Dibussi Tande
Far from the glare of the international community which was distracted at the time by the liberation war in Algeria, literarily given a free pass by Western governments obsessed with the “Red Menace” on Africa; and egged on by a Western media which saw terrorism in every UPC declaration and action (sounds familiar??), France unleashed a bloody reign of terror in the French Cameroons from 1956 to 1964 which many have not hesitated to label genocide.
Between 1956 and 1964, the French army led by “Frenchmen with European and Indo-China honours” (The Daily Gleaner, Monday, July 31, 1961), sought to “pacify” rebellious UPC strongholds (first the Sanaga Maritime region in the South, then the Mungo and Bamileke regions in the West). According to The Daily Gleaner, the French used “tough some say brutal methods” to deal with the UPC rebellion. Today, available evidence shows that these methods were so brutal that they amounted to war crimes in many cases.
November 11, 1957 - Three Die In Red Led Cameroons Rioting
PARIS: Three persons have been killed and five injured in Communist led political rioting in the FRENCH West African CAMEROONS Trusteeship. Reports reaching here today said the rioters were agitating for full political indepedence for the CAMEROONS .The FRENCH army is deadlocked with a small rebel guerrilla force- supported in varying degree by most of non-European population. France has been unable to put down the rebellion... - The Fresno Bee Republican, Monday.
The Pacification of the Sanaga Maritime
December 2, 1957: Premier André-Marie M'bida finds himself confronted with a reign of terror spearheaded by 5,000 hard-core Communist guerrillas... the terrorists burst out of the jungles, burn grass huts, shanghai thousands of natives into the forest, murder those who will not go. Their demands are for immediate independence (France has promised only "eventual" independence)... TIME Magazine.
Following the continued inability of the colonial forces to crush the UPC rebellion, Prime Minister Andre Marie Mbida, on December 9, appealed for French troop reinforcements to “reestablish order” in the region. On that same day the zone de pacification de Sanaga maritime (ZOPAC), or the Sanaga Maritime Pacification Zone, was established with headquarters in Eséka. Military operations in the ZOPAC were placed under the control of Lieutenant-colonel Lamberton, a veteran of Indochina, who was once in charge of the 2nd bureau of French land forces in the Far East.
France Denies Cameroons Move
PARIS, Jan. 6, 1958 (INS) -- The French Defense Ministry branded as "completely grotesque" today published reports that fresh troops were being rushed to the Cameroons to keep the situation from developing into "another Algeria."The report was so ridiculous, the Ministry said, Jacques Chaban-Delams, Defense Minister assigned to the West African Equatorial territory, would not even deign to comment further.
The Ministery said Chaban-Delmas a month ago ordered 200 infantrymen to the Cameroons from neighboring regions at the request of Cameroons Premier Andre-Marie M'bida.
This was done, the Ministry said, mainly because of the weakness of the forces stationed in the Cameroons totaling 1200 men for the 3,500,000 population.
The Washington Post. Jan 7, 1958, Page A6
According to Anthony Clayton (Frontiersmen: Warfare In Africa Since 1950 (Warfare and History), p. 35,
« The French deployed local Tirailleurs Senegalais detachments and a reinforced gendarmerie garde camerounaise; the campaign's most spectacular event was a parachute drop by two companies of Coloniale parachute infantry on Eseka airport, an operation necessary to secure communications between Douala and Yaounde. »
In his book on French Military History since 1940, Andre Martel writes that during the Indochina campaign French soldiers “challenged the guerilla with counter-guerilla tactics; terrorism with anti-terrorrism; vicious blows with low blows”. In Cameroon, these veterans from Indochina used these same methods with very bloody results.
From the beginning, the goal of the French-led forces was to isolate the UPC paramilitary by creating a buffer between them and the local population, terrorizing the population into severing all contacts with the UPC, and putting a high physical and psychological price for collaborating with the rebels.
According to Time Magazine of Monday, Jul. 27, 1959, “entire villages were moved down to roadside locations surrounded by stockades, French and Cameroonian patrols flushed guerrillas from the emptied hills.” In an issue published some two years earlier [Dec. 2, 1957], Time Magazine had explained that “By regrouping huts near roads, where they can be guarded, [Premier Mbida] hopes to maintain order, proceed with the slow evolution toward real and responsible independence.”
In the stockaded villages a list of occupants of each house was posted on the door, and impromptu roll calls were made usually at night. Individuals who were unaccounted for were considered to have joined the rebels and their families or villages punished accordingly. Similarly, any individual who happened to be in the wrong house was considered a rebel infiltrator and treated as such.
The reign of terror in the Sanaga Maritime lasted for 11 months. On September 3, 1958, Ruben Um Nyobe, the UPC leader was ambushed and killed close to his village of Boumnyebel. Within weeks, the core of the Bassa leadership of the UPC led by Theodore Mayi Matip (who mysteriously survived the ambush on Um Nyobe) came out of the maquis to rally the Ahidjo regime.
