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In Buea, the southwestern capital, an angry crowd lynched the policeman who shot and killed a five-year-old girl.
After a police officer in western Cameroon killed a 5-year-old girl who was subsequently lynched by an angry crowd, the English-speaking authorities in western Cameroon called for calm.
The incident took place on Thursday in Buea, the capital of the southwest region, where English-speaking separatists and French-speaking government forces were locked in one place. A bitter four-year conflict.
“We urge the public to remain calm. This is a sad and unfortunate incident,” Governor Bernard Okalia Bilay told the national television channel CRTV.
“Don’t worry, those who do this will pay the price. This is an atrocity,” he said.
Blaise Chamango, the head of a local campaign group called “Human Is Right,” said a woman who drove her child to school was ordered to stop at a checkpoint by the police.
“The driver did not listen. A military police opened fire and a female student was fatally injured,” she said.
“People responded by lynching the military police. More than 500 people marched with their bodies [of the girl] Go to the governor’s office. “
A statement from the Ministry of Defense confirmed these incidents and said in a statement: “In the inappropriate response, it was not suitable for the situation at the time, which was obviously not commensurate with the driver’s disrespectful behavior. One of the military police… fired a warning shot to stop it. The vehicle is moving.
It added: “During this process, Caro Louise Ndialle Jr., an approximately 5-year-old elementary school student, was shot in the head and died in the aforementioned vehicle.”
The ministry stated that it has launched an investigation into the girl’s death and police lynching.
Residents protest on the streets of Buea [Eyong Blaise/Reuters]Protest broke out
Later on Thursday, hundreds of residents took to the streets of Buea, some holding branches as a sign of peace.
Others waved 500 francs of CFA notes ($0.88), which they said was the amount the girl’s parents refused to pay before the military police opened fire.
Some people said the incident was part of a pattern of harassment of residents by highly militarized security forces.
“All they did was to intimidate people. If you have an ID, it’s a problem. If you don’t have an ID, then there is a problem,” said one protester, who declined to be named for security reasons.
The southwest and the adjacent northwest are home to English-speaking people who make up about one-fifth of Cameroon’s 22 million people.
Perceived discrimination
On October 1, 2017, separatists launched a decades-long campaign to correct the discrimination felt by most people in French-speaking countries.
The suppression of attacks by armed separatists on security forces has plunged the two areas into a cycle of violence, which has caused more than 3,500 deaths and forced approximately 700,000 people to flee their homes.
Last month alone, 15 soldiers were killed in two attacks in five days. In 2020, 7 schoolchildren were killed and 4 suspected separatists were sentenced to death.
The existence of English-speaking areas originated from the colonial era.
After World War I, Britain and France partitioned the former German territory of Cameroon.
After Cameroon became independent from France in 1961, a part of British territory, namely southern Cameroon, joined Cameroon.
For a long time, English-speaking countries have been annoyed by obvious inequality, especially in education and law.
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