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Gunmen have killed a linguistics professor in francophone Cameroon’s volatile English-speaking Northwest Region, hit by a bloody separatist campaign and a brutal security crackdown, a university official said Friday.

Paul Kuban Mbufong was shot dead Thursday while going to work in the University of Bamenda, the institution’s rector, Emmanuel Suh Cheo, said in a statement.

“He was killed by unidentified attackers who followed him to the place where he tried to hide” behind a nearby town hall, Cheo said, calling it a “macabre act.”

University staff said the murder of the academic, who was also in charge of administration, bore the hallmarks of the “Amba boys,” or separatists fighting for an independent English-speaking state called Ambazonia.

The two anglophone regions in western Cameroon are the site of an uprising by armed separatists, who have also called for a boycott of local schools. They argue the French-language education system penalizes English-speaking students.

Since the start of the new term in September, insurgents have killed one principal, mutilated a teacher and attacked several high schools.

The violence, which erupted last year, has claimed the lives of at least 420 civilians, 175 members of the security forces and an unknown number of separatists, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG) think-tank.
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Some of the thousands of people who fled the volatile English-speaking regions of Cameroon before the Oct. 7 presidential election have returned nome to find that their houses and villages have been burned to the ground.

Separatists pushing for an English-speaking state had vowed to prevent any voting in northwestern and southwestern Cameroon, and they attacked many polling places on election day. 

Christa Banla, 18, fled her village of Ngarum for a town in a French-speaking area. After incumbent President Paul Biya was declared winner of the election, she decided to go back to her village, thinking that peace had returned. 

Instead, she found her home had been torched. The military had attacked the village and other areas where they believed armed separatists were hiding or holding training camps. 

“They came and drove all of us out of the compound,” Banla said. “We were only coming back in the evening to discover that the compound was destroyed by the military and burned down. We do not even have food to eat, no clothes to wear.We need help.” 

Emmanuel Chuye, mayor of Ndu district, which includes Ngarum, said that after the election, the government ordered the military to attack suspected separatist strongholds. He said many people were being killed and their houses were being burned down by both the military and the separatists. 

“The government has been attacking the ones fighting for the restoration of the independence of southern Cameroon,” Chuye said. “In Ngarum, a lieutenant was killed as well as two military officials; civilians were killed, including a [municipal] councilor. They were not only killed, they were burned and their houses, too, were set ablaze.” 

The government has not given casualty figures from the recent fighting, but local media reported that at least 30 civilians, soldiers and suspected separatists had been killed in the northwest within a week. 

Northwest Region Gov. Deben Tchoffo confirmed that the military was at work in the region, but said soldiers were not killing indiscriminately and burning villages. He said the attacks would continue until peace returned to the region. 

“Government has taken necessary measures to secure the remotest areas, neglecting nothing that can hinder the global security of the nation,” Tchoffo said. 

Two years ago

Unrest began in Cameroon in November 2016 when English-speaking teachers and lawyers demonstrated against the dominant use of the French language. Separatists took over and demanded the English-speaking northwest and southwest secede from the rest of the country. 

The United Nations has said that at least 400 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes as a result of the conflict. At least 20,000 have fled to Nigeria. 
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Residents of Kapende, a Congolese neighborhood in the Angolan town of Lucapa, scrawled messages on their homes to keep the looters away, but it did not work.

“Occupied,” “do not enter,” “home of an Angolan” — the writing remains visible on the wrecked houses belonging to Congolese who have gone home as Angola has clamped down on illegal diamond mines and the migrants who worked them.

The destruction in Kapende, where no house remains occupied or intact, marked the culmination of three days of violence in Lucapa, a sprawling mining town in the northeast surrounded by some of the world’s richest diamond fields.

About 300,000 Congolese have fled Angola in the last few weeks, many of them in response to the violence in Lucapa at the beginning of October.

For many in the town, the violence was shocking in an area that had turned a blind eye to Congolese migration and where digging for diamonds provided a living. Politically, the upheaval threatens to further destabilize Congo ahead of elections in December and harm relations with Angola, an old ally.

In interviews with 14 eyewitnesses as well as an Angolan security source, Reuters has pieced together the events of Oct. 3, 4 and 5, detailing for the first time the ethnic violence, police action and looting that forced half the city to flee to the border and into Democratic Republic of Congo.

The accounts of death and pillage contradict assertions by the Angolan government that Congolese migrants are returning home voluntarily and that only one person died, in a traffic accident. Angola denied accusations of massacres and abuses.

It says it is asserting its right to ensure national security and protect its natural resources. Angola says the effort, which it calls Operation Transparency, is part of a drive to reform the diamond sector and increase revenues from the country’s second largest export after oil.

