CAMEROON : WHO BURNT DOWN KUMBA HOSPITAL?

Part of Kumba Hospital that was burnt down on February 11,2019 by unknown arsonists

By Ayah Paul Abine*

In the last two days, the question as to who has burnt down the Kumba Hospital has resurfaced prominently. An eminent Francophone lawyer has argued powerfully that the Camerouoonianese Government doesn’t appear to have a clear conscience. The mainstay of her stance is that, in the normal course of things, the best position of the government would have been that ‘investigation would establish who the culprits were’. By rushing to blame the arson on the Amba fighters within the hour of the arson whereas the government was hundreds of kilometers from the scene does suggest a guilty conscience…

Countering that argument with the fact that the opposite camp did retort similarly does create a serious doubt as to the veracity. Faced with such possible in pari delicto, we of the learned profession often do find make recourse to the objective tests to establish the veracity. In the instant situation, similar facts evidence could be usefully decisive!

We would, in the circumstance, find extremely useful the findings as to who burnt down the Mbonge Hospital, similarly burning patients alive? The silence of the government in the face of the grave accusation that it was the act of government agents would be very cogent evidence.

Again, the consistent evidence that the burning of some two hundred villages is held to have been perpetrated by government agents is a strong corroborative pointer. Such burning has been accompanied by the burning alive of human beings, at times, in their sleep. What difference is there between the burning of human beings in dwelling houses and the burning of patients on their hospital beds?

And if the government nonchalantly removed Francophone MRC (political party) patients with bullet wounds from their hospital beds into prison custody, glaringly before the international community without qualms, how on earth would that same government care a damn treating Anglophone patients all the worse?

Only one thing is desirable. The truth about the burning down of the Kumba Hospital can only be established credibly by a neutral third party and NOT by the Camerouoonianese Government as some international bodies have proposed. The very government that has hastily accused the ‘secessionnistes’ NEVER can be expected to conclude otherwise.

How can any reasonable person forget that no one should be a judge in his own cause???

* Ayah Paul Abine is a retired Deputy Attorney-General of Cameroon's   Supreme Court ,now a Barrister-at-law .This piece was first published on his facebook page on February 17,21019