Cameroon – Anglophone crisis: The position of the United States

 

According to a Washington Post article, the United States is a key player in the serious English-speaking crisis that continues and disrupts the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon.

“They seem to prefer the status quo,” the newspaper reported, informing that the US State
Department’s response to the crisis was to appeal to restraint and dialogue.

Such a response, says the major US daily, reflects the US foreign policy dilemma of balancing the interests of national security with the promotion of democracy.

On June 26, 2017, two angry US MPs addressed a letter to US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressly asking him to “take appropriate action” against the government of Paul Biya.

These two American parliamentarians Anthony G. Brown and Jamie Raskin are exasperated by “the tactics of intimidation used by the Yaounde power against the anglophone minority” and consider “unacceptable any form of violence directed against the populations of the regions of the North-West and South-West of Cameroon “.

 

Cameroon – USA Relation

Cameroon has enjoyed the status of an American security partner since 2002, when the country obtained a provisional seat on the UN Security Council.

According to Yonatan L. Morse, assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, “the United States had strongly urged Cameroon to abstain from any vote of war resolution. Paul Biya was the personal guest of the White House on the eve of the war in Iraq. Since the rise of Boko Haram in the region, the US has increased military aid in Cameroon.

At present, 300 American soldiers and an American drone base are based in northern Cameroon, near Nigeria. “It is hard to say that we have moved the ball considerably on the things that matter most to us, such as the strengthening of democracy,” US Ambassador to the Cameroon Janet Garvey wrote in 2009. For him, this attitude does not seem likely to change under the current administration of Donald Trump.

K'mer SAGA