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Rights groups have warned of the growing crisis in western Cameroon, where separatists and government forces are struggling with a deadly fight.
"The international community is asleep at the wheel with regard to the crisis in Cameroon," Secretary-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (CNR), Jan Egeland, said in a report released on Tuesday.
"The brutal murders, burnt villages and mbadive displacements were greeted with deafening silence."
Two regions of Cameroon are in the throes of an armed campaign by English-speaking militants seeking independence from the predominantly French-speaking country.
On October 1, 2017, they declared the creation of the "Republic of Ambazonia", covering the two Anglophone regions incorporated in Cameroon after independence in 1961.
The statement remained largely unnoticed outside of Cameroon and "Ambazonia" – named after a bay located at the mouth of the Douala River – has been recognized by no one.
The government responded with brutal repression and the separatists in turn launched a campaign of attacks against state buildings, shootings and kidnappings.
According to the International Crisis Group think tank, 1,850 people were killed, while more than 530,000 people were forced to leave their homes, according to UN figures.
NRC said the crisis in the North West and Southwest regions tops its annual list of "the world's most neglected displacement crises."
There has been no major mediation effort, no major relief program, minimal media interest and insufficient pressure to stop attacks on civilians, he added.
The second and third on the CNR list were long-standing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.
Meanwhile, a Cameroon-based human rights group, the CHRDA, based in Canada, and the Canadian-based Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, have accused the military of carrying out "a deliberate violent campaign against civilian populations ".
He acknowledged that local armed groups also bore "a lot of responsibility" for the violence.
"It is sometimes argued that the current crisis is only one more conflict in a series of attacks and reciprocal reprisals between the government and the secessionist forces," the report released on Monday said.
"However, minimizing the gravity of attacks against civilians as part of the" normal "conflict serves to protect serious human rights violations and crimes against humanity and may even allow them to be prosecuted.
"Minimizing the conflict also does not take into account evidence that violence is spreading, engulfing the French-speaking regions of the country, becoming a threat to the entire subregion."
About one-fifth of Cameroon's population of 24 million is English-speaking.
Resentment has long been fueled by perceived discrimination on the part of the French majority in education, law and economics.
In recent years, President Paul Biya has rejected growing demands for autonomy or return to the federal structure of Cameroon, which has prompted radicals to take the ascendancy in the Anglophone movement.
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