Cameroon separatists in the nation's Anglophone region are causing widespread harm to children's education through systematic kidnappings, curtailing their ability to go to school, and intimidating teachers, a report by a global watchdog says.
The 131-page report from Human Rights Watch said separatist groups' waves of violence since 2017 - including 260 abductions and 16 murders of students and educators - have had a "devastating impact" on local schools systems and students.
"These separatist groups are conducting a brutal campaign against education," said Illaria Allegrozzi, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. "They have used schools as their bases and camps to store weapons to torture and hold their hostages."
Separatists have been fighting since 2017 to form an English-speaking state within the majority French-speaking country. The United Nations says the conflict has killed more than 3,300 people, displaced more than half-a-million and left 700,000 children without schooling.
A separatist spokesman slammed the HRW report, calling it inaccurate. Chris Anu, secretary of state for communication of the self-declared Republic of Ambazonia, said most schools are empty because the “French Cameroon” military moved into the region and escalated conflicts, forcing locals to flee.
“The Human Rights Watch does not get the dynamics and their report is not accurate," he said. "If you go to Ambazonia you will find out that in the rural areas, most of the towns have been deserted. No school exists there because nobody lives there.
"People are not going to school in Ambazonia, but that is only because with the presence of the military, there is insecurity and parents decided to pull their children out of school and send them to city areas,” Anu said.
Anu said there are what he called "vigilante groups" sponsored by the Cameroon government that are committing violence against locals.
“Those people cause atrocities, and they are attributed to Ambazonia restoration forces, whereas they are illegitimate fighters owned by government elite," he said. "This is what human rights watch doesn’t take into consideration.”
But HRW's Allegrozzi said that the group's investigators found that separatists were responsible for the majority of violence against teachers sand students.
"Separatist groups are conducting a brutal campaign using education as a weapon to achieve political gains, and so they are robbing an entire generation of children of their fundamental right to education," she said. "They should immediately stop interfering with children’s education and announce an end to school boycott.”
In the past, separatists used HRW findings to promote their cause, Allegrozzi said.
“I think that when they claim that we don’t understand the conflicting dynamics at play in the Anglophone regions, when they claim that our findings are biased, they forget that they have praised our research in the past when it highlighted abuses by the government forces,” she said.
![HRW Says Cameroonian Separatists Harm Children [02:33]](https://gdb.voanews.com/997bac11-8197-42b1-9801-82facbab1f22_w250_r1.png "HRW Says Cameroonian Separatists Harm Children [02:33]")
