Children are bearing the burden of an escalating crisis in Cameroon, UN says

UNITED NATIONS — Children are bearing the brunt of a worsening crisis in the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon, UN officials said Friday, as 650,000 of them are locked out of schools shut down amid civil unrest while as many as 1.3 million people need humanitarian assistance.

“Some 1.3 million people, including around 650,000 children, are now in need of some form of humanitarian assistance in the  Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon, as the security situation and living conditions continue to deteriorate,” Toby Fricker of the United Nations Children’s Fund said during a news conference Friday in Geneva. “Around 450,000 of these people, half of whom are children, are internally displaced.”

Conditions in the two English-speaking regions have deteriorated considerably as the primarily French-speaking government cracks down on civilians and suspected separatists at the forefront of a movement that began as a concerted demand for equal status in the country of 24 million people.

But experts have said the situation devolved into nearly a civil war when government forces and separatists began using violence.

“Children and their families are suffering amidst and fleeing armed violence, attacks on their homes and schools, abduction, sexual violence and recruitment into armed groups,” Fricker continued, adding that 80 percent of schools in the two regions are now closed. “Imposed lockdowns, or ghost-town days, set in place by nonstate armed groups, are affecting people’s freedom of movement and the delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

The current conflict is a sharp escalation of simmering tensions dating back decades to Cameroon’s first days of independence in the early 1960s, experts have said, as its English-speaking and French-speaking counterparts tried to forge a post-colonial future.

Anglophones in the Northwest and Southwest regions, however, have long felt marginalized by the Francophone government and majority. Their frustrations reached a boiling point in November 2016, UN officials have said. 

The UN’s humanitarian affairs chief, Mark Lowcock, noted during a May presentation before the UN Security Council that the crisis began after a government crackdown on protests to the imposition in November 2016 of a mainly French policy in schools and courts. That conflict has led to the near civil war, with an armed separatist group clashing with government troops as the country’s civil society crumbled.

In December 2017, a Stony Brook University comparative literature professor, Patrice Nganang — a native of Cameroon and a U.S. citizen — was detained by security forces for about three weeks after he wrote and posted articles that were critical of President Paul Biya’s handling of the crisis in the Anglophone regions.

Hospitals have been attacked and schools have been shuttered, with only about 20 percent of children attending schools amid the turmoil, Lowcock said. He added that while 4.3 million people in the country are in need of humanitarian assistance — 30 percent more than last year — 1.3 million people are in need in the northwest and southwest regions, eight times more than last year’s 160,000 people.

“Thousands of people lack access or have reduced access to basic services such as health care and safe drinking water, and livelihoods have been destroyed,” Fricker said. “As of December 2018, an estimated 40 percent of health facilities in the Southwest region were not functioning.”