On October 19, 1958, barely five weeks after the death of Um Nyobe, Xavier Torre, the new High Commissioner announced that France was ready to grant independence to the French Cameroons on January 1, 1960. This announcement did not however pacify the UPC leadership in exile. As Moumie later explained,
"[The UPC] will never follow a man who has done nothing for his people [i.e., Ahidjo], and who is divorcing their future from that of the rest of Africa by tying them to France. We have been left with no alternative but revolt because our repeated warnings to France and to the U.N. itself have fallen upon deaf ears.
Oakland Tribune, Wednesday, August 05, 1959.
With the Sanaga Maritime effectively pacified, the UPC switched its operations to the Mungo and Bamileke regions in the West of the country.
Aug 31, 1959 - New Violence Kills Five in Cameroons
YAOUNDE, French Cameroons - Five persons have been killed and many huts burned during armed attacks in the Mungo and Bamileke provinces of the French Cameroons since Wednesday night, officials announced today -The Washington Post.
Click here to read a sanitized version French military operations in the Sanaga Maritime between 1957 and 1959 published in La Tribune du CID, the journal of the French Military Academy (Collège Interarmées de Défense).
The Insurgency Begins in the Mungo and Bamileke Regions
1959 was a particularly bloody year as Cameroon headed toward independence as the infernal cycle of violence continued unabatted.
Time Magazine Monday, Jul. 27, 1959 - Violence, once sporadic, has now become frequent. In the port of Douala, biggest city in the Cameroons, terrorists recently attacked a police outpost and a movie theater. With pangas, they stabbed an Air France pilot to death in a bar, butchered a stranded European motorist with machetes on a lonely road, burned three planes on a banana plantation airstrip. In the capital city of Yaoundé, an armed band swooped down on La Renaissance Bar, murdered the French proprietor and his sister. In eight days 14 people died, seven of them Frenchmen.
Each UPC action was followed by severe punitive expedition by the French and their Cameroonian surrogates, which was in turn followed by even more audacious UPC retaliation. As usual, the Western media decried the barbaric action of the terrorists while sanitizing the actions the colonial forces.
Sep 17, 1959 - Some 5000 Quizzed In Killing
DOUALA, French Cameroons, Sept. 16--French Cameroons police have questioned nearly 5000 persons and detained 400 temporarily for identity checks after incidents on Monday night in which nine persons were killed and 10 wounded. The Washington Post of 9. Sep 17, 1959. Page: B4
By the mid 1959, it became common place to publicly execute arrested UPC militants to send home the message that rebellion would not be tolerated – a tradition that continued until 1971.the public.
July 11, 1959 - Five Executed in the French Cameroons
Five alleged terrorists Friday were executed in public in the market place of Bafoussam. It marked the first time the death sentence had been carried out in the French Cameroons. The Lethbridge Herald, Saturday, July 11, 1959.
The cycle of violence (or the « terrorist campaign » to quote the Western press, did not abate as January 1, 1960 drew near :
November 17, 1959 -Sword-Waving Night Raiders Spread Terror
DUALA, Cameroons authorities braced Sunday for a feared new bloodbath by cutlass- wielding night raiders who have killed 90 people since September in this French-mandated African state scheduled for independence on New Year's Day. Intelligence reports received by the French said the raiders, all backers of exiled politician Dr. Felix MOUMIE, were planning to step up their terrorist campaign as part of a program to force a general election under United Nations supervision before independence day. Duala, the seaport, lives in constant fear of fresh knifings and shootings. Four of the dead thus far have been Europeans - Nevada State Journal.
Next: "Genocide": The French Expeditionary Force arrives...
In 2006 France remains the only "ex-colonial power" to maintain expeditionary forces in Africa. What they did in Cameroun was carried out in Rwanda in 1994, and repeated in Congo-Brazzaville in 1998 barely four years after the French genocide in Rwanda. France, with no small help from Uncle Tom Koffi Annan, sucessfully concealed the atrocities in Congo-Brazza where the re-installation of their puppet-tyrant, Dennis Sassou Nguesso, came at the cost of 250,000 Congolese lives. Chirac went as far as instructing the head of one French news organisation to halt the departure of its journalist on the tarmac of the airport as there were about embark and report on Congo-Brazza.
Evil France, as we speak is recidivating in Cote d'Ivoire!
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The article below speaks for itself.
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The French Tell Lies in Broad Day Light
By Stephen Buckingham, The New Times (Kigali) 27/11/06
Nov 29, 2006, 09:08
Our old friend, the very old and very deluded French judge, who seems to have made it his life's work to 'Get Kagame' - like a Stallone Hollywood movie - has voiced his fantasy allegations again - strangely enough just after the conclusion of a Rwandan investigation into the participation of French troops in the Genocide.
This is what I know, from corroborated findings, well documented and undisputed.
1: As Habyarimana's executive Falcon 50 jet - a present from President Francois Mitterrand, of France - approached Kanombe at just before 8:20 p.m.. on 6th April 1994; all the lights at the airport went out.
2: At 8:23 two missiles were launched at the approaching plane and the second blew the plane apart. And the airport lights came on again.
3: The missiles were fired from Masaka Hill, an area patrolled by the Presidential Guard, not the PPF.
