17 October 2011

When Protest is Called “Disorder”

October 16, 2011 

By Juliette Abandokwe 


Douala, Cameroon 

On October 4th, five days before the general election, seventeen of Mboua Massok’s young militants were arrested as they were disseminating invitations for the next pre-electoral meeting to be held two days later. Mboua Massok, also commonly called “Acting Combatant”, has become over the years the symbol of resistance to the trivialization of the intolerable and ruthless rule of Paul Biya. 

According to the newspapers, the seventeen arrested youth are facing charges for having caused disorder; their trial will take place on Monday 17 October. 

A young 22 year-old Cameroonian on Facebook commented this arrest by saying that “they weren’t fighting for liberty but for disorder (according to the newspapers). The next one who’ll act in that sense will be punished and charged”. 

It is nice to know that in Cameroon one is punished first and then charged! 

This kind of talk just shows how well Paul Biya’s rule is using young Cameroonians in his efforts to disseminate terror, by convincing them to believe how bad it is to have a different opinion, and to stand up for it. These youth are then left to criss-cross all over the place for systematic intimidation and demonization of independent thinking. The warning of this young man is just drenched in abuse of power and impunity, supported by the climate of terror instilled by the brutal national system of repression. 

Biya's newspapers and television: A very efficient and well financed brainwashing scheme 

To protest against the high-jacking of basic liberties, against institutionalized brutality, and against the rape of a people's right to chose its leader freely, is not "fighting for disorder" as the Cameroonian state controlled media are proclaiming. That is the language of coldblooded dictation, aimed at the destruction of any attempt for self-determination. 

For the sake of their business, Paul Biya and France need a system in Cameroon where Cameroonians are superfluous. They would lose too much money if the people of Cameroon succeeded in standing up to ask for more justice and fair partnerships. So all heads must be kept down, and any head that comes up will be chopped off. That is in essence what the state media are telling Cameroonians. 

In reality, the self- and France- proclaimed part-time president has declared war on “his” people, by continuing the 51-year old denial of the right for the Cameroonian people to organize an efficient, coherent thus strong opposition. The global picture of today’s’ opposition is the direct result of a systematic psychosocial destruction of society, operated mainly through imported and well used propaganda methods. 

As protest is called “disorder”, everybody naturally agrees that is has to be put in order. That is part of the brainwashing procedure. In reality, Biya is forcibly suppressing any kind of protest, with the support of a completely rotten "justice" system, where it is his friends who are in charge. As he considers the Cameroonian people as superfluous, it would be contradictory if he cared about their fundamental rights. 

Biya, “The Choice of The People” 

For Paul Biya, the people of Cameroonian have no rights; his has done the utmost efforts to prevent them from asking for their civil liberties, by managing to make them believe that the misery they are living in, is what is called “peace”. 

Intimidation, repression and propaganda will not stop the wheel to turn round. When the “too much is too much” will have gone over the brim, the time will come when a miserable tyrant called Paul Biya will himself be punished and charged in the bitterest way. That moment is slowly coming, however sarcastic people think about it. 

That is except if he runs off without paying his bill, which at his age can happen anytime.

Evil ruling never lasts for ever

16 October 2011

In Nigeria, Militancy Raises Specter of Civil War

12 October 2011 
David Francis


On Oct. 2, Nigeria celebrated the 51st anniversary of its freedom from British rule. A large gala was planned in Abuja, the fast-growing Nigerian capital located in the center of the country.

But, days before the celebrations, Boko Haram, a Muslim extremist group based in the country's north, and the Movement to Emancipate the Niger Delta (MEND), based in the country's oil-rich south, both threatened to disrupt the festivities with violence. Boko Haram had already made it clear that it was capable of attacking Abuja on Aug. 26, when it exploded a bomb at the United Nations building there, killing 23. And just a week before the scheduled gala event, a bomb scare at the country's National Assembly sent lawmakers scrambling for safety.

MEND had long ago showed itself capable of such an attack. It is responsible for a string of bombings, kidnappings and killings against the Nigerian government as well as against oil companies in the south over the past decade. And as Boko Haram has emerged, MEND has become even more active in an effort to reinsert itself into Nigeria's national conversation.

