50 Boko Haram fighters killed in Nigeria attack
More than 50 Boko Haram fighters have been killed in an attack on a multi-national force in northeastern Nigeria, a military spokesperson said Wednesday.
Source: AFP
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Yaounde to deport 4,000 Nigerian refugees
Cameroon officials on Wednesday said it has concluded arrangements with neighbouring Nigeria for the return of 4,000 Nigerian refugees to their country by April 29.
According to the region’s governor Midjiyawa Bakari, the refugees from Minawao camp, the only official refugee camp in Cameroon’s far North region, voluntarily opted to return home.
“We have agreed with the Nigerian government that 4,000 refugees from Adamawa state in Nigeria will be returned.
“They are the first ones to return but the process will continue after that,’’ Bakari told newsmen.
According to him, they will return by air, while Cameroon will provide the security from the refugee camp to the airport.
“We (Nigeria and Cameroon) are discussing how we will do with their children that have been going to school here and the property they have obtained here,’’ he said.
officials said that the majority of the refugees at the camp are from Borno state in Nigeria except those from Adamawa asked to be taken home because “there is calm and security there’’.
In early April, Cameroon assisted 40,000 out of about 60,000 Nigerians who fled into Cameroon before Nigeria’s February elections to return home.
According to the UN, Minawao camp hosts over 57,000 Nigerian refugees who fled from the atrocities of terror group Boko Haram.
Source: PM NEWS Nigeria
Nobel Peace Prize winner calls for end of hostilities in Southern Cameroons
Leymah Roberta Gbowee, 2011 Noble Peace Prize winner, Liberian female peace activist, on Tuesday called for ending of disputes in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions that have been ravaged by war in the last two years.
“As someone who has survived war and has lived through it, I will tell Cameroonians, war has never been the answer to solving any kind of problem. My message to Cameroon is that it should never be Anglophone or Francophone, it should be one Cameroon, one people.” Gbowee told reporters in the capital Yaounde after meeting with government officials.
She said that she had spent three days in the restive regions urging for an end to the war and intensifying efforts to defend the rights of women and girls in the conflict zone.
“It is the women and girls who pay the brunt of it. There is always increase in sexually transmitted diseases, rape and abuse and teen pregnancies.” Gbowee said, citing the example of her country, Liberia which she said should serve as an example for Cameroon that nobody wins war.
“We (Liberia) went through a very devastating civil war where we killed almost 10 percent of our population and the impact is still been felt by the population. There are no winners in any kind of crisis. It takes generations for the pains to go away,” she said.
Cameroon is largely populated by French-speakers, but since November 2017, Anglophone minority have formed armed groups to fight for the independence of the English-speaking regions after complaining of decades of marginalization.
Source: Xinhuanet
Southern Cameroons Crisis: Women Fleeing Violence Use Moss As Tampons
Women who have fled into the bushes from the conflict in English-speaking regions of Cameroon are using moss squashed into balls as tampons, risking infection. One 16-year-old explained to BBC Focus on Africa the challenges she is facing since she left her home:
Quote Message: There is no way we can get sanitary towels in the bushes. The nearest town is too far away and it’s not safe to go there. We use rags during our periods and it’s not easy finding pieces of cloth to use. I know it’s dangerous and one can easily get infected.”There is no way we can get sanitary towels in the bushes. The nearest town is too far away and it’s not safe to go there. We use rags during our periods and it’s not easy finding pieces of cloth to use. I know it’s dangerous and one can easily get infected.”
Another woman explained to me what she had been using for the last six months:
Quote Message: Moss plant – it grows on cocoa trees. Our mothers used it in those days when sanitary towels did not exist. You crush it and shape it into a small ball or tampon. Then you insert it deep into your body. This is what I’ve been using for the six months I’ve been in the bush. Moss plant – it grows on cocoa trees. Our mothers used it in those days when sanitary towels did not exist. You crush it and shape it into a small ball or tampon. Then you insert it deep into your body. This is what I’ve been using for the six months I’ve been in the bush.
