Language barrier: Cameroon’s forgotten conflict

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In the Fergana Valley of Central Asia lies Soh, a little pocket of Uzbekistan's territory that lies entirely within Kyrgyzstan. The valley is a tangle of such exclaves and clashes at the many border crossings are increasing. And a word of caution if you're planning to drive. In Estonia, the country's innovation minded authorities are running a trial in which speeding is punished not with a fine, but with a long roadside timeout. First up, though not so long ago Cameroon was a stable country in a fragile region. Today it's anything but. For the past three years, a bloody conflict has been raging. Separatist militias want independence for the English speaking areas of the mainly francophone country. The government's trigger happy forces are burning down villages while the militias are becoming increasingly viol. Thousands have died in the unrest. More than half a million have been forced from their homes.

I spent a week traveling in the Anglophone regions where the effects of the war are clear for everyone to see.

John McDermott is our Africa correspondent.

In village after village that I drove through, I saw fields that had grown wild, houses that had been burned down and several buildings that had just been pockmarked with bullets. You know, the conflict was inescapable. The origins of the conflict go back at least a century. After the First World War, the former German colony of Cameroon was split up between Britain and France. And then when those parts became independent in 1960 and 1961, they were spliced together to make modern day Cameroon. And now the country is officially bilingual, with roughly 20% of people speaking English and 80% of people speaking French. But the English speakers claim decades of marginalization by the central government. And year upon year, they've been promised more devolution to their regions. But those promises have been repeatedly broken.

And so why did those tensions start to increase three years ago?

Well, those tensions had been bubbling for some time, but towards the tail end of 2016, lawyers and teachers hit the streets, protesting against the imposition of francophone systems. And in response to those peaceful protests, the government hit back hard. In turn, a year later, some of the more extreme Anglophones, who are separatists, that is, they want independence. They proclaimed the independent state of Amazonia, which is named after the Ambas Bey in the southwest of the country. And once more, this led to another escalation, this time violent. International NGOs think there's been at least 3,000 people killed and perhaps several times more than that.

And so who's responsible for that violence then? Is it security forces? Is it the separatists themselves?

So neither side are covering themselves in glory. Both separatist militias and security forces have committed atrocities. But there's also no doubt that the Cameroonian military is behind most of the bloodshed. A local NGO in Boya, the main city in the southwest region, estimates that more than 220 villages across the Anglophone region have been burned by the Cameroonian military.

And you met some of the people who have been affected by that violence?

Yes, I met lots of people who had been affected. One man I met was called Ayuk, who had to flee his village of Ikona because of just a torrent of shootings and burnings by the military. He said that he could recall literally hundreds of incidents where soldiers had fired at his fellow villagers.

The devastating story is that when the military come, they would destroy houses, remove people from the houses and shoot them. So it was frightful, it was dangerous.

And, you know, when you're hearing these stories, you kind of stop and say, why? You know, why are they doing this? And, you know, for him, it just seemed like there was no questions being asked by the soldiers. They were just firing at will.

So we had to.

And why do you think they shot your neighbor and these two other people.

I really cannot tell you. I really cannot tell you because that's just the system. They meet people on the way and shoot them. I don't know their reason.

And you say that the army is responsible for most of the violence, but not all. I mean, what are the separatists doing?

So the separatists have mostly been attacking military and the military installations, but they've also been attacking people on their own side who are deemed to be collaborators with the state. One woman I met, Adeline, worked for a state run company called the Cameroon Development Corporation, which runs a series of plantations in the region. And she described how one day she was accosted by about 20 of these militiamen who attacked her, tied her to a tree, stuffed leaves in her mouth.

After that they slipped us down again, whipped us with collapse our back, whipped.

Her, and then chopped off a finger.

We'll be in hospital two months.

Again you ask, why are they doing this? And her crime, little as it might seem to us, was to work for this state run company. And thus she was deemed a collaborator. If you have anything to do with the francophone central government, you are deemed to be on their side.

I mean, that must have knock on effects for the way the country runs, for the economy, for society.

The economy is collapsing. The Anglophone regions contribute about a fifth of the country's gdp. And the main company is that plantation cdc. And since the attacks began a couple of years ago, workers essentially stopped. Revenue is down 90%. They haven't sold a single banana. When I went down to the headquarters in a town called Limbe, the general manager and all his staff just seemed completely forlorn, not least because they had also been receiving lots of death threats from the separatists. So I said, you know, how are you dealing with this? And he paused and he sighed and he looked at me and he just.

Said, I pray more, I go out less.

I pray more, I go out less.

And so in essence, people are simply afraid to go about business as usual.

Yes, there's widespread terror amongst the population, and it's especially acute amongst parents. Almost 90% of children in the Anglophone regions have not gone to school for three years. This is partly because of forced displacements by the military, but it's also because the separatists see schools as arms of the state. Now there are some incredibly brave educators who have set up ad hoc classrooms in buildings for these displaced children. But again, it's not entirely safe. I asked one of the teachers at the school I visited in Boyar. How do you ensure the security of these children? And frankly, she admitted, you can never be 100% safe.

