Southern Cameroons Interim Government

CONTINENTAL SHIFT: Colonial-Era Ties to Africa Face a Reckoning in France

Secretive and Powerful 'Cell' Suffers Blows As Controversies Grow

By DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARS
May 16, 2007; Page A1

On the evening of March 4, 10 French paratroopers reached Birao, Central African Republic, and dropped near an airstrip captured by rebel militia. The paratroopers ambushed the rebels, killing several and reclaiming the airport for the government.

In France, neither the public nor parliament was informed of the attack for three weeks. Coordinating the mission was the "Cellule Africaine," a three-person office nestled behind the Elysée, France's presidential palace. This wasn't the first time the office has been involved in the Central African Republic's internal affairs: In 1979, France toppled the former colony's self-proclaimed emperor and reinstalled his predecessor.

GUARDING FRANCE'S AFRICAN FRONTIER
How French presidents from de Gaulle to Chirac have handled the "African Cell" and France's interests in Africa.

For the past half-century, the secretive and powerful "African Cell" has overseen France's strategic interests in Africa, holding sway over a wide swath of former French colonies. Acting as a general command, the Cell uses France's military as a hammer to install leaders it deems friendly to French interests. In return, these countries give French industries first crack at their oil and other natural resources. Sidestepping traditional diplomatic channels, the Cell reports only to one person: the president.

But with France's new President Nicolas Sarkozy preparing to assume office later today, the African Cell's days may be numbered. There are accusations the French military bears some responsibility for the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, charges the government strenuously denies. There's fierce debate over the French military's continuing presence in the Ivory Coast, where soldiers were dispatched in 2002 when rebels threatened to overthrow President Laurent Gbagbo.

The Cell's close ties to oil giant Elf Aquitaine, where top executives were jailed on corruption charges, were a source of embarrassment. And a former Cell chief is now facing charges related to arms trafficking to Angola. Critics say the Cell's support of non-democratic African regimes, an artifact of France's colonial past, is preventing these nations from making progress to modernity. And Africa, once evidence of imperial grandeur, is now viewed by many French as the source of a continuing flood of poor immigrants.

Farewell, Jacques Chirac

A Leader With a Deep Scorn for Fostering Democracy
By Anne Applebaum
Tuesday, May 8, 2007; A25

(Culled from The Washington Post)

"All political careers end in failure," a British statesman once wisely said. Judging by the wreckage of the famous political career that ended this week, he was even wiser than he knew. With the election of a new president of France on Sunday, the lengthy professional life of Jacques Chirac -- French president for 12 years, mayor of Paris for 18 years, twice French prime minister for a total of four years -- comes to a grinding halt, apparently to the great relief of his compatriots.

Jacques Chirac Leaves Behind One of His Favorite Puppet-Tyrants, Camerounese Governor Paul Biya

In the coming weeks, there will be plenty of time to discuss the virtues and vices of his successor, President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy. But before Chirac fades from the scene altogether -- or before he becomes embroiled in corruption investigations -- I'd like to take this opportunity to recall some of the highlights of his diplomatic career. Many Americans know him only as the man who made the right decision about Iraq, albeit for the wrong reasons. But try, if you can, to leave Iraq aside: Chirac's more important diplomatic legacy lies elsewhere.

Ponder closely, for example, what Chirac has had to say on Africa, where his country has enormous influence, in many places far outweighing ours: During a visit to the Ivory Coast, Chirac once called "multi-partyism" a "kind of luxury," which his host, president-for-life F?lix Houphouet-Boigny, clearly could not afford. During a visit to Tunisia, he proclaimed that since "the most important human rights are the rights to be fed, to have health, to be educated and to be housed," Tunisia's human rights record is "very advanced" -- never mind the police who beat up dissidents. "Africa is not ready for democracy," he told a group of African leaders in the early 1990s. On Britain: "The only thing they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease . . . You can't trust people who cook as badly as that."

President Nicolas Sarkozy: Has a Thug Inherited Françafrique?

IG Research Bureau
May 07, 2007

In mid-June of 1998, just four years after the French genocide in Rwanda, France was again in Africa, this time in Congo-Brazzaville. And like they did four years earlier, the French NGOs: Cimade, Agir ici and Frères des hommes carried out protests in France that were utterly ignored by France’s elite establishment media. Regarding official France, Jean-Arnold de Clermont, the president of Fédération protestante de France would lament in the Fall of 1999 that he was “shocked by the complacent attitude of the French embassy in Congo, and if it is true that the French army was training Mr. Nguesso’s militia, I’ll be very worried about the future. The same thing happened in Rwanda and we know how that turned out.” In a war sponsored by France and ELF, about 250,000 defenseless Africans in the Pool of the Congo will die. Mr. Jean-Arnold de Clermont fears came true. In a morbid conspiracy of silence, there was a complete media black out in France. A journalist for TF1 would say in December of 1998 that “we wanted to mobilize a team in Brazzaville, but we were blocked at both ends.” In Paris and Brazzaville (François-Xavier Verschave). French media barons freely acquiesced to the diktats of the Elysée Palace forbidding any coverage of the carnage in Congo-Brazzaville, a carnage that had the fingerprints of Jacques Chirac and the françafrique village. These are the same media barons French presidential candidate François Bayrou has warned Sarkozy is very close to, in addition to the big businesses like the Bolloré and Bouygues Groups whose thuggish and corrupt practices in Africa has enabled so much deviance on the continent, enabled by French surrogates masquerading as African heads of state.

