Donald Trump, President of the United States has never been a fan of the United Nations. Boh Herbert, MoRisc Spokesperson words directly echoes the sentiments showed by Trump towards the United Nations. Read On

The United Nations Sucks
By Ntumfoyn Boh Herbert (Yindo Toh)
Spokesperson, MoRISC

If you have read the statement posted on the website of the United Nations and attributed to UN Spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, (and by extension, to his boss, the Secretary General of the world body), you may have been left sighing as I am doing right now:

“Dis United Nations no di shame sef”!

Our leaders and people were abducted many, many months ago. They have been held in the dungeons of Colonial Cameroun for many, many months. They committed no crime that could have even remotely justified their arrest; talk less of their torture and prolonged detention.

From the very first second of their being taken hostage, our people, in their millions, rose like one man and ever since then have not stopped writing text messages, emails, letters, complaints and petitions to the United Nations. Our people have flooded the UN system with photographic and video evidence of the horrors of military occupation, annexation and recolonization by Colonial Cameroun.

Our people have organized four medium-to-massive protest marches outside the UN head offices in New York, pointing out these abuses, decrying recolonization and calling for the unconditional release of our leaders and people. Our protest of the 3rd of March 2017, bringing together no less than 1,200 people, handed over to the Office of the UN Spokesperson for onward transmission to the Secretary General, the Chair of the Fourth Committee on Decolonization and other UN Member States, not only petition documents but also the official flag of Southern Cameroons.

The UN has been informed from the very beginning of our Sovereign People’s determination to restore our independence come Sunday, the 1st of October 2017.

Many months after we got started; with dozens of our people killed execution style by the colonial army and its Death Squadrons; with hundreds, if not thousands of our people “disappeared”; with our cause for Restoration of Independence more widely advertised than at any time in modern history, the Spokesperson of the Secretary General of the United Nations refuses even to call Southern Cameroons by its name.

Shall we guess that the UN graduated from the same school as the colonialists of LRC who think that the best way of resolving a problem is by first refusing that it even exists. While the stupidity from LRC at the onset of the crisis in the Cameroons was to claim as loudly as possible that “there is no Anglophone Problem”, the UN is resolving the dispute brought before it by Southern Cameroonians by notably arguing that “there is no Southern Cameroons Problem”.

The UN has not used those exact words. Nope! Not just yet. But, they just may have, albeit indirectly or by another expression.

Who, on God’s earth, is the United Nations referring to when it says “Anglophone community” in that statement? Is the UN following in the footsteps of the colonial regime in arguing that any citizen who happens to speak English in the Cameroons is a stakeholder in the problem the UN is working overtime to avoid mentioning? Is the crisis in the Cameroons about language? Is it a conflict between linguistic communities? If y some extraordinary stretch of the imagination the problem is, indeed, linguistic, what mandate may I ask does the United Nations have to tackle linguistic problems that has been denied it when it comes to tackling independence issues?

The UN cannot eat its own Resolutions although at the rate at which it’s Spokesperson is ignoring some, the world body probably wishes it could cause some Resolutions on its books to simply disappear. Alas, wishes ain’t horses… The UN has to deal with its Resolutions at some point. After all, it is not the people of Southern Cameroons who voted in the UN General Assembly to adopt Resolutions 1541. The people of Southern Cameroons did not force the UN to provide for peaceful separation from LRC under UNGA Resolution 1541, facilitated if needed, by the UN organizing a Referendum to achieve that goal as set out under Principle IX of that Resolution. It is not the people of Southern Cameroons who adopted UNGA Resolution 1608 granting independence to Southern Cameroons effective the 1st of October 1961. Those who obtained independence by virtue of that vote shall not be downgraded, as the UN seems to be trying to help LRC in doing, to the rank of “the Anglophone community”.

“Tufiakwa!” I say!

Someone should tell the UN that they will not succeed in belittling the territorial dispute between Colonial Cameroun (LRC) and our homeland of Southern Cameroons. By misrepresenting the Southern Cameroons Problem as the Anglophone Community Problem, the UN is helping to fire our people up. They can ask a certain Paul Atanga Nji who parades himself as a minister in the colonial regime of Yaounde.

History teaches us that the UN is neither a quick nor a smart learner. However slowly they want to read up on our case, something is for sure: the UN knows how this film ends, because the UN has seen this film before. This is a mere replay of the same film East Timor brought to the UN. At a time in their history similar to where Southern Cameroons is today, the UN preferred (they call it diplomacy) to refer to present-day East Timor as the “East Timori community”. Present-day Eritrea was once referred to by the same UN and by the colonial authorities of Ethiopia as the 14th Province of Ethiopia.

As with Indonesia’s military occupation of East Timor; as with Ethiopia’s snatching of the autonomy and military occupation of Eritrea; the UN is, once more, cheerleading for colonialists. By denying to acknowledge Southern Cameroons; by refusing to recognize the Sovereign People of Southern Cameroons as a people, separate and different from the people of LRC; by trying so hard to rename our homeland “the Anglophone community” (wherever that is on the map), the UN is playing slave master.

That is how come the UN is trying so hard – nearly a year since we said “enough is enough” – to impose a name on us other than the name we have given ourselves. The UN is asking us to give up our unique identity as Southern Cameroonians in favor of being forcefully annexed to Colonial Cameroun within the framework of what the world body describes as “national reconciliation”. If we were one nation, why did the UN bother to grant us independence? Why did the UN not wait for the Cameroons to get one national Independence Day which would have greatly facilitated the so-called “national reconciliation”?

The current UN leadership needs to be called out on its hypocrisy and diplomacy by burying one’s head deepest in the sand. The UN needs to be named and shamed for trying so hard to cheerlead for what everyone (except the UN apparently) knows is a recolonization project masterminded by the French Government. It started when the French voted against our independence on the floor of the UNGA, mobilizing other French-speaking countries to do same, on the 21st of April 1961. Denying us independence was not just a vote. It was the beginning of the act of sabotaging the independence we won and implementing the recolonization project that the UN is now cleverly – or not so cleverly – rephrasing as “national reconciliation”.

Let’s assume for a brief moment that reconciliation is not a bad thing. Can the UN explain to us why it did not call for “national reconciliation” when it came to granting independence to Eritrea? Could it not ensure “national reconciliation” between East Timor and Indonesia? Why did it not evoke “national reconciliation” during the war in Kosovo or as a solution to 30 years of war in Sudan leading ultimately to the independence of South Sudan? Why did the UN not advocate “national reconciliation” for each of the nearly three dozen former territories that have become sovereign nations only since 1990? Or, as we suspect, is the UN silently hoping that LRC can wage its own 30-year war of recolonization of Southern Cameroons resulting in another two million people killed, as was the case with South Sudan, before the UN can live up to its mission of truly promoting a sustainable peaceful solution to the Problem of the Cameroons?

Ntumfoyn Boh Herbert (Yindo Toh)
Spokesperson, MoRISC