Month: March 2019

A new report from Human Rights Watch says Cameroon’s military has killed scores of people and burned down hundreds of homes in its campaign against separatists in the country’s Anglophone regions. Cameroon is rejecting the report as grossly biased.

Government spokesperson Rene Emmanuel Sadi read a communique on

Cameroon state radio CRTV, saying troops fighting separatists in the country’s northwest and southwest regions have remained professional in protecting its citizens.

The communique said although soldiers in the English-speaking regions have been victims of relentless attacks from separatist forces, they have not stopped protecting people and their property. It added that in no situation have the forces torched houses or indiscriminately shot at citizens.

The acts of bravery and patriotism exhibited by the soldiers is exemplary, the communique stated.

That message has been repeated over and over in reaction to the latest report from Humans Rights Watch, which accuses Cameroon’s military of killing scores of civilians, using indiscriminate force, and torching hundreds of homes over the past six months.

The report said that in one case, Cameroonian security forces attacked the village of Abuh in the northwest region and burned an entire neighborhood to the ground. It included satellite images and photographs as evidence.

Separatist violence

The report also said armed separatists have assaulted and kidnapped dozens of people, executing at least two men amid intensifying violence and growing calls for secession of the northwest and southwest regions.

All kidnap victims were released, most after a ransom was paid, according to the report.

Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior central African researcher for Human Rights Watch, said since October, at least 170 civilians have been killed in more than 220 incidents in the two regions.

“We have accounts from victims with material evidence, including photographic and video evidence, satellite imagery, showing the destruction of homes and also medical records,” she said. “Ahead of the publication of this report we have also shared our findings with the government. And we have sought its response which we have incorporated. Nevertheless we do maintain our independence and impartiality.”

Allegrozzi said Cameroon government should respect human rights instead of complaining about the report.

“We understand that the government might not share all our findings,” she added, “but we firmly stand by these findings and we stand by the victims of abuses we documented and whose rights we want to see protected.”

Yvonne Mumah Bih, a civil society activist in Cameroon, also said the military is committing abuses.

“To tell you how deep this problem is,” she said, “look at the number of youths that have lost their lives. Should we continue in that order? I say no. Why has it become a situation where civilians are killed? It is time we talked of humanizing the military.”

Human Rights Watch is calling on both the government and the separatists to restore the rule of law and bring peace that has been absent from the English-speaking regions of Cameroon for three years.

The unrest began in 2016 when English-speaking teachers and lawyers demonstrated against the growing dominance of French in the officially bilingual country.
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Four people died Thursday in a gunfight at a military camp in Comoros where police had detained an opposition presidential candidate. VOA’s Swahili service said at least seven people were injured. 

Late in the day, Interior Minister Mohamed Daoudou said the government was in control of the situation.

Earlier Thursday, police arrested Soilihi Mohammed, one of 12 politicians who ran against President Azali Assoumani in Sunday’s election. Police also took into custody more than a dozen women who were protesting against Assoumani’s government.

Mohamed is head of an opposition transitional authority that aims to replace Assoumani. 

Escape attempt

 

Also Thursday, sources in Comoros told VOA Swahili that an armed group tried to help former Maj. Faissoil Abdou Salam and others they considered political prisoners escape from prison in the capital, Moroni. Faissoil had been jailed for plotting against Assoumani.

Thursday’s violence prompted the U.S. Embassy for Comoros and Madagascar to order its staff to leave Comoros. 

 

On Tuesday, the country’s election commission declared that Assoumani won the election with 60.77 percent of the vote. The commission said his nearest rival, Mahamoudou Ahamada, had 14.62 percent. 

 

The opposition leaders said they didn’t recognize the election results because of what they called widespread fraud. Observers from three regional bodies — the African Union, the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa, and the African Standby Forces of the East — said the voting was full of irregularities that led them to conclude it lacked credibility and transparency. 

Referendum on presidential terms

 

Assoumani came to power in a coup in 1999 and led the government until 2006. He was elected president again in 2016.  

 

Late last year, he ordered elections to be held after Comorans voted to support changing the constitution to extend presidential terms from one five-year term to two. The opposition boycotted the referendum.  