9 October 2011

Paul Biya, the Killer of Innocent Cameroonians

3 October 
Tila Bokado


Voice Of Cameroon is calling on the United Nations, the United States government, human rights organizations and media groups around the world to advise Paul Biya who have continuously torture and savagely murdered innocent Cameroonians , to watch his evil ways because we are ready to take down his armed chickens. We understand that they're some members of the Cameroon armed chickens who are dedicated to brutalize and murder innocent Cameroonians in order to please Paul Biya the tyrannic dictator. That will be the greatest mistake if that happen because our Freedom Troopers will use every means necessary to equalize any bloody killings in the South Cameroon camp by the evil regime. The Cameroon People's Liberation Troopers want the following issues to be resolved immediately between paul biya and Southern Cameroonians.

1.  Paul Biya must immediately release every Southern Cameroonian and political prisoners who are in prison or house of arrest. Our people have every rights to walk freely and enjoy their natural fatherland without fear of anyone.

2.     WE need the names of every Southern Cameroonian and political activists who are held captive by the illegal regime of Dictator paul biya. We have seen recent videos of filthy, crowded house of arrest and detention camps where our citizens are held captive by Paul Biya.

3.    If any Southern Cameroonian or citizen of Cameroon who have been arrested lost their life in the hands of paul biya and his armed chickens, that will be the beginning of a bloody war. The Cameroon People's Liberation Troopers will not sit and watch paul biya murder our citizens anymore. Those Cameroonians who are supporting Paul Biya will automatically be classified as enemies of the State because they are knowingly promoting violence by supporting a brutal dictator.

4.   We are giving paul biya less than 24 hours to meet our demands and if Paul Biya decided not to let them go, The People's Liberation Troopers will forcefully release every Southern Cameroonian and political prisoner in Cameroon.

8 October 2011

Live Either Free or Die

8 octobre 2011
Patrick Sianne



Let Paul Biya go, now! 

Let him vamoose and leave the Cameroonians held in bondage for this too long in an uncaring dictatorship, FREE. This Freedom that I am calling for is not just for me and my family members and friends. It is deep and meaningful Freedom that allows people to think and act and even fly freely without turning around and looking back and left and right to protect their back and sides from a dictator, be it this Biya’s or the one that may come after.

Liberty has no price. Many are those of the ruling cabal, friends inclusive, who have come to me in private and public, day time and in the thick of darkness at bight, to ask me, Patrick Sianne, since coming back from China, “Patrick, but what do you really want? We are prepared to fix your conditions, if you are ready to tell us, we settle it and you remain silent.

My answer to them has been then, now and tomorrow viz: “Let Paul Biya go, now! Let him vamoose and leave the Cameroonians held in bondage for this too long in an uncaring dictatorship, FREE. I want Freedom, so, has been my answer. This Freedom that I am calling for is not just for me and my family members and friends. It is deep and meaningful Freedom that allows people to think and act and even fly freely without turning around and looking back and left and right to protect their back and sides from a dictator, be it this Biya’s or the one that may come after.”

It is a natural law for all to be free. Man does not have to be a burden to man, as Biya has become one big bug to a cross section of Cameroon, just in an effort to preserve a power that he inherited accidentally on that objectionable, damned November 6, 1982.

Je pense donc je suis,” said Descartes, the famous French Mathematician-Philosopher to illustrate how vital is Freedom to Humans in particular and to society at large. Limiting Freedom is holding everyone and everything back from enlightenment and advancement.

So much of import is the necessity to feel free that one of the fifty states of the United States of America, Newhampshire, a State in the East Coast part of the USA called New England, adopted this telling slogan as its State Motto: “Live Either Free or Die.”

This notion is not of just today. It has a historical significance birthing right from the days of the American Revolution, the then nascent nation’s War of Independence from colonial and Imperialistic England or the United Kingdom.

Revolution is first and foremost a question of freedom of the mind. Bob Marley, the great legend of Reggae, underlined this fact in one of his hit tunes of liberation and redemption when he asked us to “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, non but ourselves can free our minds.”

Sick and tired of oppression, exploitation and cheating by the British colonial masters, patriotic American nationalist of high intellects like Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton (Founding Fathers) , as revolutionary ideologues, set out first of all, to provide the ideas markets from which the people were to buy and use to use to free their mind to the critical point when they gather the necessary courage to start challenging the evil system fearing nothing else, but fear itself.

That was the trend of thoughts that pre-set the chain of events, little-step-by- little-step culminating in the famous Boston Tea Party when precipitated the transformations leading to the war and liberation of America under the able leadership of the person who became the first president, General George Washington, the man in honour for whom the capital of th present all-powerful United States of America is named in thanks for his selfless bravery and commitment to the noble cause of FREEDOM.

