Betrayal of Too Trusting a People. The UN, the UK and the Trust Territory of the Southern Cameroons

Carlson Anyangwe

Description

There is a growing body of literature on what was originally envisioned as a free political association of the French and British Cameroons and its dramatic effects on the 'British Cameroons' community. Anyangwe's new book is an attempt to write the history of the Southern Cameroons from a legal perspective. This authoritative work describes in great detail the story of La Republique du Cameroun's alleged annexation and colonization of the Southern Cameroons following the achievement of its independence, while highlighting the seeming complicity of the United Nations and the British Trusteeship Authority. In the process, Anyangwe unravels a number of myths created by the main actors to justify this injustice and, in the end, makes useful suggestions to reverse the situation and to restore statehood to the Southern Cameroons. The book is rich in archival research and informed by a global perspective. It convincingly shows the uniqueness of the Southern Cameroons case.

Sujets

• Law

Informations

• Publié par: Langaa RPCIG
• Date de parution: 15 août 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 21
• EAN13: 9789956715602
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Betrayal of too Trusting a People he UN, tHe UK and tHe Trust Territory of tHe SoutHern Cameroons

Carlson Anyangwe

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Betrayal of Too Trusting a People The UN, the UK and the Trust Territory of the Southern Cameroons

Carlson Anyangwe

Langaa Research & Publishing CIG Mankon,Bamenda

Publisher: LangaaRPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon [e-mail] www.langaa-rpcig.net

Distributed outside N. America by African Books Collective [e-mail] www.africanbookscollective.com

Distributed in N. America by Michigan State University Press [e-mail] www.msupress.msu.edu

DISCLAIMER

ISBN: 9956-558-81-8

©Carlson Anyangwe 2009

All views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Langaa RPCIG.

Betrayal of Too Trusting a People

Content

Preface .................................................................................. vii

Chapter One Historical Background ........................................................................ 1

Chapter Two Horse and Rider ................................................................................. 15

Chapter Three A Trust Betrayed by the United Nations ....................................... 33

Chapter Four A Trust Betrayed by the British Government .............................. 47

Chapter Five A Black Colonialist Makes an Expansionist Claim ..................... 63

Chapter Six Refutation of the ‘History’ Thesis .................................................. 69

Chapter Seven Refutation of the ‘Consent to Incorporation’ Thesis: The Plebiscite in 1961 ............................................................... 85

Chapter Eight Refutation of the “Consent to Incorporation” Thesis: The Pretended “Referendum” in 1972 ................................. 103

Chapter Nine The Bakassi Equation .................................................................... 129

Chapter Ten The Matter of Secession ................................................................ 147

Chapter Eleven Determination not by the “Self ”, but by the “Other” .............. 169

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Chapter Twelve The ‘Independence by Joining’ Hoax ........................................... 191

Chapter Thirteen Was the Southern Cameroons Ever Decolonised? .................... 217

Chapter Fourteen A Historical Injustice Crying Out to be Set Right ..................... 243

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Preface

As ‘saltwater’ or white colonisation in Africa was drawing to an end, sadly a new and dangerous situation of black-on-black colonisation was emerging in parts of the continent. Some states, themselves beneficiaries of the right to self-determination, soon became latter-day colonisers of less fortunate peoples in countries that happened to be their neighbours. Imperial Ethiopia laid claim to Eritrea, Morocco to Mauritania and Western Sahara, Cameroun Republic to the Southern British Cameroons, and apartheid South Africa to South West Africa (Namibia). Other states with expansionist ambitions also made legally indefensible territorial claims and grabbed vast border areas within neighbouring countries: the claim of Somalia to northern Kenya and to the Ogaden region in Ethiopia, of Libya to the Aouzou Strip in Chad, and of both Nigeria and Cameroun Republic to the Bakassi Peninsula in the Southern British Cameroons.The formal basis of these claims has always been a supposed ethnicity and/or historical connection. In truth, however, the primary reason for the claims is economic – a craving for access to critical resources such as minerals, oil, gas, cash crops, water, and the sea. But in international law, all these claims are expansionist and destabilising and have therefore never been accepted by the international community. Today, all but two of these claims have been abandoned. Cameroun Republic has still not ended its annexation of the Southern Cameroons and Morocco has also still not ended its annexation of the Western Sahara. By hopelessly continuing to hold on to their respective colonial pretensions, Cameroun Republic and Morocco have chosen the path of defiance and violent confrontation. While Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara has received extensive international attention, Cameroun Republic’s annexation of the Southern Cameroons hasescaped international notice and therefore concern. Many reasons account for this. First, the United Nations (UN), creator and supervisor of the international trusteeship system, and the United Kingdom (UK), trustee power for the Southern Cameroons for almost half a century, aborted the process of decolonisation they had set in motion, denying the Southern

