Cameroon, a bilingual and multicultural country known for its stability and its strong alliances with France and the US, is slipping into a protracted human rights crisis in the largely Anglophone North-West and South-West regions that border Nigeria.

Since late 2016, Anglophone activists, who have long complained of their regions’ perceived marginalization by the Francophone majority, have mobilized significant segments of the Anglophone population to demand more political autonomy or secession.

Between October and December 2016, English-speaking lawyers, teachers, and students took to the streets to protest the perceived “francization” of the regions’ educational and judicial systems by the central government. In response, government security forces heavily clamped down on protests, arrested hundreds of demonstrators, including children, killed at least four, and wounded many.

In early 2017, the government negotiated with the lawyers and teachers’ unions. The government claimed to have agreed to their demands, including the creation of a National Commission for Bilingualism and Multiculturalism and the recruitment of bilingual magistrates and teachers by the government, but this did little to deescalate the crisis. The government’s repression and arrest of prominent Anglophone negotiators on January 17, 2017, emboldened more extremist leaders who began to demand, increasingly violently, independence for Cameroon’s Anglophone North-West and South-West regions – a territory they call “Ambazonia.”

Report by the Human Rights Watch