POLITICS-CENTRAL AFRICA: Three Countries, One Common Problem

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Sylvestre Tetchiada

YAOUNDE, Aug 27 2006 (IPS) - The banditry activities along the Cameroon, Chad and the Central African Republic borders are worsening and claiming innocent lives.

Jean Paul Manga, a lecturer at Cameroon’s University of Yaounde I, told IPS: “The insecurity is a result of banditry activities by former rebel groups, attacks by highway robbers and reprisals by armed forces.”

A Cameroonian police officer, who requested anonymity, told IPS that they have identified several different types of crimes being committed along the three borders.

They include trafficking in firearms, vehicles and human organs, highway robbery, theft and incursions by armed gangs into the interiors of the three countries.

Despite measures taken by each country to secure its border, the crime continues, the officer said.

To combat the banditry, the Central African Republic (CAR), Cameroon and Chad formed a ‘Tripartite Initiative’ in December 2005, authorising each of the countries’ regular armies to pursue armed bands threatening security.

“But to date, no national army has initiated large-scale, trans-border action to fight the armed thugs sowing terror along our common borders,” said Paul Zemdjio, the coordinator of Equal Opportunity for All, a non-governmental organisation based in Yaounde, Cameroon’s capital.

“At the end of December 2005, Cameroon and the CAR created a separate joint commission to resolve the security problems along their common borders. But what has it amounted to?” he wondered.

“The results have been ineffective because violence and extortions have increased since then,” added Marthe Belinga, a Yaounde attorney. She denounced the “formation of a previously unknown armed group that claimed to have carried out raids in two villages in northeast Cameroon” two weeks ago.

The highway robbers, often former combatants from CAR or Chad, have been committing murder and rape along the three borders.

Police sources in Cameroon say some of the robbers are former CAR rebels who helped the current president, Francois Bozize, overthrow Ange-Felix Patasse in a military coup in 2003.

The CAR army launched an operation in the border town of Bouar on July 14, 2005, killing 36 roadside robbers who had been terrorizing the area near Cameroon for several months. During the operation, the army also freed 20 Cameroonian children who were held hostage by the thugs, the police said.

Cameroon’s army also shot dead three highway robbers and captured five others on July 28, 2006 after the bandits attacked Mbaiboum, a town near where the three borders meet.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Yaounde told IPS that about 20,000 people fled their villages in northeast Cameroon, northern CAR, and southwestern Chad between April 2005 and July 2006 after attacks by highway robbers and other armed groups.

The police said it recorded 15 deaths and “numerous” hostages taken by highway robbers operating on both sides of the three borders between 2005 and 2006.

Manga said the prevailing insecurity caused many villagers to leave and take refuge in the fields, forests and cities.

“I arrived in Yaounde at the end of June 2006 after fleeing the chaos in Djohong (600 kilometers northeast of Yaounde),” Michelle Amama, 31, told IPS.

“The criminals arrived in our village with guns, raped women and girls and extorted money. Then they left with the children and some of the women,” she stated grimly, holding back tears. ”I fled into the forest and several weeks later ended up in Betare-Oya (in eastern Cameroon). From there, I made it to Yaounde.”

The criminals Amama refers to are either former Chadian or CAR soldiers who took to the bush with their arms after a lull in fighting between the two countries, a French diplomat in Yaounde, who requested that his name not be revealed, told IPS.

“The CAR was affected several months ago (April-May 2006) by flaring tensions between Chad and Sudan, who accused each other of supporting rebels hostile to each others’ regimes,” Marie-Angele Nguebou, Yaounde’s police commissioner, told IPS.

“So here’s a situation of mistrust and mutual suspicion which has led to the proliferation of armed gangs and firearms in the sub-region that the national armies are unable to effectively control due to a lack of manpower and logistics,” she said.

According to military sources in Yaounde, the armed forces can effectively fight insecurity. But they lack communication equipment, appropriate vehicles and satellite surveillance gadgets to locate the gangs’ movements in the bush.

But some analysts are also concerned about the ability of the three countries to contain the banditry.