The Colonial Occupation of the Southern Cameroons by la republique du Cameroun or French Cameroun. By Prof Carlson Anyangwe.

Colonial occupation of the Southern Cameroons

By Prof. Carlson Anyangwe.

 

In its Memorial in Communication 266 complainants asserted and demonstrated that the Southern Cameroons has been annexed by Republique du Cameroun and remains under the colonial occupation of that country. The Commission rightly characterised this development as very serious. Indeed it is, and the people of the Southern Cameroons do not make the charge of colonial occupation lightly. First, the occupying State does not deny that it is in complete and asphyxiating control of the Southern Cameroons and administering the territory following its inherited French system. Over the years it has been fishing for some possible justification of its seizure of that territory. In the 1960s it argued that it simply took over a hitherto separated part of its territory handed over to it by the UN and Britain. When challenged to produce the instrument by which the UN and Britain allegedly ceded the Southern Cameroons to it (a legal impossibility since neither the UN nor Britain were owners of the territory), Republique du Cameroun changed its story. It claimed that its occupation of the Southern Cameroons is by virtue of what it called “reunification on 1^st October 1961 following the plebiscite vote on 11 February 1961”. But when it was pointed out that one cannot credibly talk of so-called ‘reunification’ when the Southern Cameroons was never, in the first place, a part of French Cameroun, and when at the plebiscite there was no such option as ‘reunification’ and there could not have been any, Republique du Cameroun then changed once more the basis of its hopeless claim. It then sought to found its claim on a brief and ill-defined German Kamerun entity and then proclaimed itself the state successor to that entity. But German Kamerun (parts of which are now legally within at least five different countries) lasted only some 25-odd years and was long since extinct. Besides, the political existence of Republique du Cameroun dates not from 1884 but from the inception of French colonial rule in 1916.

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Further, it is both a legal and a factual impossibility for a country to succeed at independence not to the territory of the immediate predecessor state but to the territory long extinct of a remote predecessor state. Furthermore, the plebiscite itself was a complete refutation of the lie that the Southern Cameroons is a part of Republique du Cameroun. If the Southern Cameroons were a part of that country the plebiscite would have been redundant and the territory simply handed over to Republique du Cameroun like Ifni handed over to Morocco by Spain, Hong Kong to China by Britain and Walvis Bay to Namibia by South Africa. Claim to territory can never be founded on mere geographical contiguity or on a remote, superficial and ephemeral historical connection. That is why the claim of Spain to Gibraltar and the claim of Argentina to the Falkland Islands have never succeeded. The plebiscite in the Southern Cameroons was a clear and loud statement by the international community that the native inhabitants of the Southern Cameroons constitute a people and therefore have the inalienable and continuing right to self-determination.

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Let the record be put straight. At the plebiscite the people of the Southern Cameroons voted first and foremost to achieve independence (the effective date of which was set by the UN to be 1^st October 1961) and, as a secondary matter, to form a political association with Republique du Cameroun under certain terms and conditions. At the plebiscite there was therefore no such thing as a so-called ‘vote for reunification’. There could have been no such vote because there was no such alternative. Nor was there any so-called ‘reunification’ on 1^st October 1961. That date was billed as the date on which UN trusteeship over the Southern Cameroons was to end, resulting in independence for the territory; it was also the date on which there was to come into existence an agreed federal form of political association between the Southern Cameroons state and Republique du Cameroun, duly underpinned by an Act of Union subscribed to by both parties.

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But before that date Republique du Cameroun had illegally assumed jurisdiction over the Southern Cameroons by performing acts of sovereignty in the territory, while the British conspiratorially looked the other way. On 1^st September 1961 Republique du Cameroun passed in its parliament an annexation law (in the form of a constitutional amendment law deceptively denoted as a ‘federal constitution’) by which it formally claimed the Southern Cameroons as part of its territory and asserted jurisdiction over it. In that same month Republique du Cameroun’s French-led troops marched into the Southern Cameroons and immediately announced their presence and demonstrated their trigger-happy nature by murdering six citizens in cold blood, again while the British looked the other way.

