Cameroonian officials said Monday five people are dead and several hundred are homeless in ongoing conflicts between host communities and people who arrived after being displaced by Boko Haram terrorism in the nation’s border area near Chad and Nigeria.
Hundreds of irate host community members set fire to at least 60 government-built houses for internally displaced people in Yala Yalta, military officials said. Three displaced people died, and two host community residents died of injuries while being rushed to a local hospital.
Government officials say it was the second burning of houses in the past five days.
Residents of Yala Yalta, a village in Mayo-Sava, an administrative unit near Cameroon's border with Chad and Nigeria, say they no longer want the people who were displaced by Boko Haram Islamic terrorists in their village.
They accuse the displaced people of kidnapping for ransom and provoking conflicts over scarce water, farm crops and fuel wood.
Cameroon's Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure said at least 400 of about 2,000 people displaced by terrorism in Mayo-Sava live in Yala Yalta and surrounding villages.
Local churches, including the Roman Catholic Church and the Cameroon Evangelical Church, say the abduction of members of the host community is the immediate cause of the ongoing conflicts.
Cameroon's military said it freed four host community members abducted for ransom.
Halidu Harouna, a pastor of the Cameroon Evangelical Church, told VOA via phone from Yala Yalta that villagers used bows and arrows, machetes and spears to attack the people seeking refuge in Yala Yalta.
He said they torched houses after someone identified two members of a gang that kidnapped civilians for ransom as being among the displaced people.
Villagers are also angry that theft of their cattle and crops has increased in recent months, Harouna said.
Military officials said host community members have attacked and wounded at least 20 displaced persons for allegedly stealing from their plantations within the past two weeks.
Captain Mark Nya Nanah, a commander of Cameroonian forces fighting Boko Haram in the central African state, said troops have been deployed to stop host communities from attacking displaced persons and their property.
The military has asked people who have fled the violence to return and has assured communities they will get military protection.
Some internally displaced people have acknowledged that some of their peers attack villagers and steal. They said a majority of the displaced people who attack villagers are either former fighters who surrendered or thieves hiding among displaced persons, a claim VOA could not independently verify.
Cameroon's ministries of agriculture and livestock said conflicts between host communities and displaced persons are increasing because of a food shortage caused by floods in October.
The government said several thousand goats, sheep and cows were either killed or swept away by flood waters, while several thousand hectares of farmland were destroyed.
The United Nations says over 40,000 people have been killed and 3 million have fled their homes in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad since 2009, when fighting between Nigerian government troops and Boko Haram militants spread to the other three countries.
