The recent killing of nine unarmed civilians in Missong Village in Menchum Division of Cameroon’s Northwest Region has, again, brought to the limelight the unprofessional conduct which has become normalised within ranks of the Cameroon military. Officials of the Ministry of Defence, in a statement, still found a way to justify the callous unprovoked act that left nine civilians, including a baby, dead.
While acknowledging and taking responsibility for the act, the spokesperson of Cameroon’s Defence Ministry, Navy Captain, Cyrille Serge Atonfack, though seemingly blaming the soldiers for their deed, still went on to say the soldiers carried out the killings for “self-protection”.
According to witness accounts from Missong Village, located near Zhoa, Fungom Subdivision, Menchum Division of the Northwest Region, on Wednesday, June 1, 2022, members of Cameroon army loitered around the Missong Village, with bottles of drinks and, upon their departure, they noticed that at least one of them was missing.
The villagers said the soldiers returned to the village and demanded that villagers produce the missing soldier. Unable to tell where they were, the security forces descended on the population; killed three children, three women and three men; the villagers told Cameroon News Agency, CNA.
According to the locals who spoke to CNA, the missing soldier later emerged, after the unit had killed nine villagers.
In MINDEF’s version of the story, issued and signed by its spokesperson, Cyrille Serge Atonfack, “…04 (four) of the 07 (seven) elements of the Defence and Security Forces of the “Bravo” Joint Unit, under the command of the 53rd Motorised Infantry Battalion (53rd BIM), detached to the ABAR Advanced Post, and returning from a patrol, were immediately redeployed to Missong Village, on a mission to search for a missing comrade.
“In the middle of the night during the hunt, the latter ran into a group of deviant villagers. In an inappropriate reaction, unsuited to the circumstances and grossly disproportionate to the hostile villagers’ refusal to cooperate, and fearing the worst for themselves and their missing comrade, the soldiers, in a hasty reaction of self-protection, and in defiance of the sacrosanct principle of precaution, used their weapons.
This confusion resulted to:
-09 (nine) villagers dead, including 04 women, 04 men and an 18-month-old girl, all buried on Thursday, 2nd June by the inhabitants ; 01 (one) girl of about 12 months slightly injured and transferred to the District General Hospital in Wum for proper medical attention”.
The MINDEF statement equally claimed that the four soldiers of the ABAR Advanced Post have been demobilised and detained in Bamenda.
The act, which has been admitted by the military high command, though with a mixed and confusing statement which condemns and justifies the act at the same time, is unfortunately not isolated. In a similar act, Government soldiers, aided by Fulani militias, had earlier, on in February 14, in Ngarbuh Village located in Donga Mantung, still in the Northwest Region, killed over 22 civilians. They first denied the act, but after much pressure, they owned up to it, but still with attempts to justify it. Thirteen of the victims were children.
This time around, it again took the military a week before they could own up to the Missong killings. In its statement, MINDEF described the victims as “deviant” villagers, but failed to name a deviant action or behaviour of the victims. It again talked about the villagers failing to “cooperate” in finding a soldier, which is not a duty of the villagers to account for a soldier who should rather be there to guard an account for them.
The soldiers’ deed violated Article 3 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person.” Article 5, further states that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Even the Constitution of Cameroon, in its preamble, trumpets the right to life, for everyone.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in its Article 6 (1) also states that: “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.” The Missong victims of gruesome executions were robbed of this right.
By law, if the villagers were judged to have committed an offence, the soldiers should have gone by Article 11 (1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that says: “Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence. The soldiers failed to give the civilians a chance to prove innocence, and went on to execute them over a crime they did not commit.
In a statement condemning the acts and several others committed recently, the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa, CHRDA, said it “condemns this renewed violence perpetrated against the civilian population and calls on the State to thoroughly investigate these incidents and bring the perpetrators to justice. We equally call on all parties to the conflict to cease using all violence against the civilian population and to instead seek a lasting solution to the crisis through peaceful means.”
By Andrew Nsoseka, JADE