“I am already a dead man”
“Soldiers are burning villages,” says Moilgan, a 29-year-old farmer from Southern Cameroon who has found refuge in Nigeria’s Cross River State. “People are living in the bush. If you even walk up to the roadside you can be shot.”
New figures released by the UN report that 160,000 people have been displaced inside Cameroon in an under-reported emergency known as the Anglophone crisis. A further 25,624 refugees and asylum seekers have so far been recorded by Caritas Nigeria as the panicked population flee across the border from what Cameroon’s bishops describe as “blind, inhuman, monstrous violence”.
The displaced people and refugees are escaping violence caused by fighting between the government and an English-speaking independence movement in Cameroon, a country still riven between its former French and British territories. Running battles between soldiers and armed independence fighters have devastated communities, leaving behind ghost villages emptied of their inhabitants.
In October, activists in the English-speaking minority regions of Cameroon declared a “Republic of Ambazonia” in defiance of the French-dominated government. This followed demonstrations by lawyers and teachers protesting against the imposition of French in their courts and schools.
The government has replied with a crackdown. Anyone thought to sympathise with activists has been targeted by the army, according to eye-witness survivors arriving in Nigeria.
Moilgan pulls up his shirt to reveal a dark scar. He has been shot in the chest, the bullet narrowly missing his heart. His brother was arbitrarily arrested in November accused of terrorism and hasn’t been heard of since.
Some people turn away from the camera, fearing retribution against their families by the Cameroon military, but Moilgan looks straight into the lens. “You can take my photo,” he says. “I am already a dead man.”
“Not a week goes by without houses being burned down, people kidnapped or killed…Fear has taken over this territory.” – Hippolyte Sando of Caritas Cameroon after visiting the badly-affected diocese of Mamfé in south-west Cameroon.