Cameroonians call for peace, reconciliation to end country’s ‘full-blown civil war’

Ahead of Cameroon’s National Day on 20 May, thousands of people are demonstrating this week, calling for peace and reconciliation in what a recent briefing paper referred to as a „bloody civil war“.
The demonstrators, led by activists, traditional leaders and clerics, gathered in the capital, Yaounde, on Thursday, calling for an end to hate speech and the separatist conflict, as well as peace and reconciliation in the Central African country. The protests began in towns and villages across Cameroon on Monday (15 May), and on Thursday thousands of Christians from Cameroon’s Catholic, Presbyterian and Baptist churches joined the protests. “It is wickedness and the type of hate speech that destroys the country,“ Reverend Father Humphrey Tatah Mbui said. “If we want peace in this country we must learn to start controlling the kind of words we use, the way we talk to other people and dialogue.“
Cameroon has been engulfed in „the full-blown civil war“ since 2017, which has claimed more than 6,000 lives, forced more than 1 million people to flee their homes and left nearly 4 million people dependent on humanitarian assistance, according to Obiora Ikoku, a Nigerian freelance journalist and activist. The violence has raged on despite domestic and international efforts to broker peace. The 2019 peace talks mediated by Switzerland and the latest Canada-facilitated dialogue between the Cameroonian government and Anglophone separatists failed to halt the fighting, partly due to infighting among the separatists. But as Ikoku points out, while Yaounde took the blame for scuttling the most recent initiative, some observers chalked up the abortive dialogue to internal disagreements among the Anglophone leaders.