BY DOH JAMES SONKEY
Some 27 leading Human Rights Organisations including Amnesty International, Committee to Protect Journalists, Mandela Center International, etc. have written an open letter to the President of the Republic of Cameroon, Paul Biya, a copy of which was sent to The SUN, calling on him to use the atmosphere of physical celebration brought forth by the organisation of the 33rd edition of the African Nations Cup in Cameroon to free “all those arbitrarily detained because of acts of free expression and free assembly.”
Authors of the joint open letter titled, “Arbitrary Detention” explain that, “the cheering and celebrations shown by the media mask another reality in the country. Over a hundred people have been shut up in prison, most for over a year, and some for over five years now, simply for protesting. Most face substantial sentences that mean they’ll be in prison for many more years. They have families that they desperately miss, and who miss them. The atmosphere in those prisons and in those families is not one of excitement, but one of anguish, pain and despair.”
While arguing that, “Detaining people simply for exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, as well as detaining people after trials with no independent procedural safeguards, is arbitrary and unlawful,” they paint that, “celebrations go on outside, these people who have done nothing beyond peacefully exercising their human rights are suffering inside crowded cells, counting the months or years that they have already spent in prison, and the months or years that await them still.”
The letter cites cases such as; “Dorgelesse Nguessan, a hairdresser and single mother who for the very first time joined the MRC-led protest on regional elections organisation, was arrested and detained for over a year and then sentenced to five years in prison by a military court, Penn Terence Khan, vice-principal of CCAST Bambili and father of four who was arrested, tortured, charged with terrorism and tried by a military court with the only evidence against him in the judgment being a T-shirt that reads ‘Diaspora South Africa standing behind West Cameroonians 4 a Federal Cameroon’ and ‘We are Cameroonians We are not extremists’. He got 12 years in prison after joining protests in the Anglophone regions five years ago, Tsi Conrad, a young independent journalist from the Anglophone regions who headed out to a protest with the intention of covering it – that is, doing his job was arrested on the spot and later sentenced to 15 years in prison by a military court, At least three other Anglophone journalists are also arbitrarily detained; Mancho Bibixy Tse and Thomas Awah Junior arrested in January 2017 and convicted by the same military court to 15 and 11 years in jail, respectively. Mancho is also known for his human rights activism around the Anglophone crisis and for standing in a coffin as he gave a speech to fellow protesters. Another journalist, Kingsley Fumunyuy Njoka, who was arrested on May 15, 2020, has been detained (at first incommunicado) without trial for more than 20 months. And Intifalia Oben, a young trader who made custom T-shirts with MRC political slogans on them, not realising that it was the security forces who’d placed the order. They came to arrest him for having made the T-shirts. He was tortured so badly that he fell ill with a lung infection and ended up chained to his hospital bed for 24 hours a day, even as he received treatment. He was sentenced to five years in prison by a military court.”