‘Licence to kill’
Lucy speaks of her last day in her village of Mbonge with arresting clarity. The 64-year-old was cooking plantains to sell by the roadside when soldiers came sweeping in to root out separatist rebels known as Amba Boys. She remembers the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns and the screams of villagers scattering ‘helter-skelter’ – many fleeing to the bush, shot in the back as they ran. ‘Whosoever the bullets met, the people died,’ she says.
Mbonge is in Cameroon’s anglo-phone southwest. The soldiers were with the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), an elite Israeli- and US-trained corps deployed by the francophone regime to crush an anglophone uprising in the northwest and southwest regions. In Douala, a port city just over the border from anglophone Cameroon, countless people who have fled the conflict tell similar stories: of security forces shooting indiscriminately, torching homes and sometimes entire villages in their determination to snuff out the separatist threat.
Some call it the ‘anglophone problem’, others ‘the war’. Semantics can be blurring, but the numbers don’t lie. At least 1,600 people have lost their
