A Small War in Cameroon

Small Wars Journal A SMALL WAR IN CAMEROON A Small War in Cameroon http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/a-small-war-in-cameroon Elizabeth Rechniewski, University of Sydney Over the last decade there has been great interest in the origins and development of COIN theory and the success or otherwise of its practical application in fields including Indochina and Algeria, not least because of the influence of the ‘French School’ of counter-revolutionary warfare on contemporary American military strategy, encapsulated in (FM) 3-24. In the discussion that has taken place and the books that have been written I have seen, however, very few references in English publications to a war that took place in French Cameroon between approximately 1955-1964. This is not perhaps surprising since even in France the war has been little discussed, overshadowed both at the time and since by the Algerian War of Independence that took place at roughly the same time. Whereas that war has seen a surge of publications, films and documentaries over the last fifteen years or so, the war in Cameroon remains little known and its very existence has been denied by official French spokesmen. Yet it might be of particular interest to military historians as another field in which the French developed and applied their theories of counter-revolutionary warfare. Cameroon, originally a Portuguese, then a Dutch, then a German colony from 1884 until taken over by the French in 1916, did not in theory have the same status as other sub- Saharan French colonies but was mandated to France, along with Togo, by the League of Nations in 1922. The Mandate saw the former German colony of ‘Kamerun’ divided between France and Britain: four-fifths of the territory were given to the French; the remaining land to the West, which contained half the total population, was mandated to the British. Despite its special status as a mandated territory, it was governed in the same way as other French colonies: native Cameroonians were administered from 1924 by the all-encompassing code de l’indigénat that led to the imprisonment of thousands each year for ‘administrative’ offences. In the interwar years, French businesses, administrators and colonists settled in the French section and established large cocoa, rubber, banana, and palm oil plantations: by the 1950s there were some 17,000 white settlers in a population of around 3 million. After WWII it became a United Nations Trust Territory, the mandate explicitly committing France (and Britain) to leading the colony towards ‘self-government or independence according to the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned’. France however continued to treat Cameroon in a very similar manner to her other colonies, including it in the various post WWII forms of Francophone communities, as an associated territory in the Union française and as a member of the CFA franc zone. UN missions would visit periodically and would be taken on carefully prepared tours to assess and report, generally in positive terms, on the progress the colony was making; and both pro and anti-independence Cameroonian representatives would periodically address the UN to put their case as to why independence should be hastened or delayed. Despite French efforts at pre-emptive political reform (predictably resisted by the French settlers), from the late 1940s activism in favour of independence developed and crystallised with the founding in 1948 of the UPC – Union des Populations du Cameroun – a title that represented the attempt to group under one banner the numerous and disparate ethnic, linguistic and religious groups that existed in the country. Its principal demands were for democratic elections, independence within ten years and reunification of the British and French territories and in pursuit of these demands it organised petitions and lobbied the UN and foreign opinion. The extent to which the UPC represented the population as a whole, rather than certain groups in particular (notably the Bamiléké), will be the subject of differing interpretations throughout its existence. In its early years it was stronger in the South, which was more urbanised and less traditional, and less dominated by the great chiefs of the North. Seven years after its founding, in 1955, the UPC controlled 460 village or neighbourhood committees and had 100,000 members, far more than other political parties (Teretta 98), particularly on the coast and in central, south and west Cameroon, among the Bamiléké and Bassa . The party published the papers La Voix du Cameroun, Lumière, Étoile and Vérité. and had active trade union (USCC), youth (JDC) and women’s wings (UDEFEC). At the end of 1954, concerned by the growing influence of the UPC, the French government appointed a new, more intransigent High Commissioner, Roland Pré. Pré defined the UPC as the local agent of international communism (referring to it consistently as the ‘PC’, as if the initials stood for ‘parti communiste’) and turned to the new French