The erstwhile firebrand opposition MP and Anglophone rights champion has been spitting more fire. In this scintillating address to the UMass Conference in Boston, USA, over the weekend, the man who prophetically declared the resistance of the people of what he preferably called West Cameroon, has this time outlined five signposts to guide anyone seeking to understand the complex destination called Cameroon.
Enjoy:
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation, and, the Centre for Peace, Democracy and Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. My special gratitude goes to Pr Padraig O’Malley who in the last ten months has, with some of his team members, flown over to London on five occasions for meetings with me to get a better understanding of the crisis in the Cameroons.
I thank the University of Massachusetts, our host for this high-level conference. I specially thank the organizers for showing great interest in the people of the former British Southern Cameroons, whom I have come to refer to as “the forgotten of the earth.” Thank you all for your gracious decision to talk Cameroon.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am a lifelong living witness to what Cameroon is and what it isn’t. I have lived all my life in Cameroon, and I can say that I have seen it all, heard it all and lived it all. There are FIVE basic truths, each interwoven into the others, around which all the trouble emanating from Cameroon evolves.
(A) Cameroon Has Lived a Lie for More Than Half a Century! The fundamental message the world needs to take home from the UMass Conference is that: this nation known to all as “Cameroon” has lived one of the biggest lies in all of human history.
The very foundations of the nation were laid on the mud of fraud, violence and falsehood. That is what has led to the ongoing blood shed on my people. And that is what led me to write a book titled:
WirbaForce: The Force of Truth in Defence of Southern Cameroons, because it required the unstoppable force of truth to spur our people to rise and tear down the high walls of over half a century of lies, that successive violent regimes had continuously fed to the world.
You are all gathered in UMass today because those walls of fraud and falsehood are coming down and the world has a chance to peep in and see the undeniable truth.
(B) Two Independent Nations Came Together in 1961! The central rock on which this unavoidable truth stands is that the nation known as La Republique du Cameroun got her independence on January 1st, 1960; and the nation known as Southern Cameroons had her own independence on the 1st, of October 1961! Both have their internationally defined and recognised boundaries to this day.
Somehow the UN and the UK had for reasons best known to them coerced the state of Southern Cameroons to have her independence through some unheard-of mechanism called “independence by joining”, either Nigeria or La Republique du Cameroun! And the UK immediately connived with France and the government of La Republique du Cameroun, to invent a Federation of “two states of equal status”, with neither a union treaty nor any legal or constitutional instruments to lay the foundation for such a federation. Of course, this highly fraudulent federation would soon afterwards be quickly dismantled by France and the government of Lrc, and Southern Cameroons would literally be annexed.
This colonization is the cause of all the war we are witnessing today.
(C) The War is Territorial not Political. As a dully elected representative of the Southern Cameroonian people, who cheated death by escaping into exile for daring to spur his people to tear down those sealed walls of falsehood, I want to inform the world, through the UMass Conference that: the underlying cause of the crisis that has led to the war between the State of Lrc and the state of Southern Cameroons, now renamed Ambazonia, is territorial and not political; because the Southern Cameroons has never been, at any time in her history an integral part of another nation called La Republique du Cameroun! Anyone, any organisation or any nation dealing with this issue otherwise, would simply be massaging the symptoms but getting no way near the disease.
(D) We Are Dealing With a Huge Case of a Stolen State. I would like to inform the world that what we have before us is an enormous and unique case of a stolen state! The nation called Lrc, before the watching eyes of the 21st century modern world, has succeeded to steal our nation called Southern Cameroons! And the world now thinks it is normal for Lrc to steal and own a smaller neighbouring state by force of arms, simply because they, backed by the French army, have the military might to do so! I want to let you all know that we will never let the Western World sleep in peace if the West normalises this blatant state theft! We, the people of Southern Cameroons, aka Ambazonia, are hell-bent on fighting to the last man standing in order to seize back our stolen nation!
(E) Only the Force of Arms Can Keep Cameroon Together! We have long gone passed the stage of keeping the two Cameroons together. Lrc and France can only try to hold Southern Cameroons as part of their own country by force of arms, which will never work. Consequently, since no one has the monopoly of arms and violence, it’s a matter of time before we ambazonians and our own partners match and overcome their fire power in the battlefield! Our people are ready for their war of independence to liberate their stolen nation.
Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends of the Ambazonian people, my people have gone through the most horrifying of lives in the last 58 years behind those heavily fortified walls of falsehood, fraud and violence, set up by France and the governments of Lrc! The unacceptable mistreatment of our people has been designed and yet unwritten policy. The SIX major technics of violent oppression used to bring down our people and keep them on their knees from the very beginning of this fraudulent union are:
1) Humiliation: The daily humiliation of our people for over half a century is directly responsible for the profound and violent anger seen in the Ambazonian people today. They were for decades humiliated from the classroom to the workplace, from the low office to the high office, from the police station to the Gendarmeries brigades, from the market place to the eternal checkpoints on the highways, from the hospital to the courtroom, from the village to the city! This has been a deeply painful and unbearable journey! They have been humiliated to believe that they do not count, that they do not matter, that they do not have an opinion and that they are objects that can be dispensed of.
2) Impoverishment: The system was designed to keep Southern Cameroonians poor, because poverty keeps people weak and helpless. There is no better way for the oppressors to keep control over the oppressed, than to destroy every economic infrastructure of the oppressed! This guarantees they will remain in servitude.
3) Imprisonment and Torture: Needless to say, is the suffering of our people jailed by this system to cover their lies after stealing our own nation. Those who questioned the system or raised a finger in
protest were simply thrown to rot in jail. There, they are systematically held and tortured behind the established prison walls, the gendarmeries prison cells, the regular police cells and the countless special detention centres, specially designed for them. The human cries from excruciating pain of the broken bones, the burnt skin, and the crushed toes and fingers became our common identity of torture aimed at killing the truth about Cameroon.
4) Exile: From 1961 our people who escaped capture and torture were pushed into exile if they hoped to live to fight another day. They are now in the tens of thousands hiding out in many countries around
the world.
5) Dehumanization: The dehumanization of our people has seen a huge leap in the last 20 years and officials have openly called us the enemy in the house. They soon moved to referring to our people as ‘them’, ‘those violent people’, ‘those Nigerians’, ‘those terrorists’, ‘killers’, and now reached the worst curve in the dehumanization process by referring to us as ‘two cubes of sugar’, ‘dogs’ and ‘rats’ in official press presentations!
6) Killing: The random killing of our people in cold blood over the years is a direct consequence of that
dehumanization process that had been in play throughout our history with Lrc. The ease with which they kill our people without remorse is the clear sign that the rulers of the nation of Lrc have never considered us human.
Even if they did, they took us for a lesser human species than they, so dispensing of that lower species, through mass killings, could be done with convenient ease! And they do it comfortably and constantly.
Ladies and Gentlemen, you will surely agree with me that if for close to 60 years the nation of Lrc had wanted to make our people and our nation feel part of theirs, they should have done so by showing us good behaviour not evil, they should have done so through giving us respect not their supreme arrogance, they should have done so through showing us love not contempt, through honouring our culture and way of life not dishonouring it with trying to kill it by imposing theirs, they should have
done so by giving us the free space to be who we are rather than trying strangle us to be who they want us to be, they should have done so through giving us hope and life not despair and death from the ever blazing guns of their marauding soldiers! Now that they missed that chance for almost 60 years, l can assure you they will never ever have it again. We will never let them have it! Not today, not tomorrow, NOT EVER!
EASE WITH WHICH SOUTHERN CAMEROONIANS ARE KILLED LEADS TO GENOCIDE
“A genocide begins with the killing of one man, not because of what he has done but because of who he is.” Kofi Ata Anan, Former UN Secretary General. The continuous mass killing of our people by the government and military of La Repbulique du Cameroun is not because of what we have done, it is because of who we are! As a result, there is an ongoing genocide on the Southern Cameroonian people that began in 2017 and as we speak, upwards of 6000 people have been killed! The world should take note of what part France played during the genocide in Rwanda, because some of the same signs are showing up in Southern Cameroon!
Thank you very much for your valuable time.
Wirba Joseph Mbiydzenyuy