Although home to some of the world’s most exciting diamond prospects, Angola has long been shunned by major mining companies due to corruption and a lack of transparency. The government has vowed radical change to put its sector on a par with Botswana and South Africa.

Human rights

The United Nations refugee agency says it is concerned by the worsening humanitarian situation as throngs of people arrive in Kasai, a part of DRC where conflict killed up to 5,000 people and displaced 1.5 million in 2016 and 2017.

DRC summoned Angola’s ambassador, demanding a “comprehensive investigation to establish who is responsible for these wrongful acts.”

Reuters was unable to establish how many people died in Lucapa, but witnesses said the toll was at least eight.

An Angolan security source with knowledge of the operation said between 10 and 14 had been killed. Congolese who fled Lucapa and were interviewed by Reuters across the border said the number was higher.

It remains unclear how many deaths were the result of police fire or of ethnic violence, but at least three people were killed by law enforcement, according to witnesses.

Pedro Sebastiao, Minister of State for Presidential Security and head of Operation Transparency, said, “They are completely false, the claims of massacres, abuses and violations committed by the authorities or by Angolan people.”

Local resentment

The screams were the first sign something was wrong in the neighborhood of Roque, on Lucapa’s west-side, said Corneille Mbala, a 42-year-old mining supervisor. A group of locals from the Tchokwe tribe burst into houses of Congolese migrants on the morning of Oct. 3.

“They threatened to kill me and my wife,” Mbala said. “We fled, leaving everything we possessed behind.”

He said five of his friends were killed by the mob in Roque that morning, butchered with machetes. Mbala escaped to Santa Isabel, a neighborhood the violence had not yet reached.

The authorities had been using local Angolans from the Tchokwe community to spy on the town’s Congolese, witnesses said. A few informers began looting houses of those that had left. Others joined and a mob formed, threatening occupied homes.

The Tchokwe people, dominant in this part of Angola, have long resented Lucapa’s immigrant Congolese community, many of them from the Pende tribe. They said they resented their arrogance, flashy cars and fancy clothes — bought with money from diamond digging.

Although illegal, Lucapa’s diamond trade was not hidden. Buyers known as bosses put their faces on billboards and Land Cruisers as if running for political office.

“The lion of Lucapa, brother of the artisanal miner,” ran one slogan. “Always loyal to the client,” read another. While the bosses built luxury homes, most of Lucapa lived in squalor. Mountains of trash run through town. Poorer neighborhoods are reachable only by motorbike, along narrow muddy paths.

“This was one of the last places in the world you could become a millionaire overnight,” said Jorge Felix, a 50-year-old Cuban who works on legitimate diamond projects in the area. “But none of the money stayed here. There’s no water, no electricity, nothing.”

The fight back

On Oct. 4, the Congolese fought back. Many grabbed machetes to defend themselves from looting. Reports spread that the Pende were arming themselves with bows and venomous arrows, according to local residents.

About 200 Congolese men marched shouting toward the main police station sometime before midday, two eyewitnesses said.

The group clashed with Angolans outside a school, with a young girl slashed in the head with a machete. She later died in hospital, the sources said. Police fired warning shots and dispersed the crowd. Fighting continued to flare up across town.

An Angolan security source with knowledge of the operation said Lucapa police called the provincial capital Dundo for backup.

The law enforcement that arrived to restore order were the Rapid Intervention Police (PIR), an elite heavily-armed branch.

On Friday morning, eyewitnesses said members of the PIR and Chacal, Angola’s Israeli-trained special forces branch, entered the neighborhoods of Kapende and Santa Isabel.

In Kapende at least one man was killed by law enforcement, according to eyewitnesses, while in Santa Isabel at least two died at the hands of the authorities.

Witness testimony suggests four others were injured in the fighting and taken to hospital. Reuters visited the hospital, but doctors declined to say how many people they had treated for conflict wounds, saying local government permission was needed.

It was not given.

With their homes looted, the Congolese left in droves.

Some packed into huge green trucks rented by the government, others paid to be driven in Land Cruisers or rickshaws to the border. Some just walked, sleeping in the open.

When Reuters visited Kapende on Oct. 19, a few lonely figures scavenged for what little was left, cutting out a few bricks from a destroyed church and hammering an axle off a burnt-out car. Everything else had gone.

At the border, the flow of migrants had slowed but hundreds were still crossing.

“There’s nothing for me on the other side, I have no family,” said Kafundanga Dominque, 30, lugging a rolled-up mattress. Staring toward Congo, he said: “I’m already dead.”
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A deadly Ebola outbreak grows. Rebels kill civilians in the streets. And yet the arrival of voting machines in this troubled corner of Congo has some especially worried as a long-delayed presidential election promises further upheaval. 