 

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1^st October 1961 witnessed the formal ending of UN trusteeship over the Southern Cameroons. But the independence which the people had voted for and whose effective date the UN had set for 1^st October 1961 remains paper independence to this day because its enjoyment was immediately suppressed by Republique du Cameroun in two very significant ways. Republique du Cameroun sent its troops into the Southern Cameroons, with the result that it remains an occupied territory to this day. Then, after the British Commissioner of the Southern Cameroons departed on 1^st October 1961 Republique du Cameroun immediately appointed one of its citizens to the Southern Cameroons as the new colonial governor, stepping into the shoes of the departed British Commissioner. The new and French-speaking colonial officer was euphemistically styled ‘inspecteur d’ administration’, a denomination later changed to that of ‘governeur de province/region’. Thus, the so-called ‘reunification’ much trumpeted by Republique du Cameroun is a mere myth and at best a Nazi-type ‘reunification’ of Alsace Lorraine and then Austria, with the Third Reich.

 

In the 1970s, believing it had achieved its colonial goal of complete assimilation of the people of the Southern Cameroons and total destruction of their identity, and in order to have unhindered access to the wealth and natural resources of the Southern Cameroons, Republique du Cameroun contrived to manufacture another ‘reunification’ which it called ‘unification’, a stage in its imperial agenda admitting of no diversity, no multiculturalism, no multi-nationalism, within its colonial set-up: the Southern Cameroons had to be completely extinguished, its people destroyed as a distinct and separate people and then sunk wholesale into the French world of Republique du Cameroun. But Republique du Cameroun did not reckon with the innate human yearning for freedom, the innate human nature and ability to resist oppression and domination, the innate individual and collective human instinct for survival, and the resilience of the people of the Southern Cameroons in the face of great national adversity and peril.

 

Now that its colonial occupation of the Southern Cameroons has been thoroughly exposed Republique du Cameroun claims to have been able to find a new basis for its tragic colonial adventure in the Southern Cameroons. It now makes the dishonest and infantile claim that the ICJ ruling in the ‘Bakassi case’ confirms that the Southern Cameroons is part of the territory of Republique du Cameroun and that the ruling acknowledges Republique du Cameroun’s sovereignty over the Southern Cameroons. But this is more of wishful thinking than what the ICJ decided in that case. The ICJ could not have decided those points for the simple reason that those matters were never pleaded before the Court. It is elementary that a court of law does not adjudicate on matters not put before it and argued by the parties. Sovereignty over the Southern Cameroons and the boundaries of the Southern Cameroons were not issues before the Court. Therefore, the Court cannot possibly be taken to have decided those issues. In any event, the ICJ is not a territorial sovereign; it does not have territory with which to assuage the colonial cravings of expansionist states. In 1961 Republique du Cameroun had tried to lay the foundation for its expansionism by claiming in the Northern Cameroons case that it had an interest in a so-called “reunification of all the people of Cameroun.” Republique du Cameroun had already set its eyes on annexing the Southern Cameroons. Its next step was to grab the Northern Cameroons via the ICJ. Had it succeeded it would have moved on to lay claim to parts of Gabon, Congo, Central African Republic and Chad on the basis that the pieces of territory in question formed part of German Kamerun. Fortunately, the ICJ at the time quickly saw through this imperial agenda and non-suited Republique du Cameroun which promptly declared what turned out to be an ephemeral day of crocodile tears.

 

The evidence of annexation and colonial occupation of the Southern Cameroons is therefore overwhelming; and every citizen of the Southern Cameroons is a colonized being however much those co-opted into the administration of the colonialist (a typical French colonial practice) might pretend. But there is further evidence of colonialism which tallies with the findings of a study (2009) by the Middle East Project of the HSRC entitled ‘Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid: A Re-assessment of Israel’s practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories under International Law.’ “The terms of the Declaration on [the Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples and Territories],’’ the study affirms, “indicate that a situation may be classified as colonial when the acts of a State have the cumulative outcome that it annexes or otherwise unlawfully retains control over territory and thus aims permanently to deny its indigenous population the exercise of its right to self-determination.”

 

First, the indigenous population of the Southern Cameroons have no control over their territory, the territorial integrity of which has been violated by Republique du Cameroun by the fact of occupation of the Southern Cameroons and the partitioning of the Southern Cameroons into provinces/regions tagged to contiguous Cameroun Republic areas. This violates the UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence.

