All Africa
As a campfire burns in a remote village on Cameroon’s northwestern border with Nigeria, seven men and five boys roast cocoa yam for supper.
The eldest among them, 45-year-old Bruno Nfor, says the group has spent at least a week in the bush after violence broke out in the town of Tadu. Armed separatists attacked the town, he says. Then, soldiers began burning houses and arresting people indiscriminately. Many people were tortured or wounded.
Nfor says if he and his friends had the means, they would leave the bush where they are hiding and cross over to Nigeria, because they are not safe in the English-speaking northwest and southwest regions of Cameroon, where they they say they were treated like animals and terrorists before they fled.
In January, Nigerian authorities said they had arrested at least two dozen Cameroonians receiving military training on its territory.
Nfor says since then, Cameroon’s military has been sweeping through border villages, searching for armed separatists whom they suspect of either going to or returning from Nigeria.
This month, the U.N. refugee agency reported that since mid-2017, tens of thousands of people had fled Cameroon’s two Anglophone regions, where the separatist movements are active. English-speakers there say they are discriminated against by the country’s French-speaking majority.
In hiding
Paul Atanga Nji, Cameroon’s minister of territorial administration, says thousands are hiding in bushes and mountains around the border with Nigeria.
Last week, he visited the two English-speaking regions to plead for the displaced populations to return. He says many of those escaping have weapons.
“They have to come out of the bushes, go back to their villages and put down the guns. If they do that, it is fine for them. We have recovered a lot of guns, a lot of weapons, a lot of explosives brought by people who are in the bushes, so we are asking them to repent and go out of those atrocities because you cannot succeed. We have a strong nation, we have solid institutions and there is no hiding place for truants in Cameroon. You cannot hide,” Nji said.