Betrayal of Too Trusting a People. The UN, the UK and the Trust Territory of the Southern Cameroons: The UN, the UK and the Trust Territory of the Southern Cameroons

3. A Trust Betrayed by the United Nations

Chapter Three A Trust Betrayed by the United Nations The case of the British Cameroons exemplifies how the UN sometimes acts in disregard of acknowledged rules or principles for reasons of politics, justifying such course of action on grounds of mere “adjustment”, or on grounds of “special” or “exceptional” circumstances. First, the UN acquiesced in the dismemberment of the British Cameroons by the British Government, in spite of the UN’s stated principle on the desirability of always maintaining the unity of colonial territories. The fact that the continuity of the British Cameroons Trust Territory was broken by the piece of Nigerian territory known as the ‘Yola Arc’, did not suffice to make it a special case in this regard since a country’s territory need not be continuous. The Administering Authority carried out the partitioning without even seeking the express views of the people of the Territory. Amazingly, at the plebiscite, the possibility of reuniting the two parts of the British Cameroons Territory to form a sovereign independent state was not presented or even considered as another alternative. In East Africa, the Belgians acted more honourably, for they partitioned Ruanda-Urundi after the people of that territory had been democratically consulted on the matter and they decided to achieve independence as two distinct states, Rwanda and Burundi. The Ruanda-Urundi case is also instructive in another significant respect. Following the 1885 Berlin Treaty, that territory became part of German East Africa and remained so until the end of World War I. With Germany’s defeat, German East Africa, like German Kamerun, was partitioned into two: Ruanda-Urundi (1/17th the size of the Territory) and Tanganyika (16/17th). The League of Nations mandated Belgium to administer Ruanda-Urundi, and Britain to administer Tanganyika. Belgium formed an economic and administrative union between Ruanda-Urundi and the contiguous colony of the Belgian Congo. 34 Betrayal of Too Trusting a People Ruanda-Urundi was thus administered as part of the Belgian Congo until Congo’s independence on 1 July 1960. Two years later Ruanda-Urundi split into two and achieved independence on 1 July 1962, as the Republic of Rwanda (10,169 square miles) and the Republic of Burundi (10,740 square miles). Significantly, the UN did not impose a plebiscite on either Rwanda or Burundi to achieve independence by joining either the Congo or Tanganyika. Yet neither Rwanda nor Burundi is bigger in size or population, or more economically endowed, than the Southern Cameroons. In the history of UN decolonisation of trust territories the British Cameroons Territory is the only case where a country’s national unity and territorial integrity were totally disrupted. The two parts into which the Territory was divided were denied the right to remain as one country and to achieve sovereign statehood as such. Worse, neither of the two parts was even allowed to achieve sovereign statehood. Without any legal authority for so acting, the UN enjoined, separately, the Southern British Cameroons and the Northern British Cameroons to “join”, willy-nilly, either of its two neighbours, Nigeria or Cameroun Republic. The imposition of these conditionalities meant that there was arguably no self-determination. There was instead a determination by the United Nations, not by the self. This was odd indeed, especially when one considers how fairly other trust territories were treated as can be seen from the following examples that provide an edifying contrast to the scandalous way the British Cameroons was treated. British Togoland was not partitioned. It joined the Gold Coast and the conjoined territories achieved independence as Ghana. French Togo was not partitioned, nor was French Cameroun; each achieved independence from France intact. Neither British Somaliland nor Italian Somaliland was partitioned; each acceded to independence and then united to form the Republic of Somalia. Ruanda-Urundi separated through an informed decision by the people of the territory and became independent as two separate states. The Gilbert and Ellice Islands separated but emerged into independence as the separate states of Kiribati and Tuvalu.1 35 A Trust Betrayed by the United Nations Second, quite early on the UN acquiesced in the Administering Authority’s incorporation of each part of the partitioned British Cameroons into the adjoining British territory of Nigeria. It is of course the case that both the League of Nations Mandates Agreements and the United Nations Trusteeship Agreements made provision for ‘administrative union’. But it is also the case that such...