Cameroon. Teachers kidnapped in English-speaking areas

Six to eleven teachers were kidnapped, Tuesday, November 3, in a school in the west of Cameroon, in an English-speaking area in the grip of a deadly conflict between separatist rebels and the army, announced the Presbyterian Church and a teachers’ union.

The attack on the Presbyterian school by armed men took place in Kumbo, in the North West region, where attacks on schools, assaults and kidnappings of students and teachers are frequent, attributed by the authorities from Yaoundé to the English-speaking secessionist rebels.

Eleven teachers were taken away by the attackers, said Reverend Samuel Fonki, head of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon and Stephen Afuh, president of PEATTU, a Presbyterian teachers’ union. But an official of the local authorities, on condition of anonymity, assured that only six teachers were missing in the evening.

Ransom

Students are usually released, as are teachers for ransom, but some have already been killed in the past, accused by their captors of “collaborating” with the regime.

This new drama comes ten days later the murder of seven schoolchildren a little further south, in the southwest region also predominantly anglophone in a largely francophone Cameroon. They were shot dead in their classroom in Kumba by strangers, armed separatists according to Yaoundé. These attacks are never claimed.

Bloody war

“Eleven teachers from the presbyterian primary and secondary school were kidnapped this morning by Amba-boys”, nickname given to the rebels in reference to the name they would like to give to an independent state in the two English-speaking regions, Ambazonia, said Reverend Fonki.

For nearly four years, these armed groups and the security forces dispatched by Yaoundé have been waging a bloody war in the two regions and the two camps have been regularly accused of crimes committed against civilians by international NGOs and the UN.

Already in mid-February 2019, nearly 170 students from a high school had been kidnapped in Kumbo and then released after a day of captivity, after negotiations with the kidnappers, who had demanded the closure of their establishment. In November of the same year, 90 students were abducted and detained for five days, then released. Their school had also been closed.

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