In an attack on a community in one of Cameroon’s volatile anglophone districts on Monday, November 6, 2023, separatist militants killed over twenty people, including women and children, according to security and local officials.
The attack took place during the night in the western Cameroonian village of Egbekaw, which has seen seven years of bloody combat between rebels and government forces.
“Approximately twenty individuals—men, women, and children—were killed in the attack, and ten others who were seriously injured are being treated at the hospital,” a top regional administrative official stated anonymously.
Officials from the security forces and a government agency also attested to the attack and preliminary toll.
The conflict has engulfed Cameroon’s predominantly English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions ever since separatists proclaimed their independence in 2017.
It came after decades of complaints about what the francophone majority saw as discrimination.
Ninety-nine-year-old President Paul Biya, who has ruled the country in central Africa with an iron grip for 41 years to the day, has responded to requests for more autonomy by cracking down.
The International Crisis Group reports that over a million people have been forced to escape their homes as a result of the violence, which has claimed over 6,000 lives.
Both the government, military, and separatists have been charged with crimes during the conflict.
Rebels “attacked the civilian populations of Egbekaw, and the provisional toll is 23 dead and around 15 houses burnt,” a local gendarmerie official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP over the phone.
An official from the country’s human rights commission confirmed the attack and spoke of 15 dead. “But this figure can evolve,” the source told AFP.
There had been no claim of responsibility for the attack on Egbekaw.
“It happened at 4:00 am. Armed young people came and fired on sleeping residents in their houses and set a whole block of houses on fire,” a resident told AFP by telephone, requesting not to be identified out of security concerns.
“Twenty-three people have already been removed from the debris, some of whom are not even recognizable because of the fire.”
He said there was reason to believe it was connected to the November 6 anniversary of Biya assuming power as president in 1982.
A meeting of the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (RDPC) was planned in the area, he added.
Armed groups are regularly accused of abducting, killing, or injuring civilians whom they accuse of “collaborating” with Cameroonian authorities.
UN agencies and foreign nongovernmental organizations frequently accuse security forces of torturing and killing civilians who they believe to be rebel sympathizers.
Two villagers in the Northwest who the rebels said were working with the army were “summarily executed” in public last month.
Amnesty International said in July that they had documented “atrocities” in the Northwest Region, including rape, torture, and executions carried out by security forces, separatist fighters, and ethnic militias. Ref: AFP