Message Approved by LVP: Libertas – Veritas – Probitas

Motto: One for all, all for One; All for one, one for All. What goes around, comes around!

Cameroon: Biya's Liberticidal Cruelty and his Free and Fair Election of 9 October 2011

5 October 2011
Patrick Sianne


While Mr. Biya has been always saying that he would like to be remembered the days after his too long a one-man show and reign over Cameroon to be remembered as the man who brought democracy in Cameroon he and his boys do all before and behind the scenes to kill the very freedoms he purported to want to nurture and culture. 


Some sort of democratic representation and representative is the ploy in play here, like any other system or policy that Mr. Biya has said he is instituting in Cameroon since November 6, 1982 that he took over from El Hadj Ahmadou Ahidjo as second present of the Second Republic of Cameroon.

Now that the English speakers of the Third Republic are staking their calim to a moral imperative to take the helm from Biya and preach by example by being the real purveyor belt for sustainable democratic institutions and traditions in Cameroon wth courageous woman and men like Kah Walla, Fru Ndi, Ayah Paul, Ben Muna and George Nyamndi, the Biya Boys are behind the scene wanting to thwart all the forces for change that is surfacing at the bud stage wherever and whenever they germinate or attempt to burst out.

Here is a new case arising in where the wonder lads of the very combative, radical Mboua Massock Movement have been picked up and put under keys at a gendarme jailroon somewhere in Bonanjo, Douala, as per this missive I just received via facebook from a trustworthy source.

This group of 17 were manhandled and taken off the street for nuisance, just because they were trying to say it loud, to speak like James Brown in his hit song of the sixties or seventies, tittled Say it Loud, I'm Black and Proud.

These proud and promissory and patriotic Cameroonian's were in the streets distributing flyers announcing a show-down with dictator Biya come October six, tomorrow Thursday, when the police visited with them unceremoniously and took them away against their basic human rights, not without a bare-arms resistance.

This other Douala public and unconstitutional cruelty by these forces of everything else but Law and order comes on the of the heavy crack down that is still to settle in Buea after the actvists of the Southern Cameroons National Council were prevented to hold their 50th anniversary commemorative grand rally by the same Biya liberticidal forces.

In Buea, the heavy arms used in the sweep was indiscriminate, catching even the watch-dogs of society, protectors and defenders of freedom of expression that are journalist in their noble role of news gathering and dissemination.

Patrick Sianne, Elvis Tah and Adams Bouddih, of The Post newspaper and Solomon Amabo of Equinoxe television are four of the know reporters impolitely accosted, violently molested and humiliated and then whisked of for detention and questioning and intimidation, just for being at the right place at the right time and attempting to do their job, provider of their daily living, how it is supposed to be ina real democracy, and not the simulacrum Paul Biya wants to seal and sell for real, this new election season again, as he has done to bag one genration of dilly-dallying at the head of the state. This callously executed political cacophony and buffoonery must come to nought this yea by any means necessary, see Malcolm X. It is the opinion of Libertas - Veritas - Probitas that the battle should leave the mainstreet to the mean street, where we the people can in quick shift respond to fire by fire, bully for bully, tit for tat.

3 October 2011

Paul Biya of Cameroon: Dictator of the month

26 September 2011
David Wallechinsky


On October 9, the nation of Cameroon in west-central Africa will hold a presidential election. There will be 23 candidates, but there isn’t much doubt which one will win…78-year-old Paul Biya, who has ruled Cameroon for 29 years. In fact, Biya is a specialist in creative rigging of elections. Once he even hired his own set of American election observers to report that an election he won was free and democratic (see below). This time around he has come up with a novel method of making sure that the outside world will be impressed by his defeat of a large number of opponents.

To run for president, a politician must put up 5 million Central African Francs (CFAs). He then receives 25 million CFAs to run his campaign. According to Cameroonian journalist Ntemfac Ofege, “All the candidates have to do is rush to the nearest bank, microfinance institution, credit union or whatever, and demand a short term loan of 5 million CFA. They collect 25 million CFA from the state; pay back their short-term loan and report a profit of at least 15 million CFA.”In my book Tyrants: The World’s 20 Worst Living Dictators, I included a chapter about Biya, which I present here.

