GENOCIDE IN AMBAZONIA: CAMEROON'S ANATOMY OF KILLINGS
The Killings In southern Cameroons didn't just start in 2022, or 2021, this killings has been recorded since 2018. It's a Tuesday so we could do a little throwback.In July 2018 a horrifying video began to circulate on social media. It shows two women and two young children being led away at gunpoint by a group of Cameroonian soldiers. The captives are blindfolded, forced to the ground, and shot 22 times. Initially when the video began to trend, people thought it in Mali but then it was traced down to LRC. But as usual. The government of Cameroon initially dismissed the video as “fake news.” well we are not surprised.
But BBC Africa Eye, through forensic analysis of the footage, proved exactly where this happened, when it happened, and who is responsible for the killings. As the debate got tougher, and after the Cameroonian govt dismissed the allegations as “Fake News.” They also claimed the guns were not those carried by the Cameroonian military. It didn't end there, They said the camouflage pattern was not used in the Far North. The government also asked why the soldiers were not wearing full combat gear. So when BBC took a closer look at the video…and found clues that prove the government of Cameroon was wrong.
They started by the location. Where did this happen? The first 40 seconds of the video capture a mountain range with a distinctive profile. After a tip off from a Cameroonian source, we found an exact match for that ridge line on Google Earth. It places the scene on a dirt road outside a town called Zelevet, in the Far North of Cameroon, close to the border with Nigeria. This is the region where Cameroonian soldiers are fighting the jihadist group Boko Haram.. Once they had the general location, they llooked at other details in the film – tracks, buildings, trees – and matched them precisely to features visible on satellite imagery. Putting all this evidence together, we can say with certainty that the killings happened here. there in Cameron
The government’s July statement claimed that the guns seen in the video are not those used by Cameroonian troops. But this is a Serbian-made Zastava M21. It’s rare in sub-Saharan Africa, but it *is* used by some divisions of the Cameroonian army. The govt also claimed that Cameroonian soldiers in the Far North wear pale, desert-style fatigues, not the darker, forest-style camouflage seen in the video. We found these images on Facebook – tagged to Zelevet – of soldiers wearing the type of camouflage seen in the video. The govt also asked why the soldiers in the video were not wearing full combat gear – heavy helmets, bulletproof vests, and rangers boots. The answer is that they were not out on patrol. They were just a few hundred metres away from this combat outpost.
In August, there was a sudden change in the govt’s position. After weeks of denying that these killings took place in Cameroon, the Minister of Communication announced that 7 members of the military had been arrested and were under investigation. We have identified three men who actually pulled the trigger. One of them is this man, introduced in the video as “Tchotcho. The BBC also spoke with a former Cameroonian soldier, who asked not to be named. He confirmed that this is ‘Tchotcho’ Cyrique Bityala. At the end of the video, we see him again - blindfolding the litte girl he is about to kill.
A few seconds later, he draws his weapon and opens fire. We put these finding to the government of Cameroon, who said that 7 soldiers have been arrested, disarmed, and imprisoned while under investigation. The two women killed outside Zelevet received no trial at all. No presumption of innocence was extended to the children who died with them.
