Southern Cameroons Crisis: World Leaders Call on Yaounde to Free Abdulkarim Ali
Violence in Burkina Faso has caused more than a quarter of a million people to flee their homes over the last three months, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says.
“Some 486,000 have been forced to flee within the country, 267,000 of whom in the past three months alone. A further 16,000 are refugees in neighboring countries,” the agency said in a statement received by AFP on Friday.
All of Burkina Faso’s 13 regions now host people fleeing violence, and around 1.5 million people are “in urgent need” of humanitarian aid, it said.
A previous estimate of the number of displaced, given by the Burkinabe government, put the tally at around 300,000.
The impoverished country has been grappling with an extremist revolt since 2015 that began in neighboring Mali.
Combining guerrilla hit-and-run tactics with road mines and bombings, the extremists have killed nearly 600 people, according to a toll compiled by AFP. Civil society groups put the tally at more than 1,000.
UNHCR spokesman Andrew Mbogori, the agency’s principal emergency coordinator, issued the statement in Geneva following a visit to Kaya, northeast of the capital Ouagadougou, and to Barsalogho, in central Sanmatenga province.
“Thousands of people are on the move, exhausted and trying to find safety among host families or at transit and official travel sites,” the UNHCR said.
“Many have been repeatedly displaced. The prospects for their immediate return to where they come from are poor.
“As a result, their needs and those of host families, already vulnerable by food and nutrition crises in the region, are growing. Women and adolescent girls face particular threats given that health and other essential services are lacking.”
(Source: AFP)
Cameroon ministry of supreme state audit on Thursday began training some senior government officials on the handling and control of public funds.
The training, first of its kind, is to encourage transparency in the management of public affairs, combat corruption, embezzlement and all the malfunctions existing in public life in Cameroon, said Rose Mbah Acha, Minister Delegate at the Presidency in charge of Supreme State Audit.
“We don’t want a situation where mismanagement has been committed and a lot of losses have been incurred by the state,” Acha said at the start of the training program in the capital, Yaounde.
Mainly officials of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development are taking part in the training but measures will be taken to extend to other ministries, the minister said.
“We want to make the activities of these administrations charged with revenue collection more efficient,” she added.
Cameroon is determined to fight corruption and encourage good governance in key sectors such as economic, financial and social management, public service and justice, according to officials of the supreme state audit.
Source: Xinhuanet
When Cameroon ratified the World Heritage Convention in 1982, it pledged to protect and preserve its rich historical and cultural heritage. Cameroon is also party to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property. Now, it faces a crucial test in keeping these promises following an attack by government troops on a sacred site of great cultural importance.
On September 24, soldiers from the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) attacked and looted the Royal Palace in Bafut, North-West region. Included on a Tentative List of World Heritage Sites since 2006 by UNESCO, the United Nations body for education, science and culture, the Bafut Royal Palace hosts the family of the “Fon,” the traditional regional authority. It comprises over 50 buildings arranged around a shrine and is surrounded by a sacred forest. But the palace also sits at the epicenter of a simmering crisis in the country’s Anglophone regions.
At least 10 BIR soldiers attacked the palace where, according to witnesses, the soldiers may have suspected Anglophone separatists were hiding. They shot and wounded the Fon’s brother before looting the palace museum and taking several precious artifacts, including a bronze mask from the 18th century and golden necklaces. The military operation lasted for three hours and occurred during a traditional ceremony with more than 200 people.
This is not the first time government forces have disregarded UNESCO obligations. In September 2018, BIR soldiers destroyed parts of the Bafut palace roof, again on the pretext of searching for separatists. In the 2018 and 2019 attacks, no separatists were found.
The Fon has asked the government, its international partners, and UNESCO to conduct an independent investigation into the attack. The government should rein in BIR forces and hold commanders of the recent assault accountable for their actions.
More than buildings and precious objects, the Bafut Palace is a piece of Cameroon’s history and a key element of its cultural identity. In the current unrest in the Anglophone regions, belligerents should make sure that this cultural heritage is protected.
Source: Human Rights Watch
Angry farmers stormed a city hall in southern Mexico, seized the mayor, and dragged him through town from the back of a pickup truck in protest, officials said Wednesday.
The incident occurred Tuesday when dozens of members of the Tojolabal indigenous community, armed with clubs, broke into the mayor’s office in the town of Las Margaritas in the state of Chiapas. Witnesses told investigators they tied up the mayor, Jorge Luis Escandon, pushed him outside and tied him to the back of a pickup.
They then dragged him several dozen meters down the street, before police and public employees intervened and freed Escandon, who survived without major injury. The mayor accused his attackers of trying to extort him.
“Around 50 or 60 people came in three pickup trucks, armed with clubs and looking to kidnap city officials to extort us and get what they’ve always wanted: to be given money,” he told AFP. “They started struggling, carrying me, tied up one foot, and dragged me out of my office to the street,” he said.
State prosecutor Jorge Luis Llaven said the attackers were demanding more public resources, including direct cash transfers, for their rural community, Santa Rita El Invernadero.
Leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has introduced a policy of providing public assistance in the form of cash payments to beneficiaries, in order to stem corruption by cutting out bureaucratic middlemen.
Eleven people were arrested and a dozen injured in the melee. Chiapas state police were also sent to help restore order in Las Margaritas, a town of 20,000 people near Mexico’s border with Guatemala.
This is not the first time farmers from Santa Rita El Invernadero have staged a violent protest. Four months ago they vandalized the town hall, demanding that Escandon fulfill promises he had made during the 2018 campaign.
(Source: AFP)
Cameroon government army soldiers attacked Ambazonia Self-Defense positions in Bali Nyonga on Saturday in a military operation just a day after the so-called Grand National Dialogue announced that the regime in Yaounde was preparing to accord special status to Southern Cameroons in a bid to end the Ambazonia conflict.