theories of revolutionary war for inspiration in the ‘rollback’ of the UPC political organisations that had been, in his words, ‘noyautées par le parti communiste’ [infiltrated by the communist party][i]. In January 1955 he sent a copy of Colonel Charles Lacheroy’s ‘Une leçon de guerre révolutionnaire’ to the territory’s administrators, requesting that they read it with the greatest attention and consider its relevance to the situation they faced in Cameroon. His own views are revealed in his accompanying comments, where he concludes that ‘le Cameroun est en effet le sujet d’une action concertée’ [Cameroon is indeed the object of concerted action] which involves ‘ces techniques révolutionnaires’ [these revolutionary techniques - ie those described by Lacheroy] (Deltombe 154). Deltombe et al argue that in his circular of February 1955 Pré was the first French official to seek to apply in a systematic and coordinated way the tactics of counter-revolutionary war (150), even earlier than its deployment in Algeria. These tactics included setting up parallel hierarchies to challenge the dominance of the UPC affiliated organisations, and a range of counter propaganda measures including educational films and support for regional newspapers that supported the French authorities. Pré authorised the banning of public meetings, constant harrassment and judicial pursuit of leaders, use of informers, police raids and arrests, culminating in the deadly repression of a UPC meeting on 25 May. Continuing violence between members of the UPC, French forces and European settlers led to him banning the party in July 1955 (it was banned in British Cameroon in 1957). The French government was determined to grant independence, if at all, on its own terms, according to its own timetable, and with a government that would be sympathetic to its geopolitical aims and business and resource interests; as the French High Commissioner (1956-58) Pierre Messmer wrote: ‘France will grant independence to those who call for the least, after eliminating politically and militarily those who demanded the most intransigeant line’ (quoted in Poilbout 88). France feared the influence of UPC demands, if successful, on the rest of French Africa and on French commercial interests, and also, Jean-François Bayart points out, as a source of possible support for the independence movement in Algeria (Bayart 452) with which the UPC had some limited contacts. In its reports to the UN, France consistently referred to the UPC as a communist- inspired organisation under the influence of Moscow. The Catholic Church, dominant in Cameroon preached vehemently and constantly against the UPC as a ‘parti politique à tendances communistes’.[ii] It is certainly true that some UPC leaders had been influenced by participation in discussion circles run by French communist teachers and trade unionists in Cameroon in the 1940s; they lobbied for support from non-aligned and Socialist countries, received political support from the French communist party and from the late 1950s the guerilla wing was strongly marked by maoism (Deltombe 342). The UPC received however almost no material, logistical or arms support from the Eastern block or other newly independent countries, except for Guinea, who may have supplied them with 40 Czech pistols (Briand 1961). Whether their movement would have been a trojan horse for international communism can never be decided; their initial demands however centred on free elections – in which they would be allowed to take part – with a view to securing genuine independence from France, and reunification with British Cameroon which Ahidjo himself achieved in 1961. Banned in 1955, after some hesitation and internal dissension, the UPC took the decision to pursue their struggle clandestinely: UPC leaders went into exile or into the forests, from where they began to organise guerilla activity. In April 1956 Pré was replaced by Pierre Messmer, a former prisoner of the Vietminh, who sought to ‘pacify’ rebellious UPC strongholds by creating in December 1956 - January 1957 a security zone around the crucial Sanaga-Maritime region between Yaoundé, the capital, and the major port of Douala: the Zone de maintien de l’Ordre (ZOE). A parachute drop by two companies of the Colonial parachute infantry on Eséka airport on 20 December 1956 (4th GCCP Groupement colonial de Commandos parachutistes, 1st Commando)[iii] was necessary to secure communications between Douala and Yaoundé. Although Pierre Messmer wrote in his memoirs of his success in pacifying this region, from December 1957 the zone de pacification de Sanaga maritime (ZOPAC) was established, with headquarters in Eséka: 7000 km2 controlled by seven infantry companies that divided the territory into sections for enhanced control. [iv] Military operations in the ZOPAC were placed under the control of Lieutenant-Colonel Lamberton, also a veteran of Indochina, who was once in charge of the 2ème bureau of French land forces in the Far East.

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