We are in a war. In fact, we always say we are in a war.

In fact, she said that there were often threats of kidnapping, which has become increasingly common as the separatists either seek to impose their will or frankly, sometimes just seek to get extra money out of the population.

So what about the people who aren't directly involved in the conflict in the Anglophone region? How do they view the constant cycle of violence?

It's hard to do polling in a war zone, but when the violence began, it seemed like there was a surge in support for the separatists who were viewed as helping keeping locals safe. But as time has gone on and you find things like the sabotage of education, opinion may be slightly shifting against them. I interviewed a professor at the University of Boyar, a guy called Ernest Malua.

The pain they have inflicted on the community has changed attitudes.

And he said that loyalty to the separatists is indeed dwindling.

They no longer call him our boys, they now call him those boys.

He also told me that what most Anglophones want isn't necessarily independence. They want more autonomy. Perhaps they want a federal Cameroon.

It is not as if Cameroonians want to separate. It's not as if it is Anglophone versus francophone.

But he was very keen to stress that the Anglophones have grievances, but they're with the central government, not their French speaking compatriots.

Do you think a kind of reduced appetite amongst the Anglophones for this conflict will have any effect on it? I mean, how do you see the situation playing out?

At the moment we're in a bit of a stalemate because the separatist militias can't take the towns and the Cameroon army can't take the bush. Now, that normally calls for a political solution. But Cameroon, governed as it is by President Paul Beer, who has been on the proverbial throne for 37 years, is prone to move slowly. In September, he announced a national dialogue, but it was a total sham. Some of the key people weren't invited and it wasn't really even about the anglophone crisis. So what you have then is this political process that's going far too slowly. Also because the rest of the world doesn't take much notice. It's an underfunded, under reported crisis and the bulk of people are just stuck in the middle of these two warring sides. Many people just want to get on with their lives in peace. And sadly, that's only possible in a few safe places, such as the very centre of Boya. One evening as I was there in the center, I was waiting for the bishop of the town and I caught one of those few glimpses of normality. Through the open windows of the church, I watched a choir, including many members who had actually fled their homes from other parts of the region, and they were practicing their songs. And for me, it was just a little reminder that in the midst of all this violence and chaos, there is an everyday urge to just keep on living, one that can accomplish occasionally manifest itself in rather beautiful ways.

John, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Nestled between two mountain ranges in the heart of Central Asia, the the Fergana Valley is the region's most populous area. In ancient times, the Silk Road wound through its rugged landscape. Now fed by two rivers, it's rich agricultural land. The valley is proud of its traditions, including ceramics and embroidery. This year, the city of Osh held celebrations as it was made the 2019 Turkic capital of culture. But all is not well there. The valley is carved up between three countries, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with jagged borders that cut ethnic groups and nationalities off from one another. And that can make life complicated.

So I visited a bus station in the city of Fergana. That's in a part of Uzbekistan called the Fergana Valley.

Joanna Lillis reports on Central Asia for the Economist.

I was seeking out people who were looking to go to a place called Soch. Sokh is also part of Uzbekistan. It's Uzbek territory, but it's actually an exclave. That means it's an island of Uzbekistan surrounded by another country, a sea of Kyrgyzstan. And that's because the Fergana Valley is crisscrossed by all kinds of borders. There are nine such exclaves in the Fergana Valley. So traveling around is pretty complicated.

And so what did the people there.

Tell you, the ones who were heading to Soc?

They told me that the journey was longer than it should be, and that's because of border bottlenecks. Now we're talking here about both closed borders and the difficulty of crossing borders in this part of Central Asia. The people that I spoke to, they were boarding a bus, a very decrepit orange bus, actually, that required a push from a few men in the bus station when it actually did set off. But the people were boarding the bus. They told me that the journey was going to take them about three, that it should be a lot quicker. As one man told me, you know, we haven't actually Been able to travel freely for a very long time.

Well, why is that? How did these borders get to be so. So complicated, so nonsensical?

Well, we have to remember that the borders that now stand today as international borders in the Fergana Valley were once upon a time, and indeed not so very long ago, they were not international borders at all. They were internal boundaries within the Soviet Union, the communist USSR that ruled Central Asia from MoSC. And these borders were drawn up in the early days of the Soviet Union, basically in the 1920s, when they were working out how to create and govern the Soviet Union. So in Central Asia, the borders were drawn up then, and they broadly stand today as they were drawn up then.

But why were they drawn in a.

Way that's led to so much confusion now?

What mattered at the time was not so much whether land lay on one side of the border or another. What mattered was meeting certain criteria. For example, each republic had to have a million people. So sometimes cities that maybe logically should have gone into one republic were simply placed into another republic. And also there was the question not only of what Moscow wanted and how it wanted to govern that area, but of what local power brokers wanted and how they wanted to keep certain areas into their fiefdoms and make them as large as possible. So it was extremely convoluted. The fact is that the borders weren't an enormous problem under the Soviet Union because they were merely internal administrative boundaries for bureaucrats. They were important in terms of how the region was governed, but for ordinary people, they basically barely existed.

