By DOH JAMES SONKEY
The Government of Cameroon has vehemently refuted accusations contained in the report of Human Rights Watch saying satellite images prove that Cameroon Defence Forces is responsible for “the murder of twenty-one civilians, including a woman and thirteen children, in an armed attack carried out on 14 February 2020 in the locality of Ngarbuh, Donga Mantung Division in the North -West Region.”
In a press briefing last February 27, 2020, government Spokesman and Communication Minister, Rene Emmanuel Sadi expressed shock that Human Rights Watch has been closing eyes on atrocities committed by separatists in the two Anglophone regions.
The Minister said “we know today that most of these terrorists disguise themselves as police officers, gendarmes and soldiers, wearing the uniforms of the National Defence and Security Forces, to deceive the populations and commit the most unspeakable violence under the label of the Cameroonian army.”
Accompanying him at the press briefing, officials of the Ministry of Defence projected a video showing individuals dressed in Cameroon Defence and Security Forces uniforms and controlling vehicles at a checkpoint in the North West region. Though the video did not have any element on the Ngarbuh incident, the MINDEF officials declared that separatists deliberately wear military uniforms to commit atrocities so that they can accuse Cameroon Defence Forces.
The Human Rights Watch report titled “Cameroon: civilians massacred in separatist area,” published last February 25, 2020 incriminating Cameroon Defence Forces was described by Minister Rene Sadi as “overtly biased.”
He revealed that “The Cameroonian Government has in fact been in possession for the past few days of irrefutable evidence establishing links between, on the one hand, Mrs Ilaria ALLEGROZZI, presented as a senior researcher at the NGO “Human Rights Watch”, author of the biased report incriminating the Cameroonian Armed Forces, and on the other hand, numerous secessionist terrorists who have regularly made available to her and at her request, since the beginning of the crisis in the North-West and South-West Regions, photographs, videos, as well as information on their various abominations, so that they may be used as arguments against our Defence and Security Forces. With regard to the links between the criminal gangs that sow terror and desolation among the populations of the two Regions involved, the arrest on 24 February 2020 of a dangerous secessionist terrorist named Nfor Yacubu and the appraisal of his mobile phone, made it possible to establish that this person maintains close relations of active complicity with Mrs Ilaria ALLEGROZI.”
The Minister went on that “Thus, in several of their exchanges by telephone messages, the latter asked the terrorist, who was then presented as a specialist in faking images for secessionist propaganda purposes, beyond all the crimes, violence and illicit trafficking in which he is engaged on a daily basis, to provide her with trumped up visual documents, photographs and videos showing the Cameroonian Defence and Security Forces committing violence against civilians.”
He said Mrs Ilaria ALLEGROZI is angry that “Cameroonian authorities decided to expel her from the national territory on 12 April 2019 and to consequently stop all collaboration with the NGO that employs her, due to the fact that the information she spreads about our country are permanently inaccurate and fallacious.”