jeudi 15 mai 2008
"Joe la conscience", un prisionnier d'opinion aux chansons engagées contre le despotisme sanguinaire au Cameroun
Veuillez écouter "emmerdement constitutionnel" de l'artiste "Joe la Conscience"
http://wmedia.cameroon-info
Pourquoi Paul Biya et sa clique en veulent-ils tant à joe la Conscience?
l'Archarnement criminel du régime sanguinaire de Paul Biya contre la personne et la famille de "Joe la Conscience" laisse pantois plus d'un. Et pour cause, beaucoup n'ont entendu parlé de cet artiste- reaggaeman, venu de son Loum natal, pour la première fois qu'après la répression de février 2008 pendant laquelle Paul Biya a tué plus de 100 personnes et jeté 2000 autres en prison.
Il n'est pas inutile de rappeler que Kameni Joe de Vinci, de son vrain nom, a été arrêté en février , devant l'ambassade des USA à Yaoundé alors qu'il y faisait un sit-in pour attirer l'attention de la "communauté internationale" sur le tripatouillage constitutionnel alors programmé par le dictateur Paul Biya. Kameni Joe de Vinci a été condamné par un juge corrompu et aux ordres, à 6 mois de prison pour "organisation de réunions et manifestations illégales".
Pendant que ce militant pacifiste est déjà en détention, son fils Kameni Aya Lionel, 11ans, est assassiné à la fin février à son domicile à Loum, par des miliciens du régime fasciste qu'on appelle abusivement "forces de l'ordre". Et comme cela ne suffisait pas, le frère de Joe la Conscience, lui aussi, est arrêté et écroué à la prison de Nkongsamba.
Et ce n'est pas tout! Comble des persécutions, l'épouse de Joe la Conscience, Sidonie Peka, qui résidait, avec ses enfants, dans la maison familiale à Loum, a dû se résoudre à prendre la fuite, après plusieurs descentes policières à son domicile et elle est actuellement en errance dans le Cameroun avec ses 3 enfants, sans moyens de subsistance!
Pourquoi ce déferlement brutal de la machine repressive du régime fasciste, contre un pauvre citoyen et sa famille, serait-on tenté de se demander.
La vérité est que le dernier album de Joe la conscience dérange. Il dérange le pouvoir avec des titres comme "paix précaire" et "campus militarisé". Plus encore, le titre "Emmerdement constitutionnel", dans lequel l'artiste dénonce les manipulations de la constitution à des fins de confiscation du pouvoir. Joe n'a pourtant cité le nom de personne dans son album et "toute ressemblance avec des personnes qui existent n'est que pure coincidence". Pourtant des criminels à col blanc qui ont pris notre pays en otage, s'y sont reconnus et ont décidé de faire payer très cher à Joe, ses "propos irrevérencieux et son album subversif"!
Vous pouvez écouter le titre "emmerdement constitutionnel" de "Joe la Conscience" ici: http://wmedia.cameroon-info
Veuillez signer ici la petition pour la libération de tous les prisionniers politiques qui pillulent dans les géoles mortelles de Paul Biya: http://www.Petition Online.com/ 280208/petition. html
lundi 5 mai 2008
Cameroon under terror: the case of "Joe la Conscience"
Joe la Conscience: Cameroon’s Forgotten Prisoner of Conscience
By Dibussi Tande: http://www.dibussi.com/2008/04/joe-la-conscien.html
In the past couple of weeks, there have been numerous stories in the
national and international media about the arrest of prominent
Cameroonian protest singer Lapiro de Mbanga. However, the arrest,
summary trial and sentencing of the less known protest singer, Joe La
Conscience, has not received as much attention.
Unlike Lapiro who is accused of being the mastermind behind the February riots, particularly in his native town of Mbanga (although eyewitness accounts and initial reports from local officials indicated that he had helped calm down angry rioters…) Joe La Conscience is not accused of any violence. His only crime is that he organized a one-man nonviolent protest against recent moves to scrap presidential term limits in Cameroon.
Click here to view or download a "Free Joe La Conscience" Poster (PDF)
In this regard his detention is even more significant that Lapiro's because it is a clear indicator of Cameroon’s new authoritarian political landscape where all sources of dissent – real, imagined and symbolic – are systematically silenced. Today it is not only vandals and “apprentice sorcerers” who get caught up in the Biya regime’s repressive maelstrom…
Joe La Conscience or the Road to Kondengui
Shortly after regime officials began agitating for an amendment of Article 6.2 late last year, Joe La Conscience (whose real name is Kameni Joe de Vinci) wrote a memorandum titled “50 good reasons not to change the Cameroon constitution” to protest against plans to scrap presidential term limits in Cameroon. He also composed a song condemning the planned constitutional amendment titled "Emmerdement constitutionnel" (constitutional hassle).
After adding 1000 signatures to his anti-amendment memo, Joe La Conscience decided to embark on a 320-kilometre (200-mile) solo trek from his native town of Loum to Yaounde, Cameroon’s capital, to hand the said memo to the President. On February 17, Joe began what he called the “Long March for Peace”. However, the march ended prematurely after he was arrested at the outskirts of Loum by security forces on grounds that he had violated an order by the governor of littoral banning public rallies and demonstrations in the province.
