Janvier T Chando

A Death in Geneva That Put a Nation in a Coma and Traumatized Africa: The Assassination of Felix-Roland Moumie and Cameroon's Unfinished Liberation Janvier T Chando

When it comes to Cameroon, there seems to be an international conspiracy of silence regarding the destiny of this land variously described as "Africa in Miniature" or "The Microcosm of Africa". It is as if it truly embodies the haunted existence of Africa. When talking about dictators, the media giants apparently fail to mention the world's longest serving non-royal head of state---Paul Biya of Cameroon, as if there is something to hide or as if there is something shameful about the Biya story and the anachronistic system sustained by France and its allies, which includes the mainstream media giants, which they would rather not talk about. While the 1954-1962 Algerian War of Independence against the colonial master France that resulted in more than 300,000 Algerian casualties (including 55,000 to 60,000 civilians), is open to discussion in the academia and media in the West, the 1956-1970 Cameroonian War of Reunification and Independence where more than half a million Cameroonians lost their lives, is barely a footnote in world history. Why? Some pundits ask. Other pundits hold that it is because of a silent acknowledgement of guilt that the perpetrators would rather see buried forever, so that it never resurfaces to expose their underhand in the dismal subjugation of the Cameroonian people. This underhand was cruelest in the 1960 assassination of Félix-Roland Moumié by the French secret agent William Bechtel, a killing that paved the way for the installation of a French-imposed system in Cameroon managed today by French-puppet Paul Biya, thereby making the Cameroon quagmire a Franco-Western as well as a Cameroonian problem.