There are times we all wish our eyes are fooling us. That was the case as I watched a video of Cameroonian security personnel brutalising students at Buea University. In one scene, I counted as many as 11 soldiers in what appeared to be a frenzied contest to pummel a single student with their batons. In was like the feeding frenzy that hungry sharks engage in when devouring a catch.
The soldiers also invaded what appears to be a hostel searching for students. And one by one they led the students to a gutter that by its very look must be pungent. As the soldiers pummelled the students, they forced them — one at a time — to lie face down in the gutter and then roll in it.
Then they made the students lie on the ground, whereupon they to start to whack at them again and again and again. When one policeman’s hand gets weary another takes over. Sometimes they hit in tandem. It didn’t make a difference whether the student was male or female. And they continued even when the students lay lifeless.
Had it been a movie, I couldn’t have continued to watch. But revulsive as it was, I felt obligated to continue watching it as a witness to an improbable reality, albeit on videotape.
The students were English-speaking Cameroonians, and their crime was protesting what they see as government-imposed French hegemony. Among other things, the students complain that a majority of the lecturers at the university — which is in the English-speaking area of Cameroon — are French speakers. Many of them speak English poorly or not at all, and so lecture English-speaking students in French.
Besides the challenge this poses to the students, there is something more insidious. The imposition could well be a creeping attempt to supplant English all together. The unstated message to English-speaking students seems to be, “If you want to do well, learn French.”
Though a majority of Cameroonians are French-speaking, the constitution places French and English on the same status as official languages and mandates the pursuit of bilingualism. However, within the framework of bilingualism, a 1998 law specifically stipulates a dual educational system, with French and English as separate branches.
What the students are protesting, in effect, is that the government is pursuing policies that would circumvent the constitution and the law by creating a de facto monolingual country.
The protests by students is only a flashpoint of a broader simmering grievance by English-speaking Cameroonians. English-speaking teachers have protested being made to teach by the precepts of the French system and English-speaking lawyers have gone on strike for similar grievances. The lawyers complain of a preponderance of French-speaking magistrates and the use of the French legal system in English-speaking areas.
The issues and protests are nothing new, but the scope of brutalisation seems unprecedented. Actually, maybe it isn’t. Perhaps, it is just seeing it on video that drives home the scope of repression. It sheds a dark light on how President Paul Biya, who turns 84 in February, managed to log his 34th year in office this November. That ranks him ahead of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in longevity in office — and arguably in tyranny.
Perhaps the videos could be the game-changer. Though the ubiquity of cellphone cameras these days makes privacy an anachronism, it is handy for purposes of exposing transgressions. The soldiers apparently didn’t realise that times have changed in that regard. They would not have been flailing their batons the way they did if they knew that electronic eyes were watching.
The videos are there for the world to see and the soldiers are readily recognisable. If the brutality doesn’t represent the official policy of the Biya government, then it has to act to bring the soldiers to justice. If the government doesn’t, it would be the responsibility of the community of nations, the International Criminal Court, for one.
It is dismaying that governments still entertain the notion that brutalising people for protesting grievances is the way to squelch it. History—as well contemporary affairs — should readily disabuse them of such convictions.
Nigerian parallel
It would be the ultimate case of fretting about the mote in a brother’s eye and not the beam in one’s own eye to not comment on the Nigerian dimension. In fact, that would have been the primary point of this column but for the power of video images.
Amnesty International reported late in November that about 150 pro-Biafra activists have been killed between August 2015 and August 2016. According to the agency most of the killings and related violence took place around the occasion of the Biafra Remembrance Day in Onitsha in May this year.
“Analysis of 87 videos, 122 photographs and 146 eyewitness testimonies relating to demonstrations and other gatherings … consistently shows that the military fired live ammunition with little or no warning to disperse crowds,” the report states. “It also finds evidence of mass extrajudicial executions by security forces, including at least 60 people shot dead in the space of two days in connection with events to mark Biafra Remembrance Day.”
A detainee told the agency’s investigators that he and others were whipped every morning and told that it was their “morning tea.”
Such brutality is inconsistent with President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration’s reported overtures to the South-East, among them plans to locate major federal industries there. The administration certainly owes Nigerians a thorough investigation of the damning allegations — and disclosure of their own findings and, as applicable, the related punitive and corrective measures.
Amnesty International doesn’t seem to have confidence that such is forthcoming: “On 30 September 2016, Amnesty International shared the key findings of this report with the Federal Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Chief of Defence Staff, Chief of Army Staff, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Interior, Inspector General of Police and the Director-General of the state Security Service. Responses were received from the Attorney General and Inspector General of Police but neither answered the questions raised in the report.”
They have to.
END
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