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7. Refutation of the ‘Consent to Incorporation’ Thesis: the Pebiscite in 1961
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Chapter Seven Refutation of the ‘Consent to Incorporation’ Thesis: The Plebiscite in 1961 The incorporation thesis is strenuously canvassed by Cameroun Republic. That thesis runs like this. The Southern Cameroons was completely fused into Cameroun Republic following the results both of the 1961 plebiscite and the 1972 “referendum”. Those polls were sufficient mandate for fusion and the Southern Cameroons thereafter became part of Cameroun Republic. The UN-sponsored plebiscite in the Southern Cameroons was “un référendum de rattachement” (‘a referendum for incorporation into Cameroun Republic’), not an independence poll; and it resulted not in the association of the two countries in a federal union but in the incorporation of the Southern Cameroons into Cameroun Republic by command of the United Nations. As a result of that incorporation Cameroun Republic acquired title to the territory of, and therefore sovereignty over, the Southern Cameroons.1 A close examination of this thesis will show that it has only a superficial attraction and that it amounts to a facile and lame argument. The ‘incorporation’ thesis completely fails to take account of the cumulative effect of Article 76b of the UN Charter, the phraseology of the plebiscite questions, the content of the preplebiscite agreement concluded between the Southern Cameroons and Cameroun Republic, and operative paragraph 4(b) of UN Resolution 1608 (XV). The plebiscite was a self-determination poll at which the Southern Cameroons voted first and foremost to achieve independence, which independence decision was endorsed by the UN. A dependent territory does not achieve independence, even in a nominal sense, by its incorporation pure and simple into another country (at least not without its express, free, voluntary and fully-informed decision), because in that case the territory would not cease to be a non-independent territory. 86 Betrayal of Too Trusting a People Achieving independence entails, at the very minimum, selfgovernment and self-identity because self-determination has to do with self-preservation and not extinction. On the good authority of Professor Philips Cadbury of the University of London, speaking in November 1960: [U]nification does not connote absorption or loss of identity but [...] something more like the Ghana-Guinea Union [...] [I]n the absence of a third option, the second option offered in the plebiscite in February will win a substantial majority. But this will not be a mandate for absorption, but for negotiation on equal terms.2 The Premier of French Cameroun, Mr. Ahidjo, had expressed a similar view (although he would later renege on that in words and deed) on 25 February 1959 at the 849th meeting of the Fourth Committee of the UN: We are not annexationists. [...] [I]f our brothers of the British zone wish to unite with independent Cameroun, we are ready to discuss the matter with them, but we will do so on a footing of equality.”3 The Southern Cameroons could not in law have negotiated with Cameroun Republic as an equal party and then proceeded to “join” that country as an unequal party. Since when did unequal parties start concluding valid contracts? Had Cameroun Republic come out in the open and offered incorporation as the terms and conditions under which the Southern Cameroons might be expected to “join” it, it is doubtful to the extreme that the political leadership of the Southern Cameroons would have accepted that as the correct interpretation of the second plebiscite question and campaigned for that proposition. Aware of the very high probability of this happening if the prospects of absorption were to be held out to the Southern Cameroons, in 1959 French Cameroun reassured the UN that its desire for political association with the British Cameroons did not in any way mean it had a hidden agenda to annex the territory. [54.226.222.183] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:40 GMT) 87 Refutation of the ‘Consent to Incorporation’ Thesis: The Plebiscite in 1961 Throughout nearly fifty years of its union with Nigeria, the Southern Cameroons opposed any form of Nigerian domination in the Southern Cameroons. It insisted on and asserted its identity and personality, and consequently doggedly refused integration into that country even though both shared and still share a common language of public administration, a common legal and educational system, culture, value system, and administrative and constitutional history. Given this record of unyielding attachment to its identity and personality and the insistence on its political autonomy, the Southern Cameroons could not have decided either in 1961 or in 1972 to become a mere appendage, an...