In 1999, Nicolas Sarkozy proudly stood in court as a character witness for one Charles Pasqua in the latter’s defamation suit against French economist and author, François-Xavier Verschave, regarding the publication of his book on French crimes in Africa, La Françafrique: le plus long Scandale de la République. During the course of the trial, Mr. Pasqua’s networks and dealings with what is now the genocidal regime in Khartoum were exposed. Today, Mr. Pasqua is under indictment for illegal arms dealing in Angola. But he now has as a character witness, the president of France.

France has elevated herself to a nation and people with a global view of life that she believes she must propagate, génocide oblige, to the rest of the world, especially in Africa. They call it their mission civilisatrice. In Africa, institutionalized under Charles de Gaulle’s 5th republic, it is a nefarious and criminal network composed of French politicians, businessmen and journalists along with their African surrogates called françafrique. It is a political disposition that in essence considers the African as sub-human and it is a doctrinaire approach regarding France’s dealings with Africa that Mr. Sarkozy is positioning himself to perpetuate. The command and control of the mafia is the Cellule Africaine at the Elysée Palace under the monopolized direct control of the president of France, that contrary to the promise of the other candidates in the recent French elections, Sarkozy has promised to maintain.

And while Mr. Sarkozy rhapsodizes about a rupture with the past, he has refused any reform of Charles de Gualle's 5th republic that for defenseless Africans has represented repeated coups, massacres, genocides and the institutionalization of a culture of tyrannical corruption, where French advisers still call the shots in countries like Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic and la République du Cameroun. Where Mr. Bayrou speaks of “the 5th republic that no longer works, wherever there is monopoly of power, pluralism should be instituted. Enough of concentrated power,” Mr. Sarkozy is preparing to use the same instruments to achieve the same aims for his business friends and African surrogates. His homage to Omar Bongo Odimba six weeks ago in Paris, a dinosaur of the françafrique salon speaks for itself.

(See video below)

SCNC Activists, CPDM Envoy Tussle In Belgium

Culled From The Post
By George Eluty in Belgium

Southern Cameroons Activists in Belgium (Source: The Post)

Sunday, April 15, protesting members of the Southern Cameroons National Council, SCNC, confronted former Foreign Affairs Minister, Jacques Roger Booh Booh, who was CPDM envoy to Belgium for the party's reorganisation, in Antwerp, Belgium.

Asked why they decided to use CPDM occasion to bring their grievance to the world, SCNC Belgium Chairman, Morfaw, said "Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh is not just a former foreign minister of La République du Cameroun, he was also the head of UNAMIR, the small force dispatched by the United Nations to Rwanda in 1993.

Jacques Roger Booh Booh

"We all have read of the instrumental role he played in forestalling any UN military preventive action against the Rwandan Genocide and the killing of the 10 Belgian service men. What is happening to the Southern Cameroons today is more or less genocide and we had to tell him in the face."

Southern Cameroons: France's Next Stage for Genocide in Africa

The French colony of la République du Cameroun was one of those countries in the world that provided a safe haven for a good number of the Rwandese genocidaires who did France’s work in the massacre of about 1 million Africans in 3 months in the French genocide in Rwanda.

The choice of la République du Cameroun as a safe haven for the French Rwandan genocidaires was not fortuitous. For in la République du Cameroun, the “French Hutus” who executed genocide in the 1950s & 60s on behalf and at the direction of France have been in power since the creation of la République du Cameroun. The line of governorship of that French enclave: Pierre Messmer, Jean Ramadier, Ahmadu Ahidjo and today Paul Biya remain the beneficiaries of one of France’s first African genocides. This piece published by The Postwatch magazine gives a glimpse of that French slaughter:

General De Gaulle set the stage for the dehumanization and brutalisation of Africans

A Very Gaullist Chief in the Southern Cameroons

The very Gaullist Chief Endeley

Charles De Gaulle
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“The Germans, our first colonial master, and the English virtually abandoned us but the French have remained and have become our real friends.” Chief Endeley told his guests.

According to The Post (March 13, 2007), Chief Endeley made the statement, Saturday March 3, while welcoming French Ambassador to la République du Cameroun Georges Serre and wife, to the Buea Town residence of former UN Representative to Congo, Dr. Namata Ngongi.

In the 1944 Brazzaville Conference where France unveiled her blueprint for the continuous plunder and brutality of their colonized possessions in negation of the global decolonization spirit in a post-Hitler world, part of the declaration read:

“The goal of the task of civilization by France in her colonies rule out any possibility of evolution outside the French block of the empire. The eventual creation even in the distant future of ‘self-government’ for the colonies is to be set aside … In greater colonial France, they are neither people to enfranchise nor racial discrimination to abolish. They are populations which we intend to conduct stage by stage to a political personality and for the more developed to political rights. But this will mean that the only independence they will want will be the independence of France.”

