Armed groups and government forces committed widespread human rights abuses, including extrajudicial or summary executions and mass killings across Cameroon’s Anglophone regions throughout 2021.The UN and the International Crisis Group estimate that more than 700,000 people have been displaced by violence, and at least 4,000 civilian casualties have been recorded.
Armed separatists have also increasingly targeted girls and women, according to rights groups, while gender-based violence perpetrated by civilians has also spiked in the past year, perhaps due in part to national lockdowns imposed by the government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; similar pandemic restrictions have caused an increase in gender-based violence worldwide.
Nancy Bolima, executive director of the Bamenda-based Health Development Consultancy Services NGO, said in the face of growing economic hardship due to the prolonged crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling girls and women have been looking “for any kind of business”.
The government continued restricting freedom of expression and association and has become increasingly intolerant of political dissent. Political space was limited as authorities cracked down on opponents of President Paul Biya and his ruling party. Hundreds of opposition party members and supporters were arrested in September following demonstrations calling for a peaceful resolution to the crisis in the Anglophone regions. In these regions, violence between government security forces and armed separatists intensified.
In February, Cameroonian soldiers and armed ethnic Fulani men massacred 21 civilians in Ngarbuh, a village in the North-West region. Separatists targeted aid workers, their premises, and property across the two English-speaking regions. They also attacked other civilians, posting some of the videos of such attacks on social media. Separatists have violently enforced a boycott on children’s education since 2017, and on October 24,2020 gunmen attacked a school in Kumba, South-West region, killing 7 children and injuring 13.
The Islamist armed group Boko Haram carried out attacks in the Far North region, killing hundreds of civilians. Responding to these attacks, government forces forced civilians to perform local night guard duties to protect against Boko Haram attacks in March and April in at least one town.
The government took measures to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus, including closing schools and banning mass gatherings at the onset of the pandemic. However, the pandemic was also used as a pretext to silence the opposition and quell dissent. There has been little government transparency with regards to its disbursement of funds collected to address the pandemic.
The Anglophone Crisis
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in the North-West and South-West regions, where violence has been acute since the crisis began in late 2016, as separatists seek independence for the country’s minority Anglophone regions. Violence displaced tens of thousands of people in the past year, adding to the hundreds of thousands who have fled their homes since the start of the violence.
The Southern Cameroons Defence Forces (SOCADEF), a separatist group, called for a ceasefire as the Covid-19 pandemic was declared. In June, government officials held peace talks in the capital, Yaoundé, with the leaders of the Ambazonia Interim Government, a major separatist group. Neither initiative led to an end to the violence.
Abuse by Government Forces
Security forces responded to separatist attacks with a heavy hand, often targeting civilians and killings hundreds of people across the North-West and South-West regions.
Every day, Gladys, a 33-year-old vendor in Buea, the capital of Cameroon’s Southwest region, heads to Muea market to sell vegetables, sweets and other food items.
“But only after the sun rises,” she said. “All day I worry it will be the day I am attacked by those boys [or] the military.”
Gladys’s fear and anxiety are shared by many women across Cameroon’s Anglophone Northwest and Southwest regions, where an armed conflict between separatist groups and government forces has been ongoing since 2016.
Al Jazeera interviewed women across the regions, including victims, who spoke of a pervasive fear of sexual assault and violence perpetrated by armed separatists, military personnel and civilians.
“Children and women are becoming more and more targeted,” said Esther Omam, a peace advocate based in Buea. “They are becoming the soft spot for this war.”
Nkongho Christy Ayuk, a gender-based violence case manager at Reach Out, a local humanitarian organization, said after nearly five years of low-level fighting, the regions have devolved into a state of “lawlessness”. Consequently, sexual and gender-based violence including rape, sexual assault and abduction have become commonplace, according to several local and international human rights and aid groups.
And the situation is worsening. Between January and March of this year, there have been nearly 500 cases of rape and sexual or physical assault documented in the two regions, and more than 500 other cases of gender-based violence including forced marriage, denial of economic resources and emotional abuse, data provided by the United Nations showed.
Last year, between February and December 2020, the UN documented 4,300 incidents of sexual and gender-based violence across the two regions. Almost half of those were cases of sexual or physical assault or rape, and in more than 30 percent of those cases, the victims were children.
In 2019, the UN had documented only 1,065 cases, 289 of which involved sexual assault or rape.
“Girls and women will just be walking around; I have witnessed it, my daughter has witnessed it, you just see the uniformed people and they have their guns with them, and they are calling you. You are helpless, you are scared, because they can just pull the trigger,” said a local human rights advocate in Bamenda, the capital of the Northwest region, who asked not to be identified.
“So you approach them to hear what they are saying and it’s about ‘Oh you are beautiful,’ or they create a motive asking, ‘Where is your ID card?’ or something that will put you with them and they corner you – they do what they want to do with you.”Both sides have been accused of committing atrocities against civilians. Government security forces have razed hundreds of houses and markets across the two regions while separatist groups have carried out abductions and attacked schools and police stations, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the UN.
In late February, HRW reported that at least 20 women in Ebam village in the Southwest region were raped by Cameroonian security forces in an attack on March 1, 2020.
In a statement last month, Cameroon’s Ministry of Defence acknowledged that the military had carried out operations in Ebam and detained 34 residents for questioning. The statement discredited HRW stating that “this organization has, to the detriment of its credibility, never reported objectively on events in the North-West and South-West Regions, but always opting [sic] at the slightest opportunity for a systematic relentlessness and demonization of the Cameroon’s Defence Force,” but it did not explicitly deny the allegations of rape and human rights abuses.
Cyrille Serge Atonfack, the head of the ministry’s communication division, declined to provide further comment to Al Jazeera about this incident or any other allegations that government security forces have carried out sexual or gender-based violence.
“Just anything that they can do in order to have money or have food. And because of that, they have been violated. Even women who are elderly,” said Bolima.
Meanwhile, many traditional rulers who would normally enforce law and order in their villages have fled to major cities after being targeted by separatists, leaving a gaping security gap behind.
A representative from Cameroon’s Ministry of Women Empowerment and the Family (MINPROFF) also cited rising poverty, homelessness, and widespread school and business closures as factors contributing to an increase in sexual and gender-based violence in the conflict-hit areas in recent years.
“The women suffer more when it happens like that because all the anger that the men have is geared towards the women,” the representative said.
“And we also have this issue of rape. Because so many houses have been burned down, many young girls are homeless and … are looking for means to earn a living. And so they have this issue of the separatists – some violating them, sleeping with them and even impregnating them,” the representative added. “And then there is this other issue where you also have the military who come and settle in a particular area because of the crisis to guard whatever thing that is happening in that area. They fall into the hands of these young men who sleep with them randomly and make them pregnant.”
The MINPROFF representative declined to comment further on specific allegations of sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated by government security forces and separatists.