Killings in Missong

On 1 June 2022, Cameroonian soldiers of the 53rd Motorized Infantry Battalion killed nine civilians in the village of Missong [fr], Northwest Region during the Anglophone Crisis.

A Human Rights Watch report after the killings found that nine civilians in Missong (a settlement in Zhoa, Fungom District [fr]) had been killed by the military, relying on testimony from five eyewitnesses and a village elder,^[1] describing it as "a reprisal operation against a community suspected of harboring separatist fighters."^[2]

A few days after the HRW report was published, military spokesman Cyrille Serge Atonfack Guemo published a federal enquiry into the action.^[2] The statement found that the soldiers were conducting a search for a missing soldier when they were confronted by a group of angry residents. According to a government enquiry the soldiers responded in a "inappropriate" and "manifestly disproportionate" manner by murdering four men, four women and an 18-month-old girl. A one-year-old child was lightly wounded and transferred to the hospital.^[3]

The federal enquiry and admission by the army was among the first of its kind by the army during the Anglophone Crisis,^[4][5] and welcomed as "a positive step" by Human Rights Watch.^[2]

See also

• Ngarbuh massacre

References