The French president, Emmanuel Macron, officially acknowledged that France had led “a war” in Cameroon against insurrectional movements before and after the independence of 1960, marked by “repressive violence”, in a letter to its Cameroonian counterpart, Paul Biya, was made public on Tuesday. This term was previously banished from the official French discourse.
Emmanuel Macron thus supports the conclusions of a report by historians who had been delivered to him in January and “clearly stressed that a war had taken place in Cameroon, during which the colonial authorities and the French army exercised repressive violence of a multiple nature,” and added that “the war continued beyond 1960 with the support of France to the actions carried out by the independent Cameroonian authorities.”
“On the Cameroonian side, the memoirs are marked in RAW”
In July 2022, the French president asked historians to “shed light” about the action of France in Cameroon during colonization and after the independence of the country, obtained in 1960.
Based on files, testimonies and discouraged field surveys, the report of more than 1,000 pages aims to fill the “commemorative vacuum”, despite some recognized works, in this blood.
“On the French side, Cameroon’s war is an incognite terra of memories in the colonial past … On the Cameroonian side, the memoirs are marked in Vive,” the report said.
Divided into four chronological parts, work studies in particular the change of repression towards a true “war.” According to historians, taking place in the south and west of the country between 1956 and 1961, it certainly made “tens of thousands of victims,” according to historians. The latter estimated in January that “this violence was very extreme because they transgressed human rights and the law of war.”
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Source: BFM TV
