CONTRIBUTION TO THE UMASS CONFERENCE, BOSTON, USA

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation, and, the Centre for Peace, Democracy and Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. My special gratitude goes to Pr Padraig O’Malley who in the last ten months has, with some of his team members, flown over to London on five occasions for meetings with me to get a better understanding of the crisis in the Cameroons. I thank University of Massachusetts, our host us for this high level conference. I specially thank the organizers for showing great interest in the people of the former British Southern Cameroons, whom I have come to refer to as “the forgotten of the earth.” Thank all for your gracious decision to talk Cameroon.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am a lifelong living witness to what Cameroon is and what it isn’t. I have lived all my life in Cameroon, and I can say that I have seen it all, heard it all and lived it all. There are FIVE basic truths, each interwoven into the others, around which all the trouble emanating from Cameroon evolves.

(A) Cameroon Has Lived a Lie for More Than Half a Century! The fundamental message the world needs to take home from the UMass conference is that: this nation known to all as “Cameroon” has lived one of the biggest lies in all of human history. The very foundations of the nation were laid on the mud of fraud, violence and falsehood. That is what has led to the on going blood shed on my people. And that is what led me to write a book titled: WirbaForce: The Force of Truth in Defence of Southern Cameroons, because it required the unstoppable force of truth to spur our people to rise and tear down the high walls of over half a century of lies, that successive violent regimes had continuously fed to the world. You are all gathered in UMass today because those walls of fraud and falsehood are coming down and the world has a chance to peep in and see the undeniable truth.

(B) Two Independent Nations Came Together in 1961! The central rock on which this unavoidable truth stands is that the nation known as La Republique du Cameroun got her independence on January 1^st, 1960; and nation known as Southern Cameroons had her own independence on the 1^st of October 1961! Both have their internationally defined and recognised boundaries to this day. Somehow the UN and the UK had for reasons best known to them coerced the state of Southern Cameroons to have her independence through some unheard of mechanism called “independence by joining”, either Nigeria or La Republique du Cameroun! And the UK immediately connived with France and the government of La Republique du Cameroun, to invent a Federation of “two states of equal status”, with neither a union treaty nor any legal or constitutional instruments to lay the foundation for such a federation. Of course this highly fraudulent federation would soon afterwards be quickly dismantled by France and the government of Lrc, and Southern Cameroons would literally be annexed. This colonization is the cause of all the war we are witnessing today.

By Wirba Joseph Mbiydzenyuy

To be continued