BY LUCY LIMA
Reports from across the North West and South West Regions, say many youths and family members are currently on the run as they have been declared wanted by the regime for siding and collaborating with separatists and other pressure groups, due to their frank talk about the ongoing crisis.
Consequently, witch-hunting and fear of the unknown have made them go underground for fear of reprisals. Families are bearing the brunt of the unending crisis which has morphed into an armed conflict since 2017. They are either kidnapped by separatist fighters for ransom for siding with the military on one hand or are arrested tortured, molested and even killed by the military on grounds that they are siding, collaborating and sponsoring separatist fighters.
Majority have been forced to drop out from school for fear of their lives or because the educational conditions are hostile for many government-own higher institutions of learning, especially as lectures in state run universities in English-speaking regions are given in French and exams set as well in French, thus frustrating English-speaking students.
As we went to press, we gathered that the entire population of Kumba, Meme Division South West Region is still to come to terms with the unfortunate incidents happening to the Fondong’s family.
THE SUN gathered that while Fondong Gaspard, a Vice Principal and chief of Commercials in a Kumba-based technical college is still serving a jail sentence since 2021 following his stand against government to allow students celebrate National Youth Day after the October 2020 massacre of some students of the Mother Francisca International Academy, his family is restless in the hands of the Cameroon defense forces.
The whereabouts of his wife remains cloudy after his home was razed by the military. His son, Yannick Buminang, disappeared after the military launched a manhunt for him and worse of all his daughter, Ngoumte Fondong Ivana Morelle, is equally at large after having being allegedly raped by the military. Sources say the military has even promised a ransom to anyone who will disclose her whereabouts. She is in the security searchlight on grounds that she is siding with SCNC activists and collaborating with separatist fighters by supplying them food and medication.
The government crackdown on Anglophone activists and politicians has since intensified with arbitrary arrests, detention, torture and extra-judicial killings becoming the new normal, human rights groups have said.
According to Amnesty International, in 2019 about 3,000 people died, at least 500,000 were declared Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, and about 40,000 being refugees in neighbouring Nigeria with close to 700,000 children deprived of schooling. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, reported in July 2019 that about 1.3 million people in Anglophone Regions urgently needed humanitarian aid.
Government forces have engaged in extrajudicial killings, random looting, shooting, torture, molestation using disproportionate and discriminating force, abusing and arresting protesters, burning more than 200 villages, 500 houses, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians, attacking hospitals beating and raping women and girls.