Ekona’s thousands of residents have fled fighting between the army and separatist militias in the Southwest region in recent weeks.
They left behind the only testimony they could: squat, tin-roofed houses gutted by fire, power lines strewn on overgrown verges and, above all, silence.
A unit of Cameroon’s special forces edged up the winding main road of what used to be a functioning village, past the rusted shell of a burnt-out lorry loaded with smashed beer bottles, past an abandoned church and a shuttered bar.
“It is weird. There used to be shops here, it used to be normal,’’ said Captain Guy Herve Onambele, surveying the wreckage from his jeep protected by military trucks full of soldiers.
“The separatists used to come here and hide. A lot of people from the area joined the secessionists’’.
Army officials generally play down the impact that a year-old armed secessionist insurgency has had in the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions and say that an offensive this year has pushed back the threat.
Yet on Thursday, soldiers from Cameroon’s Rapid Intervention Brigade (BIR), sporting full combat gear, vigilantly scanned Ekona’s roadsides for threats, their automatic rifles raised. (Reuters/NAN)
