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Cameroon Civilians Protest Growing Separatist Barbarism, Increasing Violence

Moki Edwin Kindzeka

   YAOUNDE - Hundreds of Cameroonians have braved a heavy military
   presence and separatists' threats to protest increasing violence and
   barbarism in the central African state's restive English-speaking
   regions. The protest in the southwestern town of Muyuka was provoked by
   the killing of civilians and other brutality by the military, which is
   searching for separatists said to be responsible for a recent wave of
   attacks and murder of women and aid workers.

   About 300 people, most of them women and children marched silently on
   the streets of Cameroon's southwestern town of Muyuka Sunday.
   Twenty-nine-year-old Ernestine Naayah said Cameroon's Womens Peace
   Movement, which she represents in Muyuka, and four other organizations
   organized the protest because they are fed up with growing violence in
   Cameroon's English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions.

   "I am out here today to say no to violence, to decry the killings of
   innocent civilians and especially women. Our cry today is for the
   leaders of the nation to do something about the crisis in the North and
   Southwest regions. We all deserve to live in peace in this glorious
   land God has given us," she said.

   Naayah said the groups organized the anti-violence protest in Muyuka
   because it is in the southwestern town that the latest gruesome case of
   murder was reported.

   Gruesome killings

   On August 11, Comfort Tumasang a 32-year-old mother of two was
   gruesomely murdered in Muyuka. A video her beheading went viral on
   social media, provoking widespread condemnation.

   Comfort's mother, 63-year-old Mary Tumasang, said separatists accused
   her daughter of collaborating with the military as an informant. She
   said she supports the protest because she wants peace to return to
   Cameroon. She said she wants her daughter's killers arrested.

   She said when separatists came to her home, her frightened daughter,
   Comfort, did not hesitate to hand over her telephone as the fighters
   requested. She said 30 minutes later, she watched helplessly as Comfort
   was forced out of the house to a neighborhood called Sandsand. She said
   in Sandsand, the fighters tied Comfort to a tree but residents raised
   an alarm and the fighters fled, taking her daughter along.

   Comfort Tumasang was later found dead in a pool of her own blood.
   Thirteen other cases of gruesome killing were reported in Cameroon's
   two English-speaking regions.

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