4: White men were seen jumping into a jeep and leaving the area at great speed immediately after the missile fire.
Let me comment on these points:
At that particular time, every one was tense and expecting something to happen, like a boil about to burst. Even those of us living in Kenya could sense that things were coming to a head. The events of the first week of April 1994 were no surprise. They should have been no surprise to the world, as Lt. Gen. Dallaire had been reporting to the UN for weeks that something was brewing. His communications are on record.
I have lived on the Kanombe side of Kigali for nine years and even when the whole area has been in blackout, I have never seen the airport go dark. How do we get such precise timings of the events if someone were not expecting something to happen?
I have many friends who definitely heard two explosions, on that night and at that exact time.
The point of missile firing is calculated by the position and spread of the plane wreckage. Ironically since most of the debris fell within the compound of the presidential palace, the missiles, or the missile which hit, must have come from the Masaka Hill area.
Being a muzungu, I am amazed at how I can be seen in the dark. If eye witnesses say they saw muzungus leaving Masaka Hill in haste on that night -
8:20 plus, totally dark - then I believe them.
A French judge in his dementia, relying on hearsay and spurious testimony, openly declares that Paul Kagame shot down the plane. He falls just short of saying that Kagame actually launched the rockets himself, but he implies it..
The whole issue of who shot down the plane is long over and done with. The fact that it is now being raised again is an international smoke-screen to vindicate the French role in the Genocide. They merely advised the Rwandan Government troops, it is said. I know otherwise. Operation Turquoise provided a safe haven for innocent civilians fleeing the latter days of the Genocide. I know otherwise.
First let me comment on Operation Turquoise: Several friends of mine in the RPF at the time said that both in the early days of conflict and in the days of Operation Turquoise when they raised their guns to sight the targets, they saw without shadow of doubt French troops opposed to them. That's no mistake; after all how many Rwandese troops are white and wear French army insignia on their uniforms?
I have also many civilian friends - survivors - and one very close friend in particular, who witnessed French soldiers assisting Interharamwe at checkpoints here in Kigali. At one particular checkpoint at a place where the road divides in Nyramirambo, this friend witnessed French soldiers beating people indiscriminately, heavily, almost to the point of death and then handing them over to the Interharamwe to do what ever they decided.
The reputation of the French military 'advisors' was lower that that of a snake. It must be added that the Belgian troops here were also thought of in much the same vein. They were seen as marauding mercenaries, enjoying violent bullying, demanding the best accommodation, food and women that Kigali could offer. It could well go some way to explain the violent deaths of the Belgian UN Peacekeepers. It's not unusual. Look at the behaviour of the American and British troops in Iraq today. I'm sure many Iraqis would like to get their hands on the soldiers who have beaten and abused them.
Things did not end with the RPF take over. I visited the Meridian Hotel, as it was, as late as August 1995. It was no more than a floor to ceiling brothel for the UN staff here. Let us not pretend that it was anything else, or that the practical on the ground assistance from the UN helped the ordinary Rwandan in any beneficial way whatsoever.
So let's have an end to this nonsensical 'blame shifting' twelve years after the Genocide. Rwanda is trying to work out her own policy to deal with the past. Most of that policy is trying to put the past behind us - without forgetting it - and moving on to a new united Rwanda. What business does a mad French judge have in fabricating lies about his own country's involvement in this tiny nation, thousands of kilometers from Paris and a million miles away from the Hollywood intrigue he would like to create?
I have not even mentioned Paul Rusesabagina - star of Hotel Rwanda - who has obviously made so much money and gained such a heroic status from the movie that he thinks he can come back here and take over as president. Who are you, sir? You do not even warrant a mention in most of the accepted books about the Genocide. I have read. Did you suddenly become a notable character after the movie? President Bush proclaimed you to be a hero, but who told him about you? His advisors have been none too reliable on other matters.
If the people who finally rescued you from Rwanda were so evil, why has it taken you twelve years to come up with the accusations? Everything was fine and dandy when you were in the Hollywood limelight. Now the spotlight is on someone else.
So what do we believe in this new era of information? We are daily bombarded by a thousand and one stories, and each day the story changes. What was the truth yesterday, is a lie today. How can we tell one from the other? In most cases it is simple common sense. Currently there are so many fairy tales about Rwanda floating about. My simple answer is, "Come and see for yourself, and then make a judgment. Don't sit in an office in Paris or New York and judge the world on a phone call. Look into the eyes of your informers and decide which is true and which is lies."
One major problem in gathering the truth from survivors is that they are still in fear of reprisals and despite the good work of Gacaca, there are still cases of retribution which draw a veil of silence over the past. There are others who seek their own absolution by raising false allegations against others. This is a big problem, but it is an internal problem which mad French judges have nothing to do with. It is something Rwandans must come to terms with themselves.
The factual information for this article was drawn from close friends, survivors and the following books:
Shake Hands with the Devil: Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire.
A People Betrayed: L. R. Melvern
The Rwanda Crisis: Gérard Prunier.
Source: Ocnus.net 2006
Posted by: SJ | November 29, 2006 at 10:41 AM