Health workers strongly warn against this because of the risk of infection. More than 300,000 people have been forced to flee their homes, according to the International Crisis Group.
Militias began to emerge in 2017 after a security force crackdown on mass protests, led by lawyers in wigs and teachers in suits, over the government’s alleged failure to give enough recognition to the English legal and education systems in the North-West and South-West.
The government was accused of relying heavily on people trained in the French legal and educational tradition to work in key posts and generally marginalising Cameroon’s English-speaking minority, who make up about 20% of the population.
Source: BBC
Southern Cameroons War: 3 Restoration Forces, 4 French Cameroun soldiers killed in clashes
At least three armed separatists and four members of the government forces died Sunday night in violent clashes in Bali, a locality in the Northwest, one of the two war-torn English-speaking regions of Cameroon, local sources said.
“Civilians have fled the area and fighting is intensifying. I saw three corpses when I was escaping. Many people are injured,” a local resident who asked not to be named said.
Government forces interviewed confirmed the confrontation and stressed that a mission to restore peace and security in the locality was in progress.
Ambazonian Communication Secretary Chris Anu warned of “dangerous times” for the locality.
“Mayhem has been unleashed on the people of Bali. We are urging everyone in Bali to look for a safer location to move to,” Anu said last Sunday in a widely circulated WhatsApp voice.
Clashes are escalating between government forces and armed separatists in Cameroon’s two Anglophone regions of Northwest and Southwest, where separatists have created an independent nation they call “The Federal Republic Ambazonia”.
Source: Xinhuanet with editing from CCN
27 Boko Haram militants killed in joint Cameroon-Nigeria operation
Twenty-seven Boko Haram militants have been killed in the latest clearance operation aimed at routing remnants of the terror group along Nigeria-Cameroon borders, Nigerian army said on Monday.
Many arms and ammunition belonging to the terror group were recovered and their gun trucks destroyed by troops of Nigeria and Cameroon who jointly carried out the operation on Sunday.
In a statement, Nigerian army spokesman Sagir Musa said the troops’ encounter with the terrorists took place in the northern part of Wulgo, Tumbuma, Chikun Gudu, and Bukar Maryam villages — all on the Nigerian side.
There was no casualty on the part of the Nigerian and Cameroonian forces, Musa said.
According to him, a number of coordinated military operations are ongoing, especially in the fringes of Gombaru-Ngala and surrounding areas to deal with terrorists fleeing from the onslaught of the Multinational Joint Task Force of Nigeria, Benin, Chad, Cameroon, and Niger.
In March, more than 100 Boko Haram militants were killed in multilateral operations along the Nigerian borders.
Last December, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari and his colleagues of the Lake Chad Basin Commission renewed their commitment to ending the Boko Haram insurgency, declaring “a fight to finish.”
Boko Haram has been trying since 2009 to establish an Islamist state in northeastern Nigeria, extending its attacks to countries in the Lake Chad basin.
The group posed enormous security, humanitarian and governance challenges in the basin, according to the United Nations.
Source: Xinhuanet
US: White House Press Secretary says most US lawmakers don’t do their own taxes
Most of the US lawmakers who are trying to look through President Donald Trump’s tax returns “don’t do their own taxes,” says White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
She made the comments on Fox News Sunday after House lawmakers gave the Trump administration a deadline to hand over his tax returns, which he refused to release ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
“I don’t think Congress — particularly not this group of congressmen and women — are smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump’s taxes will be,” she said. “My guess is that most of them don’t do their own taxes, and I certainly don’t trust them to look through the decades of success that the president has and determine anything.”
Trump has refused to release his tax returns arguing that they are being audited, a claim rejected by the IRS.
Most of the money Trump received from his father’s real estate empire in the 1990s apparently came through tax dodges.
The figure would amount to at least $413 million in today’s dollars.
Sanders made the remarks in reaction to formal request by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal’s from IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig to turn over six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns.
A new April 23 deadline was also announced after an initial April 10 deadline lapsed.
