Cameroon President Paul Biya agreed on Sunday with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that an impartial probe was needed after gunmen killed 22 people in a village at the heart of a separatist insurgency last month.
The French presidency said the two leaders spoke by phone about the Feb. 14 attack in Ngarbuh village in north western Cameroon, where gunmen in military uniforms and masks shot women and children and burned others in their homes.
“They agreed an impartial probe was needed in reaction to the violence committed against civilians in the village of Ngarbuh in the northwestern province,” the French presidency said in a statement. Even so, the presidency had already ordered an investigation into the killings. At thensame time, government had already blamed the deaths of children, and pregnant women on collateral damage from and explosion of fuel stocked by Ambazonia “terrorist” following a confrontation with the military.
President Macron had delared publicly that he wasngiing to call Paul Biya and put maximum pressure on him over the Ngarbur killings. But his words had rattled the Biya regime. The secretary general at athe oresidency and the minister of communication minster respectively denounced the president’s declarations to a Cameroonian activist who confronted him with allegations of genicide by the military. Pro government protesters staged two days of demonstrations in front of the French embassy and streets of Yaounde.
Cameroon’s army since 2017 has been fighting English-speaking militias seeking to form a breakaway state called Ambazonia amid the cocoa farms and forests of west Cameroon.
As fighting has intensified, so have abuses by both sides, witnesses and rights groups say.
The fighting is the gravest threat to stability in the oil- and cocoa-producing country since Biya took power nearly 40 years ago.
By Reuters
*Additional Reporting by
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