The Nation

As a political entity, the West African nation of Cameroon was patched together by European colonial powers. The population of more than 16 million speaks 279 languages. Slightly more than half of Cameroonians are Christians, a quarter follow traditional belief systems, and about 22% are Muslims. There are approximately 260 distinct ethnic groups. Since a chi eving independence in 1960, Cameroon has been ruled by one party and only two presidents. Cameroon is Africa ’s largest producer of timber and it is the world’s fifth-largest producer of the cocoa that goes into making chocolate. The nation has the reputation of being one of the most corrupt countries in the world and actually earned Transparency International’s number-one ranking as corruption champion two years in a row, in 1998 and 1999.

Pre - Biya

The Germans claimed Cameroon as a colony in 1884. Following World War I, the Treaty of Versailles divided the colony between France and Great Britain . The French granted East Cameroon independence on January 1, 1960. On October 1, 1961, the British gave up control of West Cameroon and it joined East Cameroon to form a single country. French-educated Ahmadou Ahidjo, a Muslim from the north, took over as president and stayed in power for twenty-two years until he unexpectedly resigned on November 6, 1982, apparently because his French doctors told him that he had a terminal disease. Ahidjo did retain his position as head of Cameroon ’s lone political party. He was replaced as president by the prime minister, Paul Biya, a Roman Catholic from the Beti ethnic group in the south. Ahidjo did not have a terminal illness, but by the time he realized this, Biya had squeezed him out of the party leadership and forced him to flee the country. Ahidjo eventually died in Senegal in 1989.

The man

Born February 13, 1933, Biya studied in Paris and received a degree in public law. After working for two years in the presidential palace, he became director of the office of the minister of education and then moved up to secretary-general of the Education Ministry. After serving as secretary-general of the presidency, Biya was named prime minister by Ahidjo in June 1975.

At the time that Biya assumed office in 1992, Cameroon enjoyed a booming economy with solid exports of cocoa, timber, and coffee and a growing petroleum industry. Thanks to corruption and ethnic cronyism, Biya destroyed the economy. While Biya and his friends grew rich on oil money, the Cameroonian economy shrank for nine straight years beginning in 1987.

In January 1984, Biya stood for election for president and managed to win 99.98% of the vote. It is not known what happened to the two-hundredths of one percent of the voters who managed to vote against him. To be on the safe side, Biya eliminated the position of prime minister so that no rival politician could create his own power base. Three months after the election, he put down a mutiny by the mostly Islamic Republican Guard, which he blamed on Ahidjo, who was condemned to death in absentia. To demonstrate that he was not a dictator, Biya changed the name of the only legal political party from the National Cameroonian Union to the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (RDPC). In 1988, he was reelected president, although his vote percentage slipped to only 98.75%.

Controlling the opposition

Under pressure at home and from abroad, Biya legalized opposition parties in 1990, but strikes and pro-democracy protests in 1991 left more than 100 dead. Forty-eight parties took part in March 1992 legislative elections. The RDPC won 88 of the 180 seats and, with the help of sympathetic small parties, cobbled together a working majority. Presidential elections had been scheduled for a year later, but Biya moved them up to October 1992 to give the opposition less time to organize. The U.S.-based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs arrived in Cameroon to help train election officials, but stayed to observe the election and to watch in dismay as the government ignored normal democratic procedures. “It would not be an exaggeration,” the observers would later report, “to suggest that this election system was designed to fail.” The government-controlled television gave Biya 142 minutes of time to present his case, while allowing the opposition parties a combined total of 12 minutes. Names of eligible voters were crossed off the registry and there were widespread reports of multiple voting and voting by underage residents. In some areas known to be anti-Biya, polling sites were moved without warning to reduce turnout. The territory of Rey-Bouba in the district of Mayo Rey blocked all political party pollwatchers from entering. Results by polling site were never published.

The election took place on October 11. A week later, George Achu Mofor, the governor of East Province , resigned to protest the way the central government had forced him to use any means necessary to ensure a Biya victory in his province. The election results were announced on October 23. Biya won with 39.9% of the vote. John Fru Ndi, the English-speaking head of the Social Democratic Front, was given 35.9%, an affront which landed him in house arrest; and a third major candidate, former prime minister Bello Bouba Maigari, won 19.2%. Demonstrations in English-speaking Western Cameroon were so large that Biya imposed a state of emergency in the region and ordered mass arrests of opposition supporters. Despite the dubious aspects of the election, the French government congratulated Biya on his victory. At the time, the French oil company Elf Aquitaine monopolized oil exploration off the coast of Cameroon .

In 1996, students at the University of Cameroon ’s Yaounde 1 campus boycotted classes to protest a hike in fees that was so broad that it included usage charges both for the library and for toilets. When the strike spread to other campuses, the government sent in troops who beat a student to death. By the time of the 1997 parliamentary elections, Biya had learned his lesson. His party manipulated the voting much more efficiently and gained a clear majority of the seats. In the presidential election later that year, Biya claimed to win 92.6% of the votes.

