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Cameroon's Separatists Intensify Attacks to Protest Dialogue

Moki Edwin Kindzeka

   YAOUNDE - New violence has flared in Cameroon as preparations intensify
   for a national dialogue called by President Paul Biya to end the
   conflict that has killed at least 2,000 people in the country's
   English-speaking regions. Scores of people have been killed in recent
   days and electricity has been cut, mostly in English-speaking towns,
   when attackers set fire to power distribution equipment. The military
   has been deployed to replace teachers who are, once again, escaped to
   safer places.

   Forty-five-year-old Godfred Metuge heeded the call of the Cameroon
   government to return and teach in the English-speaking southwestern
   town of Mamfe when the school year in the central African nation began
   September 2. Metuge has again fled for his life to Cameroon's capital,
   Yaounde.

   "It is because of the insecurity there. I was traumatized," he said.
   "My children were traumatized and there are many people who had from
   the trauma, they went to serious depressions and from serious
   depressions, some even passed on."

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