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Cameroon: Wrong Ones in the Dock
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The Post (Buea)
OPINION
10 March 2008
Posted to the web 10 March 2008
Azore Opio With Reports From Churchill Samba*
It has been a scary week for some youths and their parents as the state installed kangaroo courts to hastily try youths troops picked at random during the recent transporters' strike.
The sorry episode has left people wondering at the insensibility of the authorities.Troops went out of their way to stampede citizens who had fled from the furious strikers as well as the ferocious anti-riot squads.
Reports from various quarters bore testimony to the troops breaking open doors or windows and hurling teargas canisters into the house, then shutting the doors. One can only imagine the agony of the occupants.
Most of the youths (14 to 20 years old) now incarcerated in various police dungeons were victims of circumstances. In Buea, when the strike started off, the town was calm; there was no movement. Only a few schoolchildren who had unsuspectingly gone to school trod back home.
But sometime in the afternoon, the troops began firing teargas in the air; at nothing. Reason; if they did not do that the authorities would say they were not working. This, the schoolchildren reported.
On Wednesday, when the strike reached fever pitch, the older youths became artful dodgers. Frustrated by the hide and seek game, the troops started breaking into houses and picking just about anybody they found. They had to be seen to be working.
They whisked away young boys, beat their mothers and fathers, broke their pots and TV sets and radios and even stole some money whenever the occasion arose.A policeman who found a woman preparing a meal for her children hefted the pot off the fire and emptied it into the bush.
In nearly all the towns, similar stories were told. The troops missed the ringleaders and swooped on helpless youngsters. And now they are the ones in the dock facing the hastiest and probably the most convoluted trial.
In Yaounde, the "legal department" of a court hurriedly tried some of the "looters" and slammed them two-year jail terms each.In Buea, Limbe, Bamenda and Kumba all the accused persons do not have counsels. They said they were arrested from their homes at night after forces broke into their houses, and that they were tortured in detention to make confessional statements implicating themselves and others.
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*Churchill Samba, CEO, Global Conscience Initiative, Kumba
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