Agbor Balla Auctions Cameroon to Amnesty Int’l

Barrister Agbor Balla

Invited as guest speaker at the ceremony to officially publish Amnesty International’s 2017/2018 report on Cameroon, in Dakar Senegal, Buea-based Human Rights lawyer, Nkongho Felix Agbor Balla, told his hearers that Amnesty’s findings are just the tip of the iceberg. He said his human rights office, CHRDA, has documented more than 1000 findings and video recordings of events in the Anglophone struggle. He said the findings are available for interested human rights watchdogs. Balla urged AI to use its world-wide influence and cause Cameroon to be isolated in the committee of nations.

            The erstwhile all-powerful and unbending president of the now outlawed Consortium of Anglophone Civil Society Organizations, told an impressive crowd of attendees at the Amnesty event in Dakar, that, giving the gross and unacceptable human rights violations by the Cameroon government and its agents especially the military, it is high time the international community consider isolating Cameroon in the committee of nations.

            Balla, who alongside Cho Ayaba, the self-proclaimed commander-in-chief of the Ambazonia Defence Forces ADF, was reputed to have submitted the Anglophone case file to the European Union Parliament in Brussels Belgium way back in 2000, also drew the attention of Amnesty International and other human rights watchdogs represented at the ceremony that the Cameroonian military is presently using arms that were destined to fight Boko Haram to orchestrate genocide on civilian populations in Anglophone Cameroon.

            Balla challenged Amnesty and the other international organizations to use their worldwide influence and cause Cameroon’s military partners to review their cooperation ties with Yaounde.

            Following Agbor Balla’s outing in Dakar, some observers have wasted no time to speculate that he might have been the brains behind the very damning Amnesty report on Cameroon. Many commentators suspect that Amnesty might have used Balla’s Human rights Office as their eyes and ears in Cameroon. Where these are true or whether they are false could not be immediately confirmed by this newspaper.

            But Talking to Agbor Balla on phone, he denied giving any information to Amnesty. Balla said he is neither an employee nor an agent of Amnesty International. But he said he has documented evidence of gross human rights violations in NW and SW regions and that whoever is interested, be it Amnesty or any other Human Rights organization can get it anytime.

            It is worthy of mention that Agbor Balla has gained the reputation over time as one of the most unrepentant, unbending and unwavering advocates and fighters of the Anglophone cause. Balla believes that only a return to the original two-state federal structure of the reunified Cameroon can bring a lasting solution to the present impasse in Cameroon. He held this stance since the early 1990s when he started the struggle whilst as a student in the then Yaounde University and has maintained it till today.

            Because of his rather hardliner’s position on the struggle, Balla was declared a terrorist by the government and arrested and jailed in the Kondengui maximum security prison in Yaounde, in January 2017. He was only freed eight months later thanks to the magnanimity of President Paul Biya, who instructed for a nolle prosequi to by the minister of justice to stop all proceedings at the Yaounde Military Tribunal where Balla and dozens others were being tried jointly and severally for their alleged roles in the on-going violence in Southern Cameroons.