On February 26, three days after troops sealed Equinoxe Radio and
TV, Joe La Conscience began a hunger strike outside the gates of the US
embassy in Yaounde to protest the government’s crackdown on the media.
The next day, troops stormed his residence in Loum, shot his 11-year
old son, Aya Kameni Patrick Lionel, to death, and ransacked his
workshop. In a letter addressed to President Biya, Joe’s wife, Sidonie,
describes how Lionel was shot « before my eyes and that of my other
children ». Unable to travel to Loum due to the rioting, Joe continued
his peaceful protest outside the embassy. Two days later, on February
29, about 30 heavily armed gendarmes stormed the US embassy gates and
whisked Joe off to a cell at the Secretariat of State of the National
Gendarmerie where, according to his wife, he was tortured. He was then
transferred to the Kondengui Maximum security prison on March 6.
On
March 19, Kondengui became Joe La Conscience’s permanent home when the
Mfoundi Court of First Instance handed him a six-moth jail sentence for
organizing “illegal meetings and demonstrations” after an expeditious
trial widely condemned by legal experts. Even non-violent protest à la Mahatma Gandhi does not pay in Cameroon. Only the silence of the slave – or of the grave – does…
Joe La Conscience or The Authoritarian Impulse of the Biya Regime
At first glance, the story of Joe La Conscience is just another personal tragedy in good old Cameroon; the tale of an individual and his family paying a heavy price for his political activism. But deep down, this is a story about Cameroon, its government, its people and its future. It is a very telling snapshot of the reigning political climate in Cameroon and a good indicator of what the Biya regime’s so-called troisième mandat will look like.
Nearly two decades ago an observer argued that :
Under the ancien regime, power was mostly exercised in a bullying and overbearing manner to limit people’s freedoms and ensure the survival of political leaders, but during the New Deal era it was usually employed in far less brutal ways mainly to feather the nests of our leaders.
We have come a long way since then, as the Biya regime has now merged the brutality of the Ahidjo regime with its own homegrown Kleptocracy. Today, just as during the Ahidjo regime, survival is the name of the game. Recent events have shown that in its bid to hang on to power at all cost, the Biya regime is, more than ever before, driven by an élan autoritaire or a dark authoritarian impulse which does not bode well for the country.
Extremists who for years have been itching for a head-on confrontation with “the forces of change” have finally gained a solid footing within the regime and are creating a deleterious political climate reminiscent of that which prevailed in the last years of the Abacha regime in next door Nigeria; a climate characterized by the emasculation of the civil society and organized political opposition, the muzzling of the press and persecution of journalists, the militarization of political life and the increasing use of martial language in regular political discourse, the isolation of potential catalysts for popular mobilization and political reawakening particularly artists, an increasing appeal to ethnicity, etc.
In 1994, Miltion Krieger posited that Cameroon's democratization experiment had taken off on the wrong footing because “Biya [was] more likely captive than capo” to obscure political lobbies which had “moved beyond conventional patrimonial politics to... ‘ethno-clientelism’”. Today, these lobbies, which were largely responsible for the political turmoil during the early multiparty years - and which conceived the infamous “Operation Mygale” in 1991 which bore an eerie similarity to the blueprint for the Rwandan genocide a few years later - are once again coming out of the shadows.
These lobbies have found solace in the motley collection of ethno-regional, political and personal interests which crystallized around the President duringthe campaign to modify the constitution – a constitutional amendment which was less about support for the Prince or the City and more about a political class desperately clinging to its privileges which would most likely disappear in the event of a regime change in 2011. In such a context, it is no surprise that individuals such as Joe la Conscience or Lapiro de Mbanga with even the slightest potential to mobilize the public against these corporate, ethnic and personal interests are mercilessly crushed.
Joe la Conscience or the Demobilization of the Cameroonian Masses
With no viable organized political force to stand up to Biya, it is now left to artists and other “lone wolfs’ to pick up the mantle for political change in Cameroon, usually with dire consequences as we have seen in the cases of Joe and Lapiro. Unfortunately unlike the 1990s where regime attempts to silence its most vocal critics ( Yondo Black, Celestin Monga, Pius Njawe, Senfo Tonkam, etc.) was met with resistance and mass mobilization, today there is instead a general feeling of resignation – the all-out militarization of national life has created a state of fear, or at least apprehension, which, although not as palpable or obvious as in some other African countries, is present nonetheless.
This “demobilization”, argues Cameroonian writer Patrice Nganang who has commented extensively on the Joe La Conscience case, does not augur well for the republic:
Never before have the arts forewarned us so clearly about the future of Cameroon; but never before have artists been so alone!... That Joe has been abandoned to the care of his wife… and a handful of friends is the most dangerous sign from the Cameroonian political scene… To abandon Joe la Conscience in the hell hole that is his cell, to abandon Lapiro de Mbanga… is to tell anyone who intends to rise up to assert his citizenship that he is alone. To forget these damned individuals… in the miasma of their loneliness, is to plant the seeds of discouragement in the heart of every citizen who, tomorrow, will wish to rise up to push back the darkness that has enveloped us. [my translation].
So are Cameroonians going to abandon Joe La Conscience, Lapiro the Mbanga and others to their fate, thereby giving the Biya regime a free hand to do as it pleases in Cameroon? Or are they going to join them to fully reassert their confiscated citizenship and freedoms?
