BY SANDRA LUM
A young farmer from Kumba, Achah Briston (commonly known as “Molo Molo”), has become the latest civilian caught in the deadly crossfire of Cameroon’s Anglophone conflict after being accused of collaborating with both government forces and Ambazonia separatist fighters.
The ordeal began on 18 December 2022 when soldiers stopped the 23-year-old on the road to his plantation. After finding food items in his vehicle intended for farm workers, troops accused him of supplying separatist fighters. Witnesses say Briston was brutally tortured on the spot.
Soldiers then reportedly drove him to the vicinity of a known separatist hideout and used him as human bait to draw the fighters out. A heavy exchange of gunfire followed, resulting in the deaths of several separatists. Briston was subsequently taken to Mile 1 Police Station, where he endured further torture. Weeks later, he managed to escape.
His freedom proved short-lived. Convinced that Briston had guided the military to their location, Ambazonia fighters raided his family home, set it ablaze, and nearly killed his cousin who attempted to intervene.
Briston has been in hiding ever since. Family sources confirm he is now wanted by both sides: the Cameroonian military has issued an arrest warrant, while separatist groups have blacklisted him.
“If the military catches him, he will be tried before a military tribunal under the 2014 anti-terrorism law — the sentence could be death,” a local human-rights monitor told journalists on condition of anonymity. “If the Amba boys find him first, they will kill him immediately. He is a dead man walking.”
A Conflict That Punishes Neutrality
Briston’s story is far from isolated. Across the North West and South West regions, civilians are routinely trapped between two warring parties that refuse to accept neutrality.
Government forces continue waves of arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, and documented extrajudicial killings. Separatist groups, meanwhile, kidnap, torture, mutilate, behead, or burn alive those they brand “blacklegs” — anyone suspected of collaborating with the state or refusing to pay imposed “liberation taxes.”
The United Nations says more than 6,000 people have died since the armed conflict began in 2017. Over 730,000 Cameroonians are internally displaced, at least 80,000 have fled to Nigeria as refugees, and hundreds of villages lie in ruins. A separatist-imposed school boycott, now in its eighth year, has robbed an entire generation of formal education.
Roots of the Crisis
The crisis erupted in late 2016 when Anglophone lawyers and teachers launched peaceful protests against the systematic marginalisation of English-speaking Cameroonians and the erosion of the country’s common-law and Anglo-Saxon education systems in favour of the French civil-law model.
A heavy-handed government response — including live ammunition against demonstrators, mass arrests, and internet shutdowns — pushed parts of the population toward armed separatist struggle and the declaration of an independent “Ambazonia.”
Despite repeated calls from the United Nations, United States, European Union, and African Union for inclusive dialogue to address root causes, the government in Yaoundé insists national unity is non-negotiable. Leading Ambazonia figures, including self-declared president Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, remain in life imprisonment following a 2019 military trial.
Seven years into open warfare, and with no political solution in sight, ordinary citizens like Achah Briston continue to bear the heaviest burden — hunted by the very forces that claim to either protect or liberate them.