By Dibussi Tande
"In the days following the military crackdown, reports began to emerge of widespread looting and rape by soldiers, and of students killed and either dumped in a lake near the university or buried in mass graves outside of Yaounde."
20 years ago today, on May 6, 1991, elements from the Cameroonian security forces launched a brutal assault on the University of Yaounde student residential area called Bonamoussadi to decapitate the Parlement student movement.
The May 6 assault was the bloody culmination of a month-long confrontation between University of Yaoundé students and the Biya regime which quickly spread beyond the gates of the University, transforming itself into a nationwide civil disobedience campaign which was anything but civil.
The events that led to the attack on Bonamoussadi began fairly innocuously in late March 1991 when the University campus was flooded with tracts calling for a protest march on April 2 in support of a general amnesty and a national conference. On April 1, 1991, Chancellor Joel Moulen issued a statement banning the planned demonstration, and warning students that there would be severe reprisals if they went ahead with the march. Given the disturbances that had occurred in other parts of Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa, what Joel Moulin did was to effectively publicize and legitimize the demonstration.
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A walk down memory lane indeed. Historians are unanimous in acknowledging the crucial role that the French parlement played in the toppling of the French Monarchy during the French Revolution(1789-1799). Under the ancien régime the parlement consisted of a number of separate chambers: the central pleading chamber, called the Grand-Chambre; the Chambre des Requêtes (to deal with petitions) and the Chambre des Enquêtes (to handle inquests); the Chambre de la Tournelle (to settle criminal cases); and finally the Chambre de l'Édit (to process Huguenot affairs). At first, the duties of the parlement were strictly judicial, but it gradually gained considerable political power. The "right of remonstrance" empowered the parlement to point out any breach of monarchic tradition and thus provided a substantive check on capricious royal authority. If you read this whole picture through the prism of the Etoudi Monarchy in Cameroon, it would dawn on you that the Parlement hatched at the University of Yaoundé by disgruntled students was intended to play a role analogous to the one played by the French Parlement in the 18th century! The Cameroonian parlements are not dead;they have simply gone underground. Maybe the October 2011 presidential vendetta will bring them back to the limelight.
Dr. Vakunta
http://www.vakunta.blogspot.com
Posted by: Peter Vakunta | Friday, 06 May 2011 at 04:05 PM