And so for the people that you saw taking the bus to Soch, what are the border crossings like now?

There are many, many border bottlenecks, and sometimes the crossings can be very slow, very bureaucratic, and on occasion, also corrupt. I spoke to an Uzbek lorry driver at a crossing called Vadil, which was the crossing that the people who were boarding that bus in for Ghana to travel of Soc would be using. And he told me he was waiting for a call to go over to Kyrgyzstan to pick up a load of potatoes. And he told me that he would have to pay the Kyrgyz border guards some money to be allowed to cross. So we see those kind of problems, but also what we see is many closed borders that people can't actually cross at all. And this is one of the reasons why people are taking these large detours to go between the places that they live and the places that they need to get to. Some of the borders simply, simply don't function. They're simply closed. I visited a border in the town of Rishton the day that I visited, and even now, that border just ends in a big tangle of barbed wire and a few Uzbek border guards patrolling that closed border. Now, this was particularly poignant because when I visited in early September, that border had recently been opened. It was opened with a big party, but the very next day, that border was slammed shut once again. And this was very symptomatic of the border bottlenecks that sort of creates such inconvenience for them in their daily lives.

It sounds as if there isn't a.

Whole lot of will for things to change.

Do you think the situation will just continue?

We're seeing a time when things are changing greatly in the Central Asian region, and that goes for border cooperation, as many other things. And the game changer that we have seen here has been a change of leadership in Uzbekistan, which was once the biggest spoiler of border cooperation and regional relations with other Central Asian neighbors. And nowadays, since the change of leadership in Uzbekistan, it's actually become one of the biggest drivers of regional integration. So things are changing.

Thank you very much for your time, Joanna.

You're welcome.

In Estonia, police are taking the phrase time is money quite literally these days, especially for drivers who are a bit too keen to shave time off their journeys.

Drivers between Tallinn, which is the capital of Estonia, and Rapla, which is a town in the center, were being stopped if they were caught speeding.

Rachel Dobbs writes about Estonia for the Economist and has recently been reporting from the side of a road.

The police then told them that they could either pay a fine or take a timeout, which meant that they had to wait on the side of the road for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how fast they had been going over the speed limit.

So why is having a timeout an option?

This is an experiment that the government and the police are doing to see how drivers respond to different disincentives to speeding. So it's traditionally been a fine in Estonia, as in most other countries, but they started wondering whether lost time might be a stronger deterrent for drivers than lost money.

So where did this idea come from.

This question of which is the greater deterrent, time or money?

So when the team were starting to think about how to reduce speeding, they were kicking various ideas around, and someone suggested, almost as a joke, that that maybe they should just put people in a timeout or that making them wait would be a punishment that fitted the crime, as they are speeding in the first place. And initially this was sort of scribbled down on a post it and then left. But as they got further and further into the project, they kept coming back to this idea. One of the main factors was that they were conducting interviews with drivers who had been convicted of speeding offences. And those drivers frequently told them that. That the time that they had to spend talking to the police when they pulled over for a ticket, that whole period, they found more annoying than the actual cost of the ticket itself. This is partly because in Estonia, if you are caught speeding by a camera rather than a policeman, that offence is not kept on a record and there is no cumulative effect, which means that you do not risk having your license taken away from you, even if you're caught speeding by a camera 20 times in a year.

And, I mean, how's it working out? How are people taking to this as an option?

So it's important to remember that this was only an experiment. The team behind it just wanted to see how people would react to time instead of money. But the public response to it has been very big and very interesting and very positive. One of the reasons that it seems to be garnering so much support is that people think that the idea of a time penalty is more egalitarian than monetary fines. Because in Estonia, monetary fines are not adjusted according to income, whereas they are in Finland, for example, which means that there are some people for who the punishment for speeding is proportionally less important. If they have lots of money, they don't really mind having to pay a €50 fine or whatever it is, but everyone has the same number of hours in the day. They also like the fact that the punishment is directly related to the offence. I think people think it's quite quirky and quite fun.

And do you think it's working as a deterrent?

Well, something that was interesting was that an awful lot of people took the time penalty rather than the monetary fine. But what was interesting about that was that the people doing that, they did so when their wages per hour were less than the amount of the fine that they would have been charged, whereas if they earned lots of money, they would normally take the fine rather than the time out. Which suggests that the balance between these things, if this is going to be an option that is rolled out, will have to be calibrated quite carefully.

Well, I suppose that you only get those egalitarian effects when it stops being an option just to pony up the money, I suppose. I mean, do you see this sort of being expanded more widely and having the fine option just closed down altogether?

Not at this stage. The experiment in its current iteration is not particularly scalable because of the manpower that it demands. The police have to be there monitoring people by the side of the road, telling them what's going on. As it is, this will remain an experiment, and more than anything, it's just a way of trying to reframe how the government and the police force think about speeding and think about how best to punish drivers. Full speeding.

Rachel, thank you very much for joining us.

And drive safe out there.

Thanks.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds.

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