By this same time, Biya was cracking down on privately owned newspapers, arresting and imprisoning journalists. In one particularly notorious case, Pius Njame, the editor of an independent French-language newspaper, reported that Biya had suffered a “malaise” and a possible heart attack while attending the 1997 Cameroon Cup soccer final. Njame was convicted of “spreading false news” and served ten months in prison.

The Pipeline

Although Cameroon attracted the attention of the oil industry, its reserves were relatively limited. But the industry had other plans for Cameroon . Northeast of Cameroon , the landlocked nation of Chad was found to have plenty of oil. A consortium of ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Elf Aquitaine drew up plans for a $3.7 billion project that would sink 300 wells in Chad and run the oil to the Atlantic coast via a 665-mile-long pipeline they would build across Cameroon . Because the regimes of both Biya and Chad ’s Idriss Déby were notorious abusers of human rights, and because of the high potential for environmental degradation, Shell and Elf pulled out of the project. With billions of dollars of profits on the line, ExxonMobil found two new partners, Chevron and Petronas of Malaysia, and plunged ahead in promoting the plan. Construction of the pipeline, which began in October 2000, threatened the destruction of the lives of 100,000 Bagyeli Pygmies living in the region and in some cases their eviction. The World Bank backed the project, making it the bank’s single-largest investment in sub-Saharan Africa , and the pipeline was completed in July 2003.

Meanwhile, human rights groups were reporting systemic torture, the kidnapping and disappearance of political dissidents, and a legal code that permitted forced female genital mutilation and allowed rapists to avoid prosecution if they marry their victims. Biya keeps such tight control over the country that his office approves all public appointments all the way down to village police officers.

In the words of lawyer Charles Taku, “To get such a job or a business license…you have to show that you support the president actively, that you love him and his party.”

Human rights, the vanishing Act

In 2002, Paul Biya caught a break. Cameroon happened to be serving a two-year term as a member of the United Nations Security Council when U.S. president George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq and needed the support of Security Council members. Biya, a longtime friend of France ’s president, Jacques Chirac, found himself being wooed by Bush and visited him in the White House the day that the U.S. began its bombing of Baghdad . U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell praised Cameroon as “a place of stability” and promised that “we will do everything we can to strengthen the government.” The criticisms of Biya’s human rights record, which had been catalogued in the reports of Powell’s own State Department, were swept aside as if they had never happened.


Creative election rigging

In 2004, Biya faced a new presidential election and came up with a new and novel tactic in the world of rigged elections. In previous elections he had perfected the arts of suppressing opposition campaigning and stacking the voter rolls. But he faced criticism from international election-monitoring groups. In July 2004, he signed a $400,000 deal with the Washington, D.C., law and lobbying firm of Patton Boggs to improve Cameroonian ties with the United States at a time when the State Department had said that Biya’s security forces had “committed numerous unlawful killings and were responsible for torture, beatings and other abuses,” and that the government “continued to arrest and detain arbitrarily various opposition politicians.” One of the Patton Boggs lobbyists, former U.S. Representative Greg Laughlin, a Texas Democrat, put together a bipartisan observer group called the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress. With Biya’s government covering the bills, the Association flew in six ex-congressmen, who observed the October 11 presidential election in which Biya claimed a 71% landslide, declared it a free election, and flew home.

One of the former congressmen, Ronnie Shows, a Democrat from Mississippi , enthused, “This is what democracy is about.” Another observer group from the Commonwealth nations, led by former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark, saw the election process differently. They said that the registration process, which the U.S. group had arrived too late to observe, had “missed a considerable portion of the voting-age population of Cameroon .” “We ran into swarms of people who had been declared ineligible to vote,” said Clark . The Catholic Bishop’s Conference of Cameroon also accused Biya’s government of vote-rigging.

The ectoplasm

Biya’s first wife, Jeanne-Irene, died in 1992, leaving behind two sons and a daughter. Two years later the sixty-one-year-old Biya married a twenty-four-year-old named Chantal and began spending an increasing amount of time on vacation. Cameroon ’s leading novelist, the late Mongo Beti, once described Biya as an “ectoplasm” and another time as a “zombie.” Because Beti also had harsh words for John Fru Ndi, Biya let him get away with it, although Beti was roughed up by police at demonstrations.