Cameroon Concord News gathered that residents fled Bali Nyonga and the Southern Cameroons town of Bali toward Manyu held by Southern Cameroons Restoration Forces.
The Cameroon government onslaught killed at least eleven civilians and six Ambazonia fighters, and wounded scores of civilians, our source said.
Yaounde said the offensive was targeting “separatists fighters” — the Ambazonia separatist group and other armed militias operating on the main highway linking Mamfe to Bamenda.
The Ambazonia Interim Government is yet to comment on the recent assault seen potentially as sending contradicting signals to the people of Southern Cameroons.
By Sama Ernest in Bamenda
Vice President Dabney Yerima says British Southern Cameroonians have a track record on how to resist colonial forces. The Ambazonian exiled leader said on Tuesday during a telephone conversation with our correspondent in Germany that the massive deployment of Nigerian troops in front of the Eastern Regional Assembly at Enugu in 1953 should remind Yaoundé that Southern Cameroonians would not allow French Cameroun government soldiers to stifle the resistance.
Comrade Dabney Yerima observed that “Whosoever is going by that name La Republique du Cameroun should be aware that the Federal Republic of Ambazonia have a history of resistance and not allowing colonial forces to usurp the rights of the Ambazonian nation and continue to exploit and marginalize its citizens.” Mr. Yerima added that the founding fathers of the British Southern Cameroons state handed over a legacy to resist during difficult conditions.
The Vice President said Ambazonian women and children have become accustomed to a cycle of deadly attacks by French Cameroun soldiers that repeat itself daily throughout Southern Cameroons territory. Dabney Yerima also pointed out that the Ambazonia Interim Government will hold talks with Southern Cameroonians in the diaspora to discuss the Amba Bond Project which he believes will manage to offset those deadly military blows from French Cameroun through a better use of Ambazonian money donated by its citizens in Europe, the USA, South African, Canada, Asia including the Scandinavians.
Vice President Dabney Yerima said equipping Ambazonia Restoration Forces remains top on the Interim Government’s agenda despite the IG’s continued efforts to contain the humanitarian situation in Nigeria, IDPS in French Cameroun and the thousands living in the bushes.
By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai
A Cameroon national was arrested in Noida on Tuesday for allegedly duping people in the name of converting their Indian currency notes into American dollars through a “magic”, the police said. The accused, Kamleu-Nya Alain, was arrested from Sector 121 in Noida, the police said. He told the police that he has earlier also been jailed in India for fraud and his passport is submitted at the Tis Hazari Court in Delhi at present, Noida Superintendent of Police Vineet Jaiswal said.
“He would promise people to return them more money, and convert their Indian currency notes into US dollar notes. A white powder and water-like fluid has been seized from his possession which he would use for the ‘magic trick’ for converting notes, he said.
A man approached the police on Monday claiming the foreigner has duped him of Rs 10 lakh using the same “magic trick”.
Alain would use his “magic trick” on notes and tell gullible people to check the money after two hours and find it converted into American dollars, the officer said.
“The victim handed him over Rs 10 lakh and got back a packet of plain papers in the shape of currency notes, with the first and last notes of the wad having a Rs 2,000 note which was printed by the accused,” Jaiswal said.
An FIR has been registered against him under IPC sections for fraud, under the Foreigners Act and the IT Act, and he has been sent to jail, the police said.
The Rs 10 lakh of the victim have been recovered from Alain and the wad of fake notes has also been taken into possession by the police, the police said.
Source: News Nation India
A Cameroonian opposition leader who was released from jail on Saturday following a presidential amnesty has vowed to intensify his fight against electoral fraud and injustice in the country.
Prof Maurice Kamto, president of Cameroon Renaissance Movement (MRC) and more than a hundred militants of the political outfit were freed when President Paul Biya asked military tribunals in the country to halt their prosecution.
Addressing supporters at his Yaounde residence shortly after his release, the fearless opposition leader promised that “the real battle is yet to start.”
“A new chapter of our battle has just opened. If some people think that the release is the end of the battle, then they have not understood anything because we have not achieved anything from what we are demanding,” Kamto said.
On Friday, the Minister of State, Secretary General at the Cameroon Presidency, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh said in a statement that president Biya had ordered their release as part of his “constant resolve to promote an atmosphere of peace, fraternity and concord.”
Friday’s decision followed a similar act a day before, discontinuing proceedings against some 333 detainees arrested in connection to the crisis that has engulfed the country’s two English speaking regions for over two years now.
Source: The East African
A 79-year-old man murdered at least 50 people, making him the most prolific serial killer in US history, the FBI said Sunday.
Samuel Little confessed to 93 homicides — mostly of women — between 1970 and 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said.
Although investigators have only confirmed his involvement in 50 of them, they believe all of Little’s confessions are credible.
The FBI has set up a website showing his videotaped recollections of unidentified killings, alongside sketches — drawn by Little — of the people he claims to have murdered.
“Many of his victims’ deaths, however, were originally ruled overdoses or attributed to accidental or undetermined causes. Some bodies were never found,” the FBI wrote on the website.
He was jailed for life in 2014 after being convicted of three murders.
“For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims,” FBI crime analyst Christie Palazzolo said.
“Even though he is already in prison, the FBI believes it is important to seek justice for each victim — to close every case possible.”
The former boxer, also known as Samuel McDowell, was first arrested in 2012 at a homeless shelter in Kentucky and extradited to California to face drug charges.
Once there, DNA evidence linked him to three cold cases, leading to his 2014 conviction for the murder of three women in Los Angeles between 1987 and 1989.
All three had been beaten and strangled.
(Source: AFP)
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