AFRICAN INTEGRATION AND AMBAZONIA INDEPENDENCE
African integration is not based on the principle of forced marriages and subjugation of one people by another. Bringing Africa together is not a method to destroy their countries and their territories; it is not a method to impose one people on another; it is not a method to promote colonisation! Wise Africans have understood that the world is not united by holding states indivisible or reducing the number of states in the world, but by reducing the number of conflicts in the world. Resolving conflicts and increasing understanding is the only way to unite the world! Indivisibility of states and conflicts do not unite the world; they divide the world. It is not the number states in the world that divide the world but conflicts in the world! So also Africa is not more united when it is in constant conflict but more divided. It is conflicts that divide Africa, not the number of states that make up Africa! Unity is in the meeting of minds, not the forcing of people into one space of existence! As colonisation, indivisibility of fraudulent states, oppression, subjugation of one people by another are all destructive of understanding and peace, so also are they the causes of disunity in Africa. Until we fully understand the principles of integration, we will continue to believe in the illusion that ending the colonisation of one African country by another is dividing Africa. It is NOT!
We divide Africa more and promote injustices and conflicts more by failing to uphold the principles of the African Union in the illusion that we would be dividing Africa. Is it not a great contradiction that the world rejects forced marriages, but Africa continues to promote fraudulent unions of people who do not belong together? We must finally understand that family unity does not depend on the number of children in the family and whether they live in one room, but on peace, justice and understanding that reigns in the family.
The respect of territorial boundaries is a cardinal principle of African integration. The principles of African integration are clear beyond all doubt that the African Union will recognise to every African Union Member State only the boundaries it inherited from colonisation on its day of independence; Cameroon did not achieve independence with Ambazonia being a part of it, and the boundaries it inherited do not include the territory of Ambazonia! Cameroon achieved independence on 1 January 1960. The UN General Assembly voted for Southern Cameroons independence to take effect on 1 October 1961, almost two years later. Article 19 and 20 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights declare that all people under the Charter have a right to external self-determination and the subjugation of one people by another is absolutely forbidden: in 2009, in Comm. 266/2003, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights declared the People of the Southern Cameroons a People under the Charter. African integration cannot be achieved through territorial theft, armed robbery, colonisation and the subjugation of one people by another or through the apartheid claim of superiority of one people over another. All these evils are destructive of peace and harmony and that is why the wise African leaders laid down these principles to guide integration. Why is the African Union promoting conflicts by its inability to implement these principles of integration? Why is even South Africa not standing up for these principles, given its own history? Has it forgotten so soon?
There cannot be peace in Africa or anywhere else in the world until each state respects its boundaries. And until each people cease to claim the right of superiority over others. Animals fight over territory; all tribes fight over territory; all states fight over territory. How do you imagine that the people of Ambazonia will not fight over their own? They must then be lower than animals, according to you!
Ambazonians love their country and territory just as Cameroon loves its own. They want to sing their own anthem, not Cameroon’s own; they want to fly their flag, not the colonial flag of Cameroon; they want to live under their own laws, not the alien laws of Cameroon; they want to speak their own language, not the imposed French of Cameroon. They want Cameroon to withdraw from Ambazonia to its recognized boundaries under the African Union Constitutive Act, Art. 4(b).
The People of Ambazonia continue to challenge the Republic of Cameroon and its supporters to cite one single article of the UN Charter or UNGA resolution or African Union instrument or any instrument of international law that gives Cameroon jurisdiction over the Southern Cameroons territory or which dispossess the people of the Southern Cameroons of the right over their territory and confers that right onto Cameroon!
Denis Atabong
To be continued
