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BUEA, Cameroon – Corpse of a crumpled soldier at a roundabout. Young men were shot in their living room while partying. A teenager killed by a stray bullet while he was watching TV. Gunshots are so common that kids call them "popcorn to fry".
The horrors told by locals at the cloud-covered base of Mount Cameroon are part of a conflict that has upset the English-speaking regions of the country in recent months.
"This situation is unbearable," said Leonard Etuge, one of the few residents still living in a once-busy neighborhood along a highway called Mile 16, which is now littered with charred and overturned vehicles and bushings. .
Cameroon is on the verge of civil war. The country is still grappling with a tangled colonial past that involved three European powers – Germany, France and Britain – and in recent years it has become an essential partner of the United States in the fight against Islamist extremism in Africa.
But the government's long-standing anger has turned into one of the nation's biggest uprisings in decades. The separatists are fighting a violent battle to separate and form their own country, called Ambazonia. The approximately 2,000 combatants are armed mostly with small arms and obey orders from activists living abroad.
Known locally as "Amba boys," the separatists face an elite military force formed by the United States and Israel, which is widely accused of human rights violations. The crackdown by the government has been ruthless. Residents and residents frequently reported that soldiers were burning houses and buildings in more than 100 villages, firing or arresting indiscriminate civilians, and sometimes shooting innocent young men in search of separatists who were forest after the attacks.
In the middle of this melee, the country is trying to hold elections. One of the oldest presidents in the world, Paul Biya, 85, who has been in power for 36 years, asks voters to give him another seven on Sunday. Mr. Biya has been in power for so long that most of the country's population has not known any other leader.
Mr. Biya has traveled the country to rally his support in a contest that should be very unbalanced given his grip on the country. The separatists promised to do everything they could to disrupt the vote, aggravating an already unstable situation.
Cameroon is already waging another war against Islamist extremists in the region. In the north, the Americans provided the country with military equipment to Boko Haram battle as the war crossed the Nigerian border. Aware of his bad reputation on the international scene, Mr. Biya's government hired a public relations firm in Washington after another company signed it and quickly abandoned it as a customer.
But the elections will hardly solve the uprising against Mr. Biya in the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon. Attendance at these meetings should be extremely low – largely because there are few people left to vote. In some areas, local officials estimate that more than 90 percent of residents have fled.
Communities like Ekona, a small town located near a rubber rubber plantation, have been completely abandoned. Burning houses, crushed sheet metal huts with shops and a blackened beer truck attest to the ferocious battles taking place here. Many houses and concrete stores along the road were riddled with large bullet impacts.
Ekona had been a fighting hotbed. A military captain attributed the damage to the separatists, accusing them of picking on residents who did not respect their calls to create a "ghost town" by abandoning the streets and staying at home. But the local reports gave a very different explanation: a shootout in June between separatists and security forces, which drove people to escape into the forest.
The English-speaking areas represent one-fifth of the population and, with their palm oil, rubber and banana plantations, they contribute significantly to Cameroon's economy. Most of these operations are now closed because of the violence.
Residents of English-speaking areas began protesting two years ago, saying that they were fed up with teachers and judges who did not speak English well but were nevertheless appointed to their schools and courts. After government security forces opened fire on protesters at rallies, the separatists armed themselves.
The demonstrations were part of a broad feeling of marginalization that had developed since the aftermath of the First World War, when the League of Nations had named France and the United States. England co-directors of the former German Kamerun. The colonialists pushed their own cultures in each region.
Although the country officially recognizes both languages, Biya, based in Yaoundé, has concentrated powers and resources in French-speaking regions, while the inhabitants of the English-speaking regions complain bitterly about unpaved roads and the lack of other infrastructures.
Mr. Biya's campaign posters stuck across the country and t-shirts distributed on street corners only reinforce the gap between the two camps. A nod to his experience, one of his campaign slogans is "The power of experience". But for the English-speaking voters, the posters awkwardly translate the slogan, saying rather "The strength of the experience" – a disturbing echo of the violence in the English-speaking areas.
"Make that kind of mistake," sighed Derick Woteva Wambo, the head of a neighborhood in Buea, an English-speaking city. "Oh, all this country."
Wambo estimated that there were only 10,000 of the 200,000 inhabitants of Buea in the city, a rather picturesque mountain area where violence has been fierce. Many fled after episodes like the one Mr. Wambo witnessed last week.
On September 27th, at 6:30 am, he was summoned to a house where he found the bodies of six men tied in the living room, one on chairs and the other lying close to him. a door, as if he was trying to escape. Another body had already been taken to the morgue.
Before dying, the men were holding a party, smoked marijuana early in the morning and were making noise, Wambo said. He added that the security forces had heard the racket and executed them after deciding that it was separatists, supposed to be heavy smokers. One of the dead includes a neighbor who also heard the noise and decided to investigate, he said.
Wambo called Buea "paradise" compared to what happens in small villages. He says that he visited them to find rotting corpses and terrified residents with the idea that their young men were mistaken for fighters and killed.
Mr. Biya's government claims that the separatists are terrorists and refused to open any dialogue with them.
Issa Tchiroma Bakary, Minister of Communication, said officials were investigating the allegations they heard about.
"It is unacceptable to commit a crime and kill illegally today, tomorrow or tomorrow," he said. "No army in the world is immune to inappropriate behavior in a handful of its elements."
Separatists in some areas, including the English-speaking town of Bamenda, have blocked roads by felling trees and destroying bridges in an effort to foil soldiers on what should be a major offensive. But the actions have also trapped civilians desperate to flee.
Others do not want to leave. A young man selling fruit in the streets of Buea this week said he knew his age was the only target.
"If I die, I want to die at home," he said.
Another man who escaped to Yaoundé said he endured a series of atrocities before giving up and bringing his family of four into his brother's living room. Eleven people are now stuck in the small apartment where he has hung a poster with figures for his four-year-old daughter. She forgot how to count up to 10 after being so long absent from school.
At mile 16, the schools have been closed for two years. The man, who requested anonymity, fears being targeted, said that he had repeatedly met with separatist roadblocks and that soldiers who had At home they shook to go home and used themselves to buy laptops, televisions and money. They even took soda without paying a 12-year-old girl who ran a small shop near her office, he said.
"We are working for you," he said. It was a small thing, but he was scandalized.
Then he saw a body floating in a nearby stream and that of a soldier at a roundabout.
But what finally drove him to escape was the aftermath of a gunshot as the soldiers pursued two men on a motorcycle shooting wildly. One of the bullets entered his neighbor's living room window and hit and killed a teenager who was watching television.
When asked if he would vote on Sunday, the man's eyes widened.
"Why?" He said. "I have been voting for years and the results have never changed."
