When soldiers burst into her village in southwest Cameroon
last month with guns blazing, small farmer Eta Quinta, 32, raced intothe forest with three of her children.
“I found a canoe and I used it to cross over with my kids,
not knowing where my husband and my (other) two kids are,” she told Reuters
across the border in Nigeria, where thousands of English-speaking Cameroonians
have fled in past weeks.
What began last year as peaceful protests by Anglophone
activists against perceived marginalisation by Cameroon’s Francophone-dominated
elite has become the gravest challenge yet to President Paul Biya, who is
expected to seek to renew his 35-years in power in an election next year.
Government repression - including ordering thousands of
villagers in the Anglophone southwest to leave their homes - has driven support
for a once-fringe secessionist movement, stoking a lethal cycle of violence.
The secessionists declared an independent state called
Ambazonia on Oct. 1. Since then, 7,500 people have fled to Nigeria, including
2,300 who fled in a single day on Dec. 4 fearing government reprisals after
raids by separatists militants killed at least six soldiers and police
officers.
The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR is preparing for up
to 40,000 refugees.
Quinta and her children walked for three days through the
dense forests to reach a border crossing at the Agbokim Waterfalls. They remain
without news of the rest of the family.
“There are many pregnant women in the forest,” Quinta said
as she held her sick two-month-old baby whose head was covered by a white wooly
hat. “I have friends in the forest and am not sure if I will get to see them
again or their kids.”
At the end of World War One, Germany’s colony of Kamerun was
carved up between allied French and British victors, laying down the basis for
a language split that still persists.
English speakers make up less than a fifth of the population
of Cameroon, concentrated in former British territory near the Nigerian border
that was joined to the French-speaking Republic of Cameroon the year after its
independence in 1960. French speakers have dominated the country’s politics
since.
Cameroonian authorities say the English-speaking separatists
pose a security threat that justifies their crackdown.
The new arrivals in Nigeria live mainly with host families
who have supported them with food, clothing and shelter. The integration, a
UNHCR official said, was made easier by the pidgin English spoken on either
side of the border.
Food and medicine are in limited supply. Four people have
died of sicknesses since coming to Nigeria and the refugees sometimes sleep as
many as 50 to a five-by-seven meter room.
Their anger has grown towards a government they feel no
longer represents them, which could provide the separatists with easy recruits.
“We were walking for peaceful demonstrations ... but it’s
because of the killing of our innocent people that is why our own people have
started reacting,” said Tiku Michael, a businessman, farmer, father of six and
now a refugee.
“Even ... God himself, he will not allow things to go (on)
like that.” (Reuters)
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