Lawmakers from Cameroon claim they have great hopes for the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, which starts on Tuesday in Washington.
The legislators are hoping that the United States will agree to prosecute the more than 200 leaders of the western Cameroon separatist movement who are now residing there.
According to Emmanuel Nsahlai, a human rights attorney of Cameroonian descent, the majority of those who collect money to fund the purchase of weapons for separatist troops in western Cameroon are based in the United States.
According to Nsahlai, “We have filed criminal complaints against close to 200 major Ambazonia separatist activists, all of the Ambazonia Governing Council’s top American leaders, and about a dozen of their non-profit organizations that they established to fund this separatist Ambazonia terrorism and violent crimes.”
Armed factions plan to secede from Cameroon and its predominantly French-speaking population to form an English-speaking state they call Ambazoonia. According to the U.N., the war has caused 750,000 displaced persons and 3,500 fatalities since 2017.
Cameroon’s government has been begging the U.S. and Europe for years to do something about separatists who work outside of Cameroon’s borders.
The separatists say they also want the U.S. Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against those they say formed armed gangs that steal and kidnap people for ransom because of the separatist issue.
On November 28, the US Department of Justice declared that it had detained and accused three Americans of Cameroonian descent of conspiring to give material support to an attempt to kidnap people and use WMDs in Cameroon.
The U.S. military should aid Cameroonian forces in their fight against Boko Haram terrorism on the country’s northern border with Nigeria, lawmakers said on Monday.
In 2016, Cameroon claimed that the United States had sent combat planes and drones that had given the military crucial intelligence against Boko Haram. However, the 100 American soldiers stationed in the northern town of Garoua left Cameroon in March 2019.
Additionally, Cameroon wants stronger commercial ties with the United States.
An economist at the University of Douala in Cameroon, Kaite Edmond, reported that the amount of American goods traded there decreased from $531 million in 2010 to $130 million in 2019. He said that Cameroon was excluded from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, the cornerstone of trade relations between the United States and Africa, as a result of flagrant violations of human rights.
Under AGOA, nearly all of the goods that the sub-Saharan African recipient countries send to the US are tax-free.
Kaite told Cameroon at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit this week that it should talk about getting back into AGOA to help its economy, which has been hurt by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Cameroon is having trouble with its economy this year because it depends too much on wheat and fuel imports from Russia and Ukraine.
At the three-day conference, there are delegations from almost 40 nations. A delegation from Cameroon is attending, and it is led by its 89-year-old president, Paul Biya. Biya is leaving the country for the first time since he traveled to Europe in May, maybe for a medical examination.
