Dusty Roads to Clarity: Documenting Cameroonian Violence
By Devon Lum, Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, UC Berkeley
Content warning: This story discusses the physical assault of women and children.
A video of three women and two children being whipped and beaten by a group of men in Southern Cameroon began to circulate online on July 17, 2019. Despite the three-minute clip’s upsettingly brutal nature it failed to attract much attention outside of a few thousand views and a handful of speculative blog posts before fading into the background of Cameroon’s ongoing and little known civil war. This conflict between predominantly Francophone state forces and approximately nineteen non-state Anglophone groups, which fight for an independent state they call “Ambazonia”, has gone on for nearly three years with some 3,000 dead and no end in sight.
In this case and others, the violence was forgotten, the victims were unacknowledged, and the perpetrators were free to strike again, protected and emboldened by journalistic negligence.
That is until student researchers at the Human Rights Center, University of California Berkeley, School of Law — in partnership with the University of Toronto — helped shed light on the location of the video through an open source investigation, the methodology of which is listed in great detail in the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab’s (HRC Lab) newly published report.
Videos of Cameroonian violence frequently picture little more than anonymous dusty tracts, indistinguishable foliage, and single-story buildings with faded brown walls and rusted metal roofs, the likes of which are ubiquitous across the country. These similarities often hinder effective reporting on human rights abuses in Cameroon; locational claims tend to be based on hearsay and go unsubstantiated, leaving news articles that cover violent acts with a disputable foundation. The lack of clarity concerning the “where” combined with widespread misinformation regarding the “who” and the “what” coming from both sides of the conflict almost always muddies the water surrounding the case in question and replaces public discourse with unproductive argumentation. This antagonizes each warring party and obscures the facts of the case, consequently limiting the number of perpetrators who experience actual accountability and fostering a sense of immunity among state and non-state actors.
As expected, arguments blaming the separatists — armed non-state Anglophone groups who declared their independence in September 2017 — as well as the Cameroonian government for the violence in the aforementioned video flooded the internet immediately after it rose to prominence in mid-July 2019. Partisan interpretations from both groups quickly superseded more measured — albeit limited — fact-based reporting, and after a purportedly official separatist Twitter account acknowledged the immorality of the acts (without fully admitting responsibility) widespread coverage of the video ended. With the war of words seemingly over, reporters and social media users moved on to the next horrific video of violence without clearly establishing what happened or attaining resolution for those involved in the beatings.
In the Fall of 2019, student researchers of the HRC Lab attempted to combat this cycle of underreporting, argumentation, and eventual obscurity by identifying the exact coordinates of the July 17 attack video.¹
Although articles covering the beating claimed it took place in “Bali Nyonga” — a town 16 kilometers southwest of Bamenda — the video itself provided very few distinguishing landmarks, leaving the location of the event up to debate.
While videos filmed in urban areas and cities often offer clues researchers can use to triangulate the positions they were filmed — such as storefront signs, multi-story buildings, and religious structures — these features were absent from the clip. However, members of the HRC Lab quickly recognized that the video was filmed at a four-way intersection of a paved and a dirt road. Using this information and Google Earth Pro’s “road” layer, they identified the “N6” highway as one of the only large paved roads that runs through Bali. Next they took screenshots of the video, constructed a panoramic image of the scene that better detailed the event’s geographical surroundings, and drew a map highlighting building sizes, positioning, and relation to the road as well as the shape of the road and nearby vegetation. Finally, the student researchers scanned satellite imagery provided by Google Earth Pro of Bali Nyonga for all four-way intersections with the “N6” highway and used the panorama and map they constructed to identify the crossroad which best matched the video at these coordinates: 5.894537, 10.009798.
While pinpointing the location of a single act of violence is just one step away from ambiguity and toward accountability, this act alone will not translate into tangible broadscale improvements, especially in Cameroon. Even if re-instigating the coverage of the Bali beatings by publicly announcing the coordinates of the crime somehow led to justice for the victims and perpetrators, the civil war that subjects Cameroonians to daily underreported human rights violations would continue to do so under the protection of unconsolidated coverage and an overall lack of verified documentation.
It is this greater cyclical pattern of violence shielded and encouraged by obscurity that the University of Toronto hopes to address with their “Database of Atrocities on Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis” — a project that we at Berkeley have joined as collaborators. The University of Toronto expects that developing an archive of verified atrocities — wherein all pieces of media related to a human rights violation in Cameroon will be organized into a publicly accessible folder and accompanied by the location, date, and potentially a list of actors identified by student researchers — will incentivize heightened and clearer coverage on the conflict.
With more international eyes on the actions of those in Cameroon and less grounds for domestic arguing over whether or not an atrocity occurred, where it occurred, and who was responsible, both state and non-state actors will be pressured to reprimand their forces at a greater frequency and may be averse to employing abusive tactics in the future. The introduction of corroborated information on the “Database of Atrocities” will not only bring the public’s eyes to the underreported transgressions of the past. It will generate awareness of the brutality of Cameroon’s civil war and cultivate a culture of accountability on the ground to help limit violence in the future.
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The Human Rights Center was integral to establishing the foundation of the “Database of Atrocities” and hopefully a clearer future in Cameroon. In addition to this project, the HRC conducts research on war crimes and other serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights in Syria, Iraq, Myanmar, and elsewhere around the globe using evidence-based methods and innovative technologies.
To learn more about how the HRC Lab is fighting to hold perpetrators accountable and protect vulnerable populations check out “Documenting Cameroon,” which contextualizes the Cameroonian conflict and illuminates the tactics and challenges used and experienced by the HRC Lab.
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[1] BBC’s Africa Eye published a short documentary demonstrating the process of “geolocation” and verification on September 23, 2018. The video, which confirms the disputed location where Cameroonian state forces shot and killed a group of women and children, has been viewed close to two million times. It pressured the Cameroonian government to acknowledge the wrongdoings of its officers and contributed to the US’s withdrawal of over 17 million US dollars in security aid to the Cameroonian government, indicating similar verification work performed by the HRC lab may lead to heightened accountability among state and non-state combatants.