 

Secondly, the people of the Southern Cameroons hitherto self-governing under British colonial rule have since been deprived of the capacity for self-governance. Republique du Cameroun exercises total civil and military administration of the Southern Cameroons through a hierarchy of Republique du Cameroun officials. Unlike under British colonial rule, there is now no Southern Cameroons parliament, no Southern Cameroons government, no Southern Cameroons judiciary, no Southern Cameroons administration, no Southern Cameroons public service, and no Southern Cameroons police service. Republique du Cameroun retains full and total control over the territory. The people of the Southern Cameroons cannot freely determine their political status. They cannot freely pursue their economic and social development according to the policy they should freely choose. They cannot exercise the right to their economic, social and cultural development. The enjoyment of the independence voted for at the plebiscite in 1961 has been suppressed by Republique du Cameroun, thereby violating the right of the people of the Southern Cameroons to self-determination. Republique du Cameroun is seeking permanently to deny the people of the Southern Cameroons the exercise of their inalienable and continuing right to self-determination.

 

Thirdly, whereas international law ordains that the territory and economy of a colonial territory must remain separate and distinct from that of the colonising power, Republique du Cameroun has completely subordinated and subsumed the territory and economy of the Southern Cameroons to its own, in fact fused the economy of the Southern Cameroons into its own so that structurally there is no longer any distinction between the two, with the result that the people of the Southern Cameroons have been totally deprived of the capacity to govern and order their economic affairs. Their right to economic self-determination has thus been suppressed.

 

Fourth, Republique du Cameroun is in breach of the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources in relation to the Southern Cameroons. The right of permanent sovereignty over natural resources entitles a people to freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources and in no case shall they be deprived of it. Oil, timber, gas, mineral and cash crop resources are taken from the Southern Cameroons for the exclusive development of Republique du Cameroun. The Southern Cameroons has changed little in the past 50 years: The existing few kilometres of tarred roads are the typical colonial ‘extractive routes’ meant to facilitate the evacuation of natural resources and food commodities from the Southern Cameroons to Republique du Cameroun. Most parts of the Southern Cameroons are unreachable throughout the year and head load over long distances is still very common. Water, electricity and health facilities remain rare amenities. Infrastructural development is virtually absent. The enjoyment of second, like first, generation human rights remain a pipe dream.

 

Fifthly, Republique du Cameroun has denied the people of the Southern Cameroons the right freely to express, develop and practice their culture. The practices of Republique du Cameroun privilege the French language, the French legal system, the French administrative system, the French educational system and the French-based cultural referents of Republique du Cameroun, while materially and purposefully hampering the Anglo-American-based cultural development and expression of the people of the Southern Cameroons.

 

Clearly, the implementation by Republique du Cameroun of its colonial policy has been systematic and comprehensive. The exercise by the people of the Southern Cameroons of their right to self-determination has been frustrated in all its principal modes of expression. Living in complete denial even in the face of compelling evidence, Republique du Cameroun argues lamely that Africa is now free and therefore the Southern Cameroons is not under colonial occupation. But that is like arguing that there is now no slavery in the world because slavery was abolished a long time ago. Colonialism is colour-blind. It is no less reprehensible because it is perpetrated by one of our kind. No one has ever argued that Americans and the Irish were never colonised by the British because they are all whites (and even with a substantial cultural and blood relations). German occupation of France was rejected as was Japanese occupation of China. 

 

Colonisation is slavery, a form of terrorism and a threat to international peace and security. Article 20 of the African Charter emphatically rejects it and the AU in the preamble to that Charter strongly denounces it. The existence of colonialism in any form or manifestation, including economic exploitation, is thus incompatible with the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. It is also incompatible with the United Nations Charter, the United Nations Declaration on Decolonisation and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights is duty bound to affirm its support for the aspirations of the people of the Southern Cameroons, under Republique du Cameroun’s colonial rule, to exercise their right to self-determination, including independence. If there is any doubt about this aspiration let an independence referendum, internationally supervised and monitored, be held in the Southern Cameroons. That is an internationally recognised peaceful method of resolving an issue of this nature and for which there are many precedents.

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