Lately news about Cameroon in the mainstream media has focused predominantly on the relatively secondary issue of the country’s French government forcing the French language onto the country’s only English-speaking region.

What’s been under reported is that the Cameroon telecommunications companies have cut off Internet connection to southern Cameroon — creating Internet refugees.  Businesses, students, and families, have been forced to migrate to other regions for Internet access.

The government has also stopped transactions of companies like Money gram and Western union from operating in southern Cameroon, making it impossible for families in the diaspora to send money to support their love ones back home. Most families depend on those funds for food, shelter, health and education.

This is all in addition to the massacres many Cameroonians are calling an impending genocide and frustration with 34 years of incompetence, high corruption, human rights abuses, and state terrorism against the people of Cameroon.

You’re invited to a briefing to provide basic information on how Cameroon has arrived at this point and some perspective on the Anglophone problem. Please RSVP. Or register to join online.

Panelists:

• Dr. Denis Foretia MD is co-chair of the Denis & Lenora Foretia Foundation and Senior Fellow at the Nkafu Policy Institute, a leading Cameroonian think tank. He is a faculty in the
  department of surgery at Johns Hopkins University and staff acute care surgeon at Lifebridge Health in Baltimore.
• Harmony Bobga Mbuton, who recently fled to U.S. from imminent political arrest, was the President of the Lawyers Association in one of the two Anglophone regions of
  Cameroon.
• Dr. Ikome Sako is also Founder/President Emeritus of the Community Humanitarian Emergency Board – an organization working in crisis fields in Cameroon and Central Africa Republic.
• Adryan Wallace, organizer with Pan-African Community Action (PACA), is also Assistant Professor of Politics, Economics, and International Studies; Director of the Africana Studies Program, University of Hartford.

Moderated by IPS Events Coordinator, Netfa Freeman.

Please RSVP. You can also register to join online.

And don’t miss our March 16th evening film showing of “Death in Geneva” about the poisoning of Cameroonian leader Felix Moumié followed by a discussion of it’s relevance today.

This briefing is organized by the Institute for Policy Studies, Global Partnership for African Development (GPAD), and Pan-African Community Action (PACA).