 

The change alters a balance of power established in 2001 that sought to end separatist crises. Under the old constitution, the presidency rotated among the presidents of the country’s three main islands — Anjouan, Moheli and Grande Comore, which also is known as N’gazidja. 

 

Comoros, with a population of about 850,000 people, is one of the world’s poorest nations. It has experienced a series of military coups and attempted coups since independence from France in 1975. 
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Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s days seemed numbered Wednesday, as the country’s ruling party and top labor union joined cascading calls for the ailing 82-year-old leader to resign.

But the biggest catalyst may have come the day before, when the head of Algeria’s powerful armed forces, Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah, demanded that a constitutional process be set in motion to determine whether Bouteflika, rarely seen in public and confined to a wheelchair since a 2013 stroke, is unfit for office.

As with the 2011 revolution in neighboring Tunisia, the military is again in the spotlight during this current popular uprising in vast, oil-rich Algeria. Until now, it has largely remained on the sidelines of the monthlong uprising that has drawn hundreds of thousands to the streets. The mass protests forced Bouteflika to renounce a fifth term in office earlier this month, but left him in power for an indefinite transition period.

In Tunisia, demonstrators hailed the army as a hero for siding with the street and supporting the democratic transition of the first Arab Spring uprising. The role of Algeria’s armed forces may be far more pivotal, analysts say, in determining whether it realizes a similarly trajectory, or tips into turmoil.

In both cases, history has helped to shape the roles of both institutions. Tunisia’s armed forces had little stake in supporting the regime of autocratic ex-president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, a former officer who came to power in a peaceful coup and then made sure the military stayed weak, analysts say.

By contrast, Algeria’s army has been a powerful player since independence, a force deeply entrenched in the political system with a mixed reputation in the eyes of ordinary Algerians, as both longtime protector of the nation but also of the current, discredited regime.

“Algeria is an army that has a state,” said International Crisis Group North Africa analyst Michel Ayari. “Tunisia is a state with an army.”

A close ally changes sides

Appointed by Bouteflika in 2004 to head the armed forces, General Salah, who is also Algeria’s deputy defense minister, has long been considered a close presidential ally. Last year, he presided over a high-level shakeup reportedly ordered by Bouteflika, which saw more than a dozen military and security officers lose their jobs.

Some analysts considered it laying the ground for a rocky period ahead as Bouteflika bid for another term in office despite his age and infirmity.

But in recent weeks, the army chief has sided with the street, saying the protest movement supported “noble aims.”

“We must adopt a solution that helps us out of this crisis … a solution that respects and adheres to the constitution so that it’s a suitable one for all sides,” Salah said in a televised address Tuesday.

He threw his weight behind a constitutional process that may pave the way for Algeria’s senate leader to become short-term caretaker president, if Bouteflika is found unfit.

The move, France’s Le Monde newspaper wrote, amounted to a crucial “rupture between the army and Bouteflika.”

Others see it as a bid for stability at a time when Algeria faces serious economic and security challenges.

“Many officers and generals were sympathetic to the protest movement, and agreed there was need for change and that Bouteflika and his clan needed to cede power,” said analyst Ayari.

“They intervened early to avoid deepening the democratic demands,” he added, “which if they intensify, could even lead to an attack on the army.”

Many protesters, however, have been underwhelmed by Salah’s U-turn, suggesting the army should follow Bouteflika to the exit.

“The population doesn’t accept it,” youth opposition leader Addad Hakim told French radio, reacting to the general’s speech. “On social networks and in the street, people are going to keep demonstrating, not just for the departure of a man or a clan, but for a whole system.”

But the military is also seen a potentially crucial arbiter in the months to come.

“Having the army a guarantor of a positive exit to the current crisis is possible and even desirable,” wrote Algeria’s leading independent El Watan daily. “It’s practically the only institution standing, largely united and patriotic.” 

“The army has an important role to play to guarantee the state’s stability and the political transition,” agreed Brahim Oumansour, North Africa analyst at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, although whether it will remain an impartial arbiter is unclear.

Marked by independence

Tunisia achieved its independence largely peacefully and its leaders deliberately kept the country’s military weak, analysts say.

During its 2011 uprising, the army earned support from the street by refusing to back President Ben Ali. But Ayari, of the Crisis Group, believes it largely stayed within its traditional role.

