the courts to assess and critique proposed laws – ensuring that they promote successful democratic evolution and adhere to core human rights. By merging control over each branch of the government, Biya and the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) function as unilateral rule-makers within the state. Each arm of the government is run as an extension of the executive, concentrating power upon Biya. Constitutional manipulation has enabled Biya to become Africa’s longest-standing leader. His rule has now lasted 44 years, earning him the title of the world's “most experienced autocrat”.
COUNTLESS HUMAN RIGHTS BREACHES
The Anglophone crisis, facilitated by Cameroon’s ingrained culture of authoritarianism and past colonialism, has made way for countless human rights abuses by government security forces and insurgents.
Government forces and armed separatists regularly target women and children as a means of coercion. For example, in February of this year, thirteen children were murdered in the Ngarbah massacre. Illaria Allegrozzi, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch, stated that “the gruesome killings of civilians, including children, are egregious crimes that should be effectively and independently investigated, and those responsible should be brought to justice”. She states that the incessant denial of these crimes by the government further incentivizes security forces to arbitrarily kill and detain citizens. The heavy-handed response by security services and insurgents alike has had a significant effect upon internal displacement - with Amnesty International reporting 679,000 being displaced as of December 2019.
Arbitrary detention at the hands of the government, coupled with sexual assault and the use of child soldiers by insurgent forces reflects a multi-faceted conflict. As UN funding lags and indecision by the international community taints the already challenging process, the presence of multiple belligerent actors with conflicting aims has almost entirely shrunk the potential for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
LOOKING FORWARD
The ascent to multiparty politics and democracy since the 1990s has been difficult to achieve due to the continuous subversion of democracy by authoritative incumbents. However, there is no single solution to catalyse change. Most importantly, we must re-assess whether democracy is the best fit for African states, and if so, how it can be re-imagined to account for the complex ethnic makeup of the continent. This is necessary to prevent further inter-ethnic violent conflict from emerging.
Rohan is an incoming Security Studies Masters student at UCL, aspiring to work within the Civil Service. His research interests include; politics and elections in Africa, ethnonational secession movements, and developmental economics. Whilst at Exeter University we co-founded ExeForRefugees- a project and fundraising campaign raising awareness for the plight of refugees within Europe and the successive human rights abuses resultant to this crisis.