New drama in English-speaking Cameroon. A village in the northwest of the country was the scene on Friday of an armed attack that cost the city at least 22 people, including 14 children and women, the UN announced on Sunday (February 16th).

The opposition and local NGOs have accused the government and the military, who have been fighting Anglophone secessionist armed groups for three years, of being responsible for the killing, which was denied by a military spokesperson.

"The evidence indicates that the majority of the victims are women and children," said James Nunan, the head of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for the North West regions, by telephone. and Southwest Cameroon. "There were at least 22 dead, among them 14 children, including 11 girls and nine under the age of 5, a pregnant mother and two women who carried their babies."

>> Read: Anglophone Cameroon: the origins of the crisis

The drama took place Friday around 2 pm in the village of Ntumbo, said James Nunan, whose team gathered "many testimonies" to establish this assessment.

Deadly fighting that claimed 3,000 lives in three years

The North-West and the South-West have known, for three years, deadly combats between soldiers and armed separatists. These clashes, as well as the atrocities and crimes committed by the two camps according to international NGOs, have left more than 3,000 dead and forced more than 700,000 people to flee their homes.

The Movement for the Renaissance of Cameroon (MRC), one of the two main opposition parties, "condemned the massacre" of women and children, in a statement. "The dictatorial regime" and "the supreme head of the security and defense forces are primarily responsible for these crimes," said the party.

The MRC is the party of Maurice Kamto, who came second in the 2018 presidential election behind Paul Biya, the irremovable head of state, 86 years old, including 37 in power.

On his Facebook page, lawyer Félix Agbor Mballa, president of the Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (CHRDA), condemned the "horrible murder" of "women and children (... ) by the state defense forces ". "All testimony accuses the army," also launched on Twitter the opponent Edith Kah Walla, presidential candidate in 2011.

"False," simply replied in the morning of Sunday, an army communications officer. AFP has called on government officials for a reaction, but has so far been unsuccessful.

Threats of reprisals and abductions before the elections

This new drama affecting the English-speaking minority in this formerly predominantly French-speaking French colony, occurred almost a week after the legislative and municipal elections which saw low participation according to the African Union (AU), in particular in the two English-speaking provinces. .

There, the separatist armed groups had forbidden people to go to the polls and promised reprisals to those who risked it. And Yaoundé had dispatched important military reinforcements.

More than 100 people had been kidnapped in the two regions by rebels in the two weeks preceding the elections, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) who accused the security forces of having committed "new abuses" in the same period.

Neither the official results of these elections, nor even the turnout, have been made public by the government to date.

With AFP

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