AMBAZONIA RECOGNITION COLLABORATION COUNCIL (ARCC)

The February 11 Washington Declaration

WASHINGTON, DC, 11 February 2018 – Six frontline Ambazonian liberation movements on Sunday in Washington, DC, launched a collaborative platform. The Ambazonia Recognition Collaborative Council (ARCC), as the platform is called, focuses on winning worldwide support for the recognition of the Republic of Ambazonia, formerly the United Nations British Trusteeship Territory of Southern Cameroons.

Approved at the end of the three-day Reboot Workshop held (9th – 11th February 2018) at the Catholic University of America, ARCC will galvanize worldwide sympathy, support and recognition for Ambazonia (Africa’s newest nation). It will build a more inclusive, tolerant, credible and legitimate transitional authority as Ambazonians continue their unstoppable march to Buea, capital of the soon-to-be fully liberated Ambazonia.

Ahead of the Reboot Workshop, participants visited Friday with some members of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Congress of the United States of America to draw their attention to the war crimes, atrocity crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes bordering on genocide perpetrated with impunity across Ambazonia by the annexationist regime of President Paul Biya. 

On Sunday, ARCC called on the United Nations to demonstrate their commitment to international law, to the protection of refugees, political dissidents and asylum seekers. The international community must force Cameroon to return to the protection of the United Nations all Ambazonian leaders abducted last January in Abuja (Nigeria) and forcibly returned to Cameroon. Failure to reverse this rendition would be the immoral equivalent of returning to Rwanda those Tutsis who fled to safety during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. Failure to return Comrade Sisiku AyukTabe & Co. to the protection of the United Nations would be the criminal equivalent of forcibly returning to Nazi Germany Jews who had successfully fled Hitler’s gas chambers during the Holocaust.

ARCC denounces, in the strongest terms, the indiscriminate targeting of peace-loving Ambazonians by the occupation forces of Colonial Cameroon (independent on the 1st of January 1960) across Southern Cameroons/Ambazonia (independent on the 1st of October 1961). ARCC members paid homage to the resilience of Ambazonians in the Homeland for remaining remarkably non-violent despite the blind crackdown marked by extrajudicial killings, point blank executions, enforced “disappearances” and a scorched earth policy that has internally displace hundreds of thousands of Ambazonians and forced over 60,000 to flee into refugee camps in Eastern Nigeria.

ARCC Member Organizations reiterated their appeal for the immediate and unconditional release of all Ambazonian political prisoners, inviting the Republic of Cameroon to refrain from further provoking our citizens with the organization in 2018 of a series of illegal colonial elections in Ambazonia. The Reboot Workshop also adopted a legal program in defense of detained Ambazonian prisoners of conscience.

ARCC committed to bring more support and relief to Ambazonian refugees in Nigeria. Through the Cameroon-Nigeria Friendship Network, AMBAZONIA RECOGNITION COLLABORATION COUNCIL (ARCC) ARCC commits to partner with the International Organization of Migration (IOM) to accelerate the transit from Nigeria to another country of as many Ambazonian refugees as possible. Ambazonians are no longer protected in Nigeria given risks of physical elimination during cross-border genocidal raids by Cameroonian forces.

Member Organizations of ARCC reminded the International Criminal Court (ICC) of their responsibility to document evidence of war and atrocity crimes unfolding in Ambazonia. They pledged to set up, over the coming weeks, a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the abductions and rendition of Ambazonian leaders and activists and to ensure that perpetrators – a complex ring of criminals - will be brought to book. To counter the propaganda campaign of shameless lies hatched and disseminated across the globe by Cameroon, the Reboot Workshop agreed to float shares for the setting up of Ambazonia’s first independent radio and television network due to launch in May 2018.

Member Organizations of ARCC also tabled a plan of action – known as the Campaign for the Recognition of Ambazonia (CARA) – whose objectives over the next ten months include proving to the international community that an overwhelming majority of Ambazonians are for peaceful separation from the failed “union” with the Republic of Cameroon. CARA is also aimed at ensuring that every Ambazonian becomes a oneperson “Campaign Manager” for a series of grassroots campaign events. CARA envisages the possibility of organizing ballots to allow the Sovereign People of Ambazonia to elect credible, legitimate and representative governance structure for themselves. ARCC is also calling on the international community to stop living in denial and instead to convene an inclusive and meaningful dialogue to resolve the crisis. That dialogue must provide the option – preferred by a majority of Ambazonians - to peacefully separate from the Republic of Cameroon.

It is denial to admit the harm done by scrapping federalism in 1972; the denial to see the injury caused by Yaounde reverting in 1984 to the name Republic of Cameroun; the 22-year-old denial to implement decentralization; the denial to heed the warnings from Buea Declaration (AACI) in 1993; the denial to accept federalism while it was still a popular option that culminated in outright calls for independence (Zero Option), first warned by the 1994 AAC II. ARCC reminds the international community that the solution to the unprecedented political chaos in Ambazonia can only be political – not military.

ARCC, meantime, calls on all Ambazonians to boycott any events organized by the colonialists from Yaounde, including this year’s so-called local, legislative, senatorial and presidential elections. Ambazonians have rejected the status of an annexed people and/or of second-class citizens in Colonial Cameroon and will no longer live as slaves in the land of our birth.