Cameroon: English-speaking Minority

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Wednesday 14th November 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Boateng]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to safeguard the human rights of the English-speaking minority in Cameroon.

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, Cameroon is in the grip of a humanitarian disaster that threatens to affect it and the whole region. The anglophone communities in the country see their rights and their expectations of a prosperous and safe life trampled underfoot. The crisis has its origins in a 1961 plebiscite, which I, a child in the region at the time, recall as being of concern then to the region, to my father—a Cabinet Minister in a neighbouring country—and, significantly, to Members of this House and the other place. They saw a flawed plebiscite that posed a binary question to the English-speaking regions of Cameroon: join Nigeria or join francophone Cameroon. They were not given the choice to form their own independent state.

We live with the legacy of that plebiscite in the plight of the peoples of Cameroon to this day, the English-speaking ones in particular. The horrific figures speak for themselves: 460,000 people have been displaced; 3.3 million are in need of humanitarian assistance; and more than 450 innocent civilians have been killed—often in horrific circumstances—in the conflict in the anglophone regions, as well as countless separatist fighters and government soldiers. Only this morning, I met someone whose family member was giving assistance to a government soldier who, when he returned to the place where the soldiers had gathered, had seen the heads of four of his comrades displayed on the road. Not surprisingly, he has gone mad.

Atrocities have been committed on both sides. As we speak, people are held without trial, people have disappeared and people have been kidnapped. It is a dirty war and no one comes out of it with any credit at all. What is to be done? The answer surely has to be that we have to engage. We have heard numerous expressions of concern from Her Majesty’s Government. Concern is welcome but it is not enough. The time has come to engage with the specific purpose of inculcating a genuinely national dialogue within Cameroon designed to address these grievances. The grievances are real, continuing and some years ago now—the situation has been deteriorating over the last two or three years in particular—led lawyers and teachers to go on strike.

The protections they had secured from the original federalist solution that followed the plebiscite had been so dissipated that anglophone students were at a disadvantage when they took exams. Cases could not properly be heard in the courts because francophone judges were adjudicating on a common law of which they had no knowledge, in languages that were improperly translated. All of that led to the increasing marginalisation of the English-speaking people of Cameroon. In no other country in the world is an English-speaking minority as discriminated against and disadvantaged as it is in Cameroon. Regardless of our historical responsibilities as the holders of the mandate that led to the creation of a federal Cameroon after independence, and, equally, with the universal right of people to protection, which we are obliged to accept, how can we stand by to see English people discriminated against in this way? We hope to hear from the Government tonight the practical measures that they will take to address this issue.

We have an excellent high commissioner in Cameroon. How is he to be supported by additional resource? After all, the Government have been very clear that we have made a commitment to increase the resources available to ensure that the Foreign Office is able to guarantee the right to protection against atrocity. Are these resources to be made available to the high commission in Cameroon? It cannot follow through that guarantee on the resources currently allocated for that purpose.

On 21 and 22 November, the Anglophone General Conference will be organised by Cameroonian religious leaders. How are we, as a nation, to support that with resources? Will we encourage the Government of Cameroon to engage with religious leaders at that conference and, crucially, will we encourage the separatist movements also to engage? Innocent people are being caught between a rock and a hard place: between the separatists, who terrorise them, and the Government, who also terrorise them and at the same time fail to protect them.

I declare an interest in this concern. I chair two charities that currently work in Cameroon. The Minister of State for Africa rightly, in my view, referred to the long-standing friendship between the British people and Cameroon, and the fact that we are partners in the Commonwealth. That long-standing friendship has caused Book Aid International, previously the Countess of Ranfurly library trust, to work in both English-speaking and French-speaking Cameroon since 1962. It is a charity that trains librarians and provides books. It helped me as a little boy growing up in the Gold Coast and then Ghana by founding the first dedicated children’s library in sub-Saharan Africa. We are now no longer able to work in English-speaking Cameroon, such is the impact on education in those provinces.

Similarly, I chair the International Council of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. We have had a long-standing relationship with Cameroon and work closely with ministries and civil society there. However, we are no longer able to work in English-speaking Cameroon. That is the reality on the ground and something has to be done.

I shall close my remarks by allowing the people of English-speaking Cameroon to speak for themselves. One child describes how she and her family have had to take to the forest to be safe both from government troops and from the separatists. Her education has been disrupted. She has no access to what we would expect any child to have. She says, “I will not be able to go back to my village and school, which have been burnt down. The forest is now my home, though there are no schools or books here. I still have hopes to go to school and read books again”. Book Aid International has no government support—it does not ask for it. It is supported by publishers, which provide brand-new books, by ordinary British people, and, because of the difficulty of working in Cameroon at this time, by the People’s Postcode Lottery, to which I give great thanks and credit.

As a result, we have now been able to send 5,000 brand- new publisher-donated books to be distributed not as they normally are through schools and libraries but in the forests, on the roads, in the camps and in places where these displaced children are—distributed, it has to be said, with the aid of brave local partners. The churches are at the forefront of this. One bishop has said, “We believe that we can give these children hope in a hopeless situation. Dreams should not end because there is strife and conflict, but unless we right the wrongs now for these children so they can learn today, there will be no tomorrow for them and their communities”.

I ask the Government: are we to support the Commonwealth or the African Union to hold the ring in the national conversation that the President of Cameroon has promised to address the long-standing grievances and current abuses of human rights on all sides, and what resources will Her Majesty’s Government make available to the Commonwealth and/or the African Union for that purpose? It will not be enough to call on them to do something unless we give them the resources and unless, within the ministerial council of the Commonwealth, we exercise the political will that the people of Cameroon are entitled to look to Her Majesty’s Government to exercise.

We have a choice. We cannot, to any useful purpose, revisit the wrongs of yesteryear in the plebiscite—the flawed referendum—and in the withdrawal from imperial responsibility, but we can ensure that these children and communities have a tomorrow.