Trapped between the Anglophone militants and the army

Nga Dora the one he consumed grief barely could stand on his own.

The coffin of her husband Johnson Mobi was sitting among the crowd of terrible mourning in the lyric in the south -western region of Cameroon, a region that witnessed such scenes many times earlier.

While working, Johnson is an English -speaking civil servant – and five colleagues were captured by armed separatists.

The militants were – and so far – they are fighting for the independence of the two Cameroon Anglophone regions in what is a predominantly francophone country. The conflict that led to thousands of deaths and lagged in life and delays life in the area.

When he was abducted four years ago, Dora tried to get to Johnson. When she eventually heard the separatist militants, they asked for a ransom over $ 55,000 (41,500 pounds) to pay for 24 hours to ensure his release. Then Dora received another call from Johnson’s relatives.

“He said … that I should take care of the children. To make my husband no longer. I didn’t even know what to do. He was driving on Tuesday and he was abducted. Friday was killed,” Dora says.

The peculiarities of the separatists not only killed, but beheaded by Johnson and left their body on the road.

The roots of the separatist struggle consist of many years of grievances that are drawn to complete independence in 1961, and the formation of a single Cameroon state in 1972 from the former British and French territories.

Since then, the English -speaking minority has felt affected by the Central Government’s perceived erosion. Johnson was just an innocent subheading, involving more and more fierce struggle for self -determination and desperate attempts of the government to pull out the uprising.

The current wave of violence began almost ten years ago.

At the end of 2016, peaceful protests began against the creeping use of the Francophone legal system in the courtroom. French and English -speaking parts of Cameroon use different judicial systems.

Protests were rapidly spreading and led to the closure of shops and institutions.

The reaction of the security forces was immediate and heavy – people were beaten, intimidated and mass arrests. The African Union called it a “deadly and disproportionate use of violence”.

Cameroon’s Defense Ministry did not answer requests to comment on these or other questions in this article.

Armed groups were created. And at the end of 2017, when the tension grew, the Anglo -Anglophone separatist leaders declared independence for what they called the Federal Republic Ambazonia.

To date, five million Anglo -Anglo -conflict have been involved in the conflict – equivalent to one fifth of the entire population. At least 6,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands forced their homes.

“We used to wake up with corpses on the streets in the morning,” says Blaze Eiong, a Kumba journalist in the English-speaking Southwest Cameroon region, which produced and presented a documentary about the BBC Africa Eye crisis, and was forced from his hometown with his family in 2019.

“Do you hear that the house was caught up. Do you hear someone abducted.

In 2019, a number of national and international attempts were held to resolve the crisis, including what the government called “the main national dialogue”.

Although the negotiations have created a special status for the two Anglophone regions of the country that recognized their unique history, very little was resolved in practical terms.

Felix Agbor Nakgo is a lawyer who was one of the 2016 protests and was later arrested, ”he says that he would now have been impunity on both sides, the moral tall land disappeared.

“It was time … When most people felt that when they needed security, they go to the separatists,” he says BBC Africa Eye.

“But in the last two years I don’t think any reasonable person thinks that the separatists will be to protect them. So, everyone must die to get independence and I ask the question: who are you going to manage?”

But not only the separatists are accused of abuse.

Organizations such as Human Rights Watch recorded a harsh security forces to the Anglophone Independence movement. They recorded the burning of villages and torture, illegal arrests and extrajudicial killings of people in the war, to a large extent invisible outside world.

Examples of the state funded, it is not difficult to find.

John (not his real name) and a close friend were taken into custody by military forces accused of buying weapons for a separatist group.

John recalls that after their imprisonment, they were given a document that they ordered them to sign without reading its contents. When they refused, torture began.

“It was then that they divided us into different rooms,” says John. “They tortured (my friend). You could just hear them drizzled everywhere. I felt it on their body (too). They beat me everywhere. Later they told me he accepted and signed it and they allowed him to go.”

But it was not true.

A month after the arrest, another man arrived in John’s cell. He told him that his friend actually died in the room he kept and tortured. A few months later, John’s case was dropped and released without charge.

“I just live in fear because I really don’t know where to start and where you can start with confidence and how,” says John.

You can see a full movie, the land that bleeds, there

Part of the separatist strategy for the weakening of the state and its security forces is to push the ban on education, which, according to them, is a tool of state propaganda.

In October 2020, Kumba was assaulting a school in Kumba. No one claimed responsibility for the atrocity, but the government accused the separatists. Men, armed with machete and weapons, killed at least seven children.

The incident has caused international indignation and condemnation for a short moment.

“Almost half of the schools in the region were closed,” says Eung journalist.

“The whole generation of children lack your education. Imagine it will have for our communities as well as for our country.”

As if violence between government forces and various separatist groups were not enough, an additional front opened in the war. Milia groups in the separatist areas appeared to fight the ambassadans, seeking to preserve Cameroon United.

The leader of one of these groups John Evom (known as Moji Moji) regularly ruled patrols to the city of Bue in search of separatists until he was arrested in May 2024.

He is also accused of human rights violations, public humiliation and torture of unarmed civilians who are considered separatist sympathizers. He denies allegations. “I never put my hands on a civilian. Just Ambazon. And I believe the gods of this land with me,” he said BBC.

Meanwhile, the cycle of abductions and murders continues.

Joe (not his real name) was – like Johnson – hostage to the separatist group seeking to maintain control through fear – and earn.

“I went into the house and found my children and wife on the floor while the commander was sitting in my kitchen with his gun very close. My neighbor was taken around me. So when I saw them, I realized it was my turn,” Joe says.

He was brought to the forest with 15 other people, where he witnessed the shooting of two of his captives. But he was eventually released after the military discovered the camp.

Johnson was unlucky, and, about two years after his funeral occurred, the news came that none of him was abducted by his five colleagues. Their body has just been found.

Now more families will have to try to reconcile with their huge loss. For Ngabi Dora Tue, sitting with his little baby on his lap, the future feels almost overwhelming.

“I have a debt that I have to settle, I don’t even know how to get settled,” she says.

“I thought to sell my body for the money. And then I’m from the shame that would come afterwards, I just have to swallow the difficulties and then move forward. I was very young to become a widow.”

The BBC asked for an answer from the Ambazonian Defense Forces (ADF), who claims to be the largest separatist force.

He replied that there are many separatists’ fighters in the Anglophone region.

The UDF stated that it works within the framework of international law and does not attack state workers, schools, journalists or civilians.

Instead, he accused people and fringes who act on their own who are not members of the UDF for these attacks.

The group also accuses government infiltrators of atrocities, stating that they will be Ambazon’s fighters to turn the local population against the liberation struggle.