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Cameroons sovereign statehood. Second, the colonial takeover of the Southern Cameroons was not as flamboyant and dramatic as Morocco’s seizure of the Western Sahara. The takeover proceeded surreptitiously, through political subterfuge and in a creeping way. Third, Cameroun Republic, the new colonial authority in the Southern Cameroons, has over the years put in place strategies aimed at concealing its colonial occupation from the world, aware, as it must be, that colonialism is now perceived like rape and robbery combined and a contemporary form of slavery. The strategies it has deployed are many: the international isolation of the Southern Cameroons so that few people are aware of the problems faced by its people; a policy of impoverishment of the territory and its population so that the people are unable to challenge the coloniser or fight back; a policy of terror towards the population carried out by an occupying army with licence to abduct, imprison, rape, torture, plunder and kill in order to secure submission and maintain the colonial occupation; a of sustained attack on the people’s inherited educational and legal culture, denying them their right to to exist, their right to cultural development and destroying their identity, their specificity and their individuality as a distinct people with a well defined territory attested to by international boundary treaties. Another of Cameroun Republic’s egregious strategies consists in making token and decorative placements of a few citizens of the Southern Cameroons in its colonial administration (a leaf borrowed from French colonial practice). This serves Cameroun Republic strategically by assimilating the people of the Southern Cameroons, English-speaking, in the French world of Cameroun Republic, camouflaging the dependent status of the people of the Southern Cameroons, and pacifying the people of the Southern Cameroons lest they rise and revolt (as they are duty-bound to) against their colonial oppressors. This book is a critical study of the colonial takeover of the territory and people of the Southern Cameroons by Cameroun Republic, highlighting the complicity of the UN and the Trustee Power, the UK Government. The book has twelve chapters. Chapter one gives a brief historical background of the Southern Cameroons from its colonisation by white foreign powers to the inception of

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its colonisation by a black alien state, Cameroun Republic, its eastern neighbour. Chapter 2 considers in the broadest outline the annexation of the Southern Cameroons by the said Cameroun Republic through duplicity, fraud and use of force. Chapters 3 and 4 broach the subject of a ‘‘conspiracy theory’’ at the UN by identifying conduct, statements and acts that form the bases of the reasonable inference of a conspiracy involving the UN and the UK Government to treat the Southern Cameroons and its people as expendable. Chapters 5 to 8 examine and confute the arguments variously advanced by Cameroun Republic in support of its colonial claim to the territories of the Southern Cameroons. Chapter 9 critiques some of the assertions made by Cameroun Republic in theCase Concerning the Land and Maritime Boundar y between Cameroon and Nigeria (Cameroon v. Nigeria: Equatorial Guinea Intervening, 2002), the so-called ‘‘Bakassi case’’. Chapter 10 gives an overview of the subject of secession from the perspectives of both international and municipal law. Chapters 11 and 12 revisit and consider in greater detail the claimed UN decolonisation of the Southern Cameroons. The book ends with a number of general concluding remarks. Overall, it is the contention of this book, based on cogent evidence, that:

(i) the Southern Cameroons is not, has never been, and will never be, part of Cameroun Republic; (ii) Cameroun Republic, by its annexation of the Southern Cameroons and its colonial domination and oppression of its people, is in breach of various legal norms under municipal and international law; (iii) the people of the Southern Cameroons have an inalienable right under international human rights law and the law of nature to rid themselves of their humiliating status of a dependent people, and to establish a sovereign independent state as a guarantee of their right to exist as a people; they alone must take the responsibility for their own liberation and collective salvation; (iv) the anti-colonial struggle in the Southern Cameroons is not a case of secession since it does not impair the territorial integrity of the colonising state of Cameroun

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