By Cynthia Bih
The family of two symperthisers of the Ambazonia separatist movement, who were deported from China, and detained at the State Secretariat for Defence, SED, in Yaounde, have been refused access to them.
The two Ambazonia separatist symperthisers, Nji Peter and a certain Michael, had been deported from China, tortured and detained, allegedly under horrible and inhuman conditions at SED.
It should be recalled that on June 14, 2023, a group of Cameroonians wore t-shirts, mufflers and other gadgets with Ambazonia colours, carried Ambazonia flags and staged a march in China, in solidarity with the secession movement in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon.
When the Cameroon embassy in Beijing, China got the news, it summoned some of the guys involved; Mackelvinson Mbong, Nji Peter and Michael. They were accused and found guilty as per the embassy officials, after the convocation at the Cameroon embassy in Beijing and in collaboration with the Chinese government. An arrest warrant was issued for their eventual arrest and repatriation to Cameroon by the Cameroon government.
However, we gathered that, alerted of the development, one of them, Mackelvinson Mbong, who happened to be a University lecturer in Wuhan, China, escaped with his family and his whereabout is still unknown.
Nji Peter and Michael were arrested, tortured and deported to Cameroon on April 1, 2024. They are presently at the SED pending further investigations and their families haven’t set eyes on them since their arrival in Cameroon.
It should be noted that some persons arrested in connection to the crisis in the North West and South West regions have died in detention.
Meanwhile, a manhunt has been launched for Mackelvinson Mbong. If arrested, he will also be deported to Cameroon and may later be tried in a military tribunal, under the anti-terrorism law, whose maximum punishment is death penalty. Others have suffered similar fate of extrajudicial killings within the context of the armed conflict in the two English-speaking regions.
It should be recalled that in February 2022, Human Rights Watch had said Cameroonian authorities subjected dozens of asylum seekers deported by the United States to serious human rights violations between 2019 and 2021.
This was in a 149-page report titled “‘How Can You Throw Us Back?’: Asylum Seekers Abused in the US and Deported to Harm in Cameroon”. The report traced what happened to the estimated 80 to 90 Cameroonians deported from the United States on two flights in October and November 2020, and others deported in 2021 and 2019.
Human Right Watch said people returned to Cameroon faced arbitrary arrest and detention; enforced disappearances; torture, rape, and other violence; extortion; unfair prosecutions; confiscation of their national IDs; harassment; and abuses against their relatives.
The organisation noted that by returning Cameroonians to face persecution, torture, and other serious harm, the US violated the principle of nonrefoulement, a cornerstone of international refugee and human rights law.
Between December 2020 and January 2022, Human Rights Watch interviewed 41 deported Cameroonian asylum seekers, four asylum seekers in the US, and 54 other people in the US and Cameroon, including relatives and friends of those deported, witnesses to abuses, lawyers, immigrant rights activists, and experts. Human Rights Watch collected and analysed US asylum and immigration documents of deported people, as well as photographs, videos, recordings, and medical and legal documents corroborating accounts of mistreatment in Cameroon.
Cameroon has faced humanitarian crises in several regions in recent years. Respect for human rights has deteriorated and the government has increasingly cracked down on opposition and dissent. Violence since late 2016 by government forces and armed separatist groups in Cameroon’s two Anglophone regions has caused mass displacement, as have intercommunal violence and ongoing conflict with Boko Haram in the Far North Region.