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Commentary:Fine-tuning Fighting Strategies

Yaounde will as from today further confirm its place as a turn-table of Central African sub-regional diplomacy when it hosts the 16th session of the Central African Police Chiefs Committee to be followed almost immediately with the ministerial forum of the said committee on security questions. Security chiefs from the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, the DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome é Principé and Cameroon will be meeting to examine in what best way to address the nagging issue of trans-border crime in the wider central African realm.

The police chiefs’ committee was set up in Brazzaville, Congo on April 10, 1997 with the express desire to improve cooperation between the International Criminal Police Organisation-INTERPOL and the countries of the sub-region in the fight against trans-border crime. So far so good; the organization has been able to hold down the ever-rising spate of such crimes. But not always good enough because with each passing day there are new forms of crime; added to the fact that the sub-region has become a theatre of criminality with numerous hotbeds of tension; many of which facilitate the  movement of not only criminals, but also small arms almost freely across borders. The centre of attention today is on those areas where there is strife; but those areas not known to be suffering from any forms of strife could easily be a fertile ground for criminal activity because of the absence of the same kind of attention one would expect in crime-prone areas. One can only grasp the full measure of the gravity of the situation by the numerous challenges posed by the management of a massive influx of refugees engendered by the crisis in the CAR. Cameroon currently hosts some 320, 000 to 350, 000 refugees excluding internally displaced people (IDP). Aside the Nigerian civilian populations fleeing the Boko Haram insurgency in the border areas with Nigeria in the Far-North Region, the bulk is composed of Central Africans, many of whom fled with light and, even heavy weapons into Cameroon at the height of the political crisis in that country in 2013. One can also imagine that deserters, in search of refuge, could also have gone to the DRC and other Central African countries, posing security concerns that are easy to fathom. Four of the eight countries participating in the Yaounde security committee meeting have a serious security challenge to face. The DRC receives substantial amounts of refugees each time there is a serious crisis in the CAR because of the ease in crossing the River Oubangui when there is insecurity in the CAR capital, Bangui. And even then, most of the eastern parts of the DRC are under sieges of various forms. Cameroon and Chad are bearing the difficult brunt of a war imposed on them by Boko Haram and are currently taking part in a joint task force, grouping troops from the two countries as well as from Nigeria and Benin and Niger. Before the putting in place of the joint task force, the countries involved in the fight against Boko Haram had already taken other initiatives such as the sharing of intelligence information. If well orchestrated, the Yaounde meeting could provide a providential platform for the fine-tuning of new strategies, not only in addressing its own security challenges but, even more usefully, contributing to the strategy of defeating the dreaded sect. The adding of the police component, as the Yaounde meeting will certainly help in doing, must be seen as a plus and an important turning point in the fight against Boko Haram.   

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