By Oduche Azih
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has suddenly indicated interest in the goings on in Anglophone Southern Cameroon. I read a report to that effect in The GuardianNgr. That was fast, having taken a few years to materialize.
However, this tepid request directed at a complicit Paul Biya-led government in Yaounde would be like asking Slobodan Milošević to use his good offices to halt the horrendous genocide in Kosovo.
Further down in a statement issued on his behalf by a spokesman Stephane Dujarric, the UN urged the “representatives of the Anglophone community to … (seek) solutions to the community’s grievances, within the framework of the Cameroonian constitution.”
Why didn’t the Jews in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Eritreans and the East Timorese, to name just a few, think of that? One has to see how the old Sudanese constitution greased the path to a most rapid independence of South Sudan.
Which brings me to the question closer to my heart. Can the United Nations system save the Biafrans from genocide this second time around?
Similarly, can the UN save the people of anglophone Southern Cameroon?
I doubt it. We have this no-holds-barred testimony by Ms. Caroline Vandenabeele who had worked in Myanmar under the errant head of the United Nations Country Team (UNCT), a Canadian called Renata Lok-Dessallien.
Lok-Dessallien had for years appeared to be more interested in the finesse of diplomatese while the Rakhine State, home of the Rohingya burned.
Vandenabeele highlighted the many (deliberate) failures of the UN delegations to do the needful in Sri Lanka among the Tamils, Rwanda and now Myanmar.
These findings do not give much room for confidence whether in Southern Cameroon or in Biafra.
Ndigbo are warned not to put all their eggs in the UN basket.
The prospects are bleak.
Oduche Azih writes from Lagos, Nigeria.
Get more stuff like this
Subscribe to our mailing list and get interesting stuff and updates to your email inbox.