“It reacted to the 2011 uprising as it had before — by maintaining peace,” he said, an expertise acquired during stints by Tunisian forces as U.N. peacekeepers elsewhere. “The army was seen in this romantic way as refusing to fire on the public. But it was actually much more pragmatic — more of a corporate reaction of applying procedure.”

Algeria’s army, by contrast, succeeded from the country’s independence fighters who waged a brutal and protracted war with France. Along with the state and the ruling National Liberation Front party, it has since been a dominating force. 

When Islamists seemed poised to win Algeria’s local elections in 1992, the army canceled the vote, triggering a bloody civil war that killed roughly 150,000 people. Elected in 1999, Bouteflika was credited with ushering in peace and reconciliation. Strikingly, he was also Algeria’s first long-term civilian president since independence.

While Algeria’s army crushed the Islamists, its role in the conflict remained opaque, including in the thousands of disappearances that remain unsolved.

How the armed forces will react to this current period of turmoil remains unknown.

“Will it be a politically transition completely controlled by the army — as some fear?” asked analyst Oumansour. For the moment however, he said, “there is a real will not to directly intervene in the political process.” 
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Migrants hijacked a cargo ship in Libyan waters Wednesday and forced the crew to redirect the vessel north to Europe, according to Italian and Maltese authorities.

As the vessel headed in a direction leading to the island nation of Malta and Italy’s shores, both countries vowed to keep the hijacked ship out of their territorial waters.

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini identified the ship as the Turkish oil tanker El Hiblu 1 and said the crew had earlier rescued migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. He put the number of migrants on board at around 120 and described what was happening as “the first act of piracy on the high seas with migrants that hijacked” a cargo ship. 

“Poor castaways, who hijack a merchant ship that saved them because they want to decide the route of the cruise,” Italian news agency ANSA quoted Salvini saying with sarcasm.

There was no immediate word on the condition of El Hiblu I’s crew. Other information about the reported hijacking was unavailable or difficult to confirm while the vessel remained at sea. 

Italian media reports said the ship was heading to Libya to drop off the group that was rescued when migrants seized control six miles from the Libyan coast.

A private group that operates a rescue ship and monitors how governments treat migrants, Mediterranea Saving Humans, urged compassion for the group on the hijacked vessel and said it hoped European countries would act “in the name of fundamental rights, remembering that we are dealing with human beings fleeing hell.” 

The Armed Forces of Malta said military personnel were standing by and the tanker still was in Libyan territorial waters as of early Wednesday night. 

A Maltese military official told Maltese media the ship was carrying 108 migrants. The official was not authorized to speak to reporters and requested anonymity.

The official also said Malta would not allow the ship to enter the country’s waters.

Salvini said weather conditions were not good and it was too early to tell if the ship was being directed toward Malta or Italy’s Lampedusa island. But he had a message for the pirates: “Forget about Italy.” 

Mass migration to Europe has dropped sharply since 2015, when the continent received one million refugees and migrants from countries in the Middle East, Asia and African. The surge created a humanitarian crisis in which desperate travelers frequently drowned and leading arrival spots such as Italy and Greece struggled to house large numbers of asylum-seekers. 

Along with the dangerous sea journey itself, those who attempt to cross the Mediterranean risk being stopped by Libya’s coast guard and held in Libyan detention centers that human rights groups have described as bleak places where migrants allegedly suffer routine abuse. 

European Union member countries, responding to domestic opposition to welcoming immigrants, have decided to significantly downscale an EU operation in the Mediterranean, withdrawing their ships and continuing the mission with air surveillance only.

EU officials on Wednesday lamented the move, while Amnesty International reiterated its view that Europe’s collaboration with Libya to stem migration was a human rights outrage.

EU members “alert the Libyan coast guard when refugees and migrants are spotted at sea so they can be taken back to Libya, despite knowing that people there are arbitrarily detained and exposed to widespread torture, rape, killings and exploitation,” Matteo de Bellis, an international migration researcher for Amnesty.

“This shameful decision has nothing to do with the needs of people who risk their lives at sea, but everything to do with the inability of European governments to agree on a way to share responsibility for them.”
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