In the ongoing conflict that the Anglophone militias are doing against Cameroon government and their own populations, money is, as expected, the key element in the conflict. The violence, the executions, the guerilla from the “Ambazonians” (the name that the secessionists give to themselves) has been fueled by money coming from ransoms, robbing goods and selling them on the black market, etc. But one source of revenue for those groups is growing and the problem is that it involves the diaspora and other countries’ legislation: fundraising.
Many websites and platforms have offered in the past years solutions to fund projects, whether it is to start a company, an association, a social program, helping persons in need, and many more. Basically, searching through all the ideas that have been funded this way is looking into what the human imagination can do.
The Hezbollah examples
The problem is that imagination is not necessarily driven by good intentions. Terrorist groups have tried to use those crowdfunding solutions to gather money to finance their actions. The Lebanese movement Hezbollah, that needed to diversify its sources of money that was exclusively coming from Iran, has indeed tried to fund different operations this way, among other means, like drug trafficking, until stopped as they are a terrorist group according to the U.S.A., Canada, the E.U., and other countries around the world. The Hezbollah is now strictly forbidden to use fundraising from those platforms or by any other mean.
The Anglophone Cameroonian terrorism funded from the U.S.
This is certainly one of the most striking elements in the total absence of regulation toward the way the “Ambazonians” are financing their actions. Despite the fact that their militias’ operations don’t differ much from the terrorist acts performed by the Hezbollah military branch, the American legislator hasn’t taken any measures to prevent the Cameroonian diaspora to fundraise money on U.S. soil.
In Cameroon, the separatist groups are kidnapping adults and children alike, burning schools, mutilating teachers, killing school principals, preventing anyone from doing business, scaring field workers. The situation in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon, the South-West and the North-West, is now desperate. People are running away from their homes and heading to safer places in Cameroon. The sad irony of the situation is that the “Ambazonians” are hurting the very same people they pretend they fight for.
Crowdfunded terrorism and the lack of U.S. regulation
At the very same time, while Cameroonians are in a critical situation in the English-speaking regions of the country, fundraising are organized and promoted on social media by the diaspora and are being processed on U.S. platforms and services that, if use by the Hezbollah, would raise eyebrows in a second, as if there were different categories of terrorism. Still, the exactions are similar, the victims suffer the same way, the governments have to deal with the same difficulties and security issues, but the U.S. legislator is not taking any actions to prevent the fundraisers to operate freely and finance terrorism.
In Cameroon, this total absence of decision has consequences, that can be counted in death tolls… Until when? is the question everyone is asking.
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