The jury remains out on whether the African Union’s determination to silence the guns this year will be actualised.

Anglophone rebels of the Southern Cameroons Defence Force have agreed for humanitarian reasons to lay down their arms while the battle rages against COVID 19.

The larger Ambazonia Defence Force has yet to say it is calling off its three-year insurgency.

In Mozambique the Islamist separatists in the gas-rich northern province of Cabo Delgado have got even tougher.

In the past week they have raided two towns, sending residence fleeing in boats to the provincial capital Pemba.

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Social media footage of the French President telling a Cameroon activist that he’s pressured Biya into releasing a jailed opposition parliament and  ending human rights abuses has gone viral.

French President Emmanuel Macron was filmed after 22 people were killed  in the English-speaking north-west of Cameroon  by men in military uniform.

Macron speaks on the film of intolerable human rights violations in Cameroon and says he’ll press President Paul Biya  to ensure there are no further killings.

The protesting youths say Macron should have respect for his elder and not make Biya look like his stooge.

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The influx brings to 80 000 the number of Cameroninas seeking refuge in Nigeria.

Nigerians have responded generously to the influx of refugees from Cameroon,

In the Taraba and Cross Rivers states they have accommodated them in public schools or with local families and provided food, clothing and medicine.

The refugees in Nigeria are outnumbered by internally displaced people in Cameroon fleeing violence between the security forces and armed groups fighting for a separate state for English-speakers who feel marginalized by the Francophone government.

The violence has escalated ahead and since the elections on February 9, the results of which have not yet been announced.

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No-one has claimed responsibility, but opponents of President Paul Biya are blaming the army.

ends intro 

James Nunan of  the United Nations Humanitarian Coordination Agency says a pregnant woman and 14 children, nine of them under five years old, are among those killed.

President Paul  Biya has been battling English-speaking separatists in the northwest and southwest of Cameroon.

Three years of fighting have left more than 3000 dead and displaced 70 000. 

His security forces are accused of atrocities and human rights violations.

This has

 led Washington to axe Cameroon from the list of African countries on a special favoured trading  status programme.

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The breakthrough hopefully ending more than two years of violent conflict is a result of the Grand National Dialogue called by President Paul Biya.

The Senate still has to approve the Bill before it is promulgated.

When they do the regions in the north west snd south west of the country – which have complained about being marginalized by the Francophone majority – will be allowed to develop public policies in the area of education and justice.

President Paul Biya is betting on this decentralization law putting the brakes on secession talks by the Anglophones in addition to ending the conflict that has cost more than  3 000 lives.

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Cameroon activists  say there’s been considerable interest shown by members of the PAP lobbied at their committee meetings in Midrand this week.

Nkongho Felix Agbor of the Centre For Human Rights and Democracy in Africa says visit to the PAP follows a petition to the body calling on parliamentarians to make the Cameroonian issue a priority.

Agbor says the situation is Cameroon has deteriorated since the English-speaking started campaigning against marginalization and oppression.

(Take in the Felix clip here }

Agbor himself spend nine months in jail and faced military tribunal which violated the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights.

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They say the continental body has a responsibility to debate the worsening crisis in the Central African country which now has the sixth largest displaced population in the world.

The Pan African Parliament has been eerily silent on Cameroon where at least 1800 people have been ordered and half a million people displaced by a crackdown on the English-speaking minority in the west of the country.

That because the PAP President Roger Nkoda Dang is a member of President Paul Biya’s ruling  party.

Felix Nkongho of the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa and Maximilienne Mbe of the Network of Central African Human Rights Defenders have arrived to be heard by the PAP committee currently in session.

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More than 350 of them have been arrested while demonstrating for the release of opposition leader Maurice Kamto.

Octogenarian President Paul Biya has his hands full dealing with the disaffected Anglophone majority in his country.

Last week his police killed a four-month-old baby among protestors in the English-speaking west of Cameroon.

Now the police have turned on Francophone opponents of Biya, who has been in power for 35 years.

Maurice Kamto and scores of his supporters were arrested after he claimed victory in last October’s presidential election.

Those supporters are defying police, and risking death and injury, by taking to the streets of the capital Yaoundè demanding his release.

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Amnesty International and global media outlets have shown footage of Cameroonian soldiers shooting and killing  civilians, including women with children strapped to their backs.

Cameroon’s a key security partner of the United States.

300 US marines are training Cameroonian troops fighting Boko Haram coming into the north of the country from neighboring Nigeria.

But Cameroon’s English-speaking minority claims it’s being marginalized and radical elements within this group are  seeking to secede.

In parts of the southwest, security experts say the country is close to civil war.

Washington’s saying it will not condone executions, attacks on civilians and burning villages 

The post US cuts military aid to Cameroon over human rights violations appeared first on Jean-Jacques Cornish.

One persons died in the attack.

The separatists are calling for the release of their leader who’s jailed and facing the death penalty.

The Anglophone Cameroonians, who make up a fifth of the country’s 17-million population, say they want a separate state in the south west of the nation  they say has marginalized them

The authorities under President Paul Biya have dealt harshly with any acts of rebellion.

At the time of the attack on the Francophone town, the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa has condemned the killing of Anglophone protestors by security forces in Cameroon

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