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CAMEROON-UNREST-LEAD
25 separatists killed in Cameroon: security officials
DOUALA, Nov 14, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Twenty-five separatists were killed in
fighting in a restive English-speaking region of Cameroon, security officials
said Wednesday.
“Twenty-five ‘Amba Boys’ were killed in three clashes” on Tuesday in Mbot,
a village near the town of Nkambe, a source in the capital Yaounde said,
confirming a security source in the troubled Northwest Region.
“Amba Boys” refers to separatists who last year launched an armed campaign
for the independence of Cameroon’s two anglophone regions, which they call
Ambazonia.
Photos obtained by AFP from a source close to the security services showed
about 10 bodies lined up on the ground.
Weapons, mainly shotguns, were placed alongside.
A source close to the security services said the fighters had set up a
base in a school in Mayo Binka, a few kilometres (miles) from Nkambe.
Two security officials told AFP that the armed forces did not suffer any
losses in the clashes.
Eighty percent of Cameroon’s population are French speakers while the rest
are anglophones, who are concentrated in the country’s west, in the Northwest
and neighbouring Southwest Regions.
Years-long frustration at perceived discrimination fed demands for
anglophone autonomy, which were rejected by the central government.
In 2017, radicals became ascendant in the anglophone movement and declared
an independent state, the Republic of Ambazonia, which is not recognised
internationally.
They have attacked troops and police and torched schools and other
buildings deemed to be symbols of the central state.
The government, in response, has launched a brutal crackdown.
Fighting in the two regions has killed between 450 to 500 civilians, 185
members of the security forces and hundreds of armed separatists think-tank
International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report this month.
“The Anglophone conflict is gradually turning into a civil war,” it said.
According to an October update by the UN’s refugee agency OCHA, there are
a total of 437,000 people from the anglophone regions displaced within the
country, while some 27,000 people have fled to Nigeria.
BSS/AFP/RY/1635 hrs