Africa and the Southern Cameroons remains burdened with a certain breed, hopefully on the verge of passing on naturally, which continues to remind us on why the continent remains the last enchanting laboratory for all sorts of human misery. This breed have for centuries been conducted stage by stage to political personalities that enable them to betray the essence of Africa’s collective humanity. Some of our Chiefs and Fons in the Southern Cameroons have fit perfectly into this Gaullist view of Africa.

Bate Besong

"To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die"

MORE ON BATE BESSONG'S PASSING

Hello Mr. Georges Serre, French Ambassador to la République du Cameroun

GEORGES SERRE, French Ambassador to la République du Cameroun

Thank you for the interview accorded to The Post newspaper of March 05/2007.
(Appended at the end of this piece)

A few years ago, a story circulated in the Southern Cameroons about an exchange between Cardinal Christian Tumi and another French man of God. When told that he was from the Cameroons, the French man of God asked Cardinal Tumi what was taking so long to Frenchify those anglophones in the Cameroons. And to his “embarrassment” Cardinal Tumi calmly replied that he is indeed one of those anglophones.

Whether this anecdote is true or false, it does reveal the depths and depravity of the conspiracy against the people of the Southern Cameroons. It also reveals the intentions behind the brutality that the state and people of the Southern Cameroons have been subjected to. But it also is displays the success of a genteel but robust resistance, which despite close to half a century of relentless and brutal colonial rule of France masquerading as la République du Cameroun sanctioned by the “international community,” she has miserably failed to destroy the political identity of the state and people of the Southern Cameroons. Or it may just be the incompetence and limitation of the patented French illusions of grandeur laced with the Fashoda Syndrome.

But here we are in March of 2007, in desperation struts in this Messenger of Death called Georges Serre, in the name of the French Ambassador to their bush Bastille enclave called la République du Cameroun. Along with his primitive coterie of Gaullist monkeys from Yaoundé he declares (or decrees?) in an interview with The Post newspaper that the University of Buea is a “national university with a focus towards bilingualism.” Even basic intellectual competence eludes this so-called French diplomat sent from the métropole to one of the primitive recesses of the periphery. It will really be helpful to both the peoples of France and la République du Cameroun that we of the Southern Cameroons have competent interlocutors who are capable of understanding the basic processes and realities of life.

Why George Serre Came to the Southern Cameroons and the University of Buea

SCNC Defence Counsel Blames Gendarmes For Obstructing Justice

By Chris Mbunwe
(Culled from The Post newspaper, March 2, 2007)

"It is our humble submission that the State of Southern Cameroons, the independence of which the accused persons are arguing has never in law nor historically been an integral and inseparable part of he Republic of Cameroon." Bobga went further to explain to the court that the Republic of Cameroon gained independence on January 1, 1960, while the State of Southern Cameroons gained her independence on October 1, 1961.

According to Bobga, the experiment to create a two-state Federation of the States of "The Republic of Cameroon" and that of "Southern Cameroons" has been a legal constitutional and historical failure giving rise to the peaceful struggle of Southern Cameroonians seeking a restoration of their independent state "now under the Republic of Cameroon illegal occupation, not withstanding the dubious Cameroon-Nigeria land and maritime boundary judgment of the International Court of Justice and the comic Green Tree agreement idea of the three neo-colonial agents and conspirators Mr. Paul Biya of La République du Cameroun, Obasanjo of Nigeria and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan," Bobga declared.
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Southern Cameroons: Prisoners in Hunger Strike, France-Cannes: Chirac feasts with his Paul Biya

Mr. Jacques Chirac who once proclaimed Africans as "not being mature" for democracy, and like the God and lover of Africans that he, Noir Chirac purports to be, warned President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa that he, Noir Chirac, understands the soul and mentality of Africans better than the South African president, is here in his element with a Gaullist African governor.

The grinning pétainiste negroid Paul Biya, the 74 year-old governor of la République du Cameroun, has spent his life giving "Calamity Jack" reason to believe that he does indeed understand the soul and mentality of Africans. For 25 years, France's grinning pétainiste negro, Paul Biya, has reduced his countrymen to abject poverty and misery, while making his country, la République du Cameroun, the bordello for France, especially for the likes of Calamity Jack and his pals.

Their morbid Françafrique feast this past week in France, could not have been at a better setting. The centre where illusions and make-belief are displayed: Cannes represented the perfect stage for Noir Chirac, Calamity Jack, a man dubbed by the French press as a "super thief" and "super liar," to act as the pompous poseur with smoke and mirrors, misrepresenting himself as Africa's best lover. The type of lover who stalks and eventually kills his victim ... out of great love. Like the people of Rwanda, Congo-Brazzaville, Côte d'Ivoire know all too well.

Governor Biya, France's puppet will return to his French plantation of la République du Cameroun with the Southern Cameroons that he plunders for France still very much in its incipient revolt. The leaders of the SCNC as reported by the UNPO will be on a hunger strike.