Source: Presstv
Sudan: Top members of former government arrested, sacked
The transitional military council of Sudan has arrested or sacked senior members of the government of the ousted leader Omar al-Bashir, a spokesman said.
The defense minister, Awad Ibn Auf, was removed from his role on Sunday, a few days after his resignation from heading the military council.
Lt. Gen Abu Bakr Mustafa was also appointed as the new chief of Sudan’s national intelligence and security service (NISS), replacing Salah Abdallah Mohamed Saleh, known as Salah Gosh.
Sudan’s ambassadors to Washington and Geneva have also been dismissed, the spokesman said.
The purges followed continuing talks between the new military rulers and protest organizers who demand a civilian government.
Thousands of protesters remained encamped outside Khartoum’s army headquarters to keep up pressure on a military council that took power after ousting Bashir on Thursday.
The protesters on Sunday demanded the country’s military rulers “immediately” hand power over to a civilian government that should then bring al-Bashir to justice.
Meanwhile, Sudan’s foreign ministry on Sunday urged the international community to support the country’s new military rulers in order to ease a “democratic transition”.
“The ministry of foreign affairs is looking forward to the international community to understand the situation and to support the transitional military council… in order to achieve the Sudanese goal of democratic transition,” the ministry said in a statement.
The military seized power from al-Bashir in a coup following months of mass protests across the country.
First head of the military council, defense minister Ibn Auf, was forced to resign following massive protest rallies against his rule, and bestowed power to his deputy Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan Abdulrahman.
The protests against Bashir initially erupted on December 19, 2018, in the face of a government decision to triple the price of bread. The demonstrations quickly turned into a mass movement across the country against the president, and finally led to his ouster on Thursday.
Bashir, 75, who ruled over 30 years, took power in a coup in 1989. He had said that he would only move aside for another army officer or at the ballot box.
Source: Presstv
US: Democrats give Trump until April 23 to hand over tax returns
US Democratic lawmakers have given President Donald Trump 10 days to hand over his tax returns, which he refused to release ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The lawmakers Saturday gave tax authorities a final deadline of April 23 to get their hands on the president’s tax returns.
The new deadline was announced after an initial April 10 deadline lapsed.
The announcement was made as part of an investigation launched in the Democratic-held House of Representatives.
“I am aware that concerns have been raised regarding my request and the authority of the Committee,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal said in a letter to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Charles Rettig. “Those concerns lack merit.”
Trump
United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said the administration would respond by the revised deadline.
“I’m sure we’ll respond by that deadline, not going to make a commitment prematurely whether we’ll be able to conclude a legal review by that deadline,” Mnuchin said. “We have people working on it diligently.”
Trump has refused to release his tax returns arguing that they are being audited, a claim rejected by the IRS. There have been reports that Trump engaged in “dubious tax schemes” that included “instances of outright fraud.”
Most of the money Trump received from his father’s real estate empire in the 1990s apparently came through tax dodges. The figure would amount to at least $413 million in today’s dollars.
Francophone Crisis: Six school children kidnapped in West Region
Six students — five boys and one girl — of a government secondary school have been kidnapped in Fongo Tongo, a locality in western Cameroon, a local government official said Friday.
“The children were kidnapped as they were helping their parents in farming. We have no idea where they are since their abduction. The kidnappers initially asked for ransom but did not contact the family again when they realized they could not pay,” Amiya Balise Ndongana, senior government official of Fongo Tongo, told reporters, blaming the armed separatists for the abduction.
Fongo Tongo is located in francophone West Region which shares boundary with troubled Anglophone region of Northwest where separatists fighting to create an independent nation have been clashing with government forces.
It is the first time that students were kidnapped in a border francophone region since the separatists picked up arms in November 2017.
“They have attacked this section of the country in the past, so we know that they kidnapped the children. Defense and security forces have launched a thorough search for the children and we hope that they will be rescued safe and alive,” he said.
Separatists have not claimed responsibility. Since the end of last year, students have been constantly abducted and then released in the English-speaking part of Cameroon by some radical separatists.
Xinhuanet