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Cameroon’s government said on Wednesday that four schools in the conflict-ravaged English-speaking regions of the country had been attacked in the past two days and six teachers kidnapped.
“Several terrorists … kidnapped six teachers and 10 students” from a Protestant school in Kumbo, in the northeast of the country, on Tuesday, government spokesman Emmanuel Sadi said in a statement.
The students were released the same day, “but the teachers are still in the hands of the secessionist rebels,” he said.
Then on Wednesday, “almost a dozen unidentified people” attacked a school in Limbe in the southwest, physically assaulting teachers and students, looting the building and setting part of it on fire, Sadi continued.
Also Tuesday, “four terrorists” fired at a university in Bamenda, in the northwest, before fleeing.
And in Fundong, also in the northwest, six students were abducted on Wednesday on their way to school but later released, the city’s mayor, Denis Awoh Ndong, told AFP.
Since separatist violence broke out in Cameroon in 2017, the kidnapping of young people, attacks on teachers and the destruction of schools have been frequent in the mainly French-speaking western part of the country.
Last month, after eight young children were massacred in class, Ilaira Allegrozzi, a Central Africa regional researcher at Human Rights Watch, told AFP that schools were “being used as a weapon of war in this conflict. Separatists they don’t want children to be in schools, institutions that they equate with central authority. “
In November 2019, UNICEF estimated that some 855,000 children in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon were not attending school.
More than 4,100 public primary schools, about 90 percent of the total, and 77 percent of public secondary schools were closed or not functioning, UNICEF said.