The machines now arriving by the thousands in this Central African nation are of such concern that the U.N. Security Council has come calling, the United States has issued warnings and opposition supporters on Friday plan a national protest. 

As Congo faces what could be its first peaceful, democratic transfer of power, fears are high that the more than 100,000 voting machines will be ripe for manipulation. They also could pose a technical nightmare in a sprawling nation of more than 40 million voters where infrastructure is dodgy — just 9 percent of Congo has electricity — and dozens of rebel groups are active. 

“We cannot accept people inventing stories that trample our constitution,” said Clovis Mutsuva, a Beni resident with the LUCHA activist organization, which has tweaked the French term “machines a voter” into “machines a voler,” or “machines to steal.” 

While President Joseph Kabila has ended years of speculation by announcing he will respect term limits and step down after the vote, the opposition has loudly protested what it calls Kabila’s attempts to ensure that his favored candidate, former interior minister Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, will win. One opposition leader was blocked from returning from exile. Another, acquitted on war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court, is barred from running. 

Now attention turns to the voting machines, made by South Korean company Miru Systems, that security researchers say are vulnerable to rigging and print codes that include ballot-specific information that could strip away voters’ anonymity. The researchers include experts from Argentina, which rejected the company’s machines after learning of the issues. 

Despite the concerns echoed by diplomats and human rights groups, Congo has plunged into training about 21,000 facilitators on the machines and is introducing the concept in cities, remote towns, Pygmy communities and places like Beni that are essentially war zones. Beni and the surrounding region are in the grip of an Ebola outbreak, which because of the violence could drag on for months before being contained. 

The government, which has rejected foreign assistance in the election, accuses critics of seeking to further delay a vote that was meant to take place in November 2016. It says the Dec. 23 election will go smoothly despite the obvious challenges. Many disagree. 

“The use of voting machines is a provocation,” an opposition politician in Beni, Jose Katsuva Kaneto, told The Associated Press. “A good number of voters have never used computers and they’ll be learning on the day of the vote.” 

An electoral commission logistician in Beni to demonstrate the machines dismissed the concerns, comparing voters with no computer experience to the blind and saying they have the right to be assisted by someone of their choice. 

Congo’s elections in 2006 and 2011 had irregularities, Jean Blaise Kamundu told the AP. “With the use of the voting machines, all of the irregularities will disappear. Certain people who exploit them are angry because there won’t be any way to do that in this election.” 

Congo has countered concerns by describing the machines as essentially printers, with voters tapping on images of preferred candidates and the choices printed on ballots that are deposited for manual counting. 

Congo hasn’t responded to questions about how results will be transmitted, whether provisions have been made for cybersecurity, how the ballots are stored and whether there will be an independent audit of the results. The electoral commission is considered independent and political parties are often encouraged to witness the voting process. 

A UK-backed organization that tested the machines has warned there is “no buffer for technological malfunction” if Congo wants to complete voting within its 11-hour window, saying people unfamiliar with the touch-screen technology likely will take much longer than expected. 

​The opposition’s stance against voting machines has shown cracks in recent days after top opposition party UDPS behind candidate Felix Tshisekedi announced it would not boycott the election, machines or no. “That doesn’t cancel out the criticisms of these machines,” said Peter Kazadi, the party’s deputy secretary general. “Only election monitoring can save our votes.” 

For some Congolese who watched anxiously as the election was delayed amid sometimes deadly protests over Kabila’s extended stay in power, it will be enough to finally stand in line at polling stations and move on. 

“The voting machine is not a big problem,” said Salomon Bagheni, a member of Beni’s civil society. “Use it or not, the essential thing is holding the elections on Dec. 23 to bring new leadership to this country.”
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A “chief finance controller” for the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group has been killed in an ambush on a meeting of its fighters in southern Somalia, the African Union peacekeeping mission announced Thursday.  

The unnamed commander, the head of tax collection in Lower Shabelle region, was killed Monday in  Bariire, the AU mission said. 

The extremist group funds its deadly activities by taxing the communities under its control. It also collects taxes on millions of bags of charcoal that make their way out of the country despite a ban on the exports, according to the latest report by U.N. sanctions monitors.  

Another seven al-Shabab fighters were killed Sunday when their attack on a forward operating base was “botched,” the AU mission said. 

The multinational AU force in the coming few years is expected to draw down and hand over responsibility for Somalia’s security to the country’s military, though U.S. military officials and others have warned that Somali forces are not yet ready. 

Al-Shabab, which seeks to establish an Islamic state, holds rural parts of southern and central Somalia and continues to target the capital, Mogadishu, with high-profile attacks.
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