In a demonstration of its openhanded cooperative relationship with the Cangele administration, UpLink International has offered to defray a large portion of the highway’s construction cost with corporate funding. While no specific financial amount has been disclosed, its promised subsidy is rumored to be in excess of $10 million U.S., ensuring that no unfair tax burden will be imposed on residents of Port-Gentil and its surrounding districts.
Shortly before this story went to press, President Cangele was asked about media stories of political opposition to his aggressive backing of the UpLink licenses. “The stories were classic sensationalistic exaggerations,” he told our reporter, adding, “It is praiseworthy that none such accounts appeared in L’Union, our national beacon of journalistic integrity and accuracy.”
The president went on to explain that there has been no significant governmental dispute over the idea that UpLink International represents the nation’s telecommunications future.
“Any divisions that may have emerged concerned minor timing and procedural issues and were settled by brotherly, well-ordered debate,” he said. “My appearance with the foremost members of all our coalition parties will show that, regardless of political or tribal affiliations, the Gabonese people are joined by common principle, and a wish to champion West Africa’s shift from continuous cycles of violence and revolution to progressive, harmonious evolution at the dawn of the twenty-first century.”
From L’Union Online
(limited content English version):
CAMEROONIAN AND CONGOLESE LAWLESSNESS: WHO IS IN CHARGE NEXT DOOR?
FRANCEVILLE — Before sunrise on September 25, Abasi Aseme, 64, left his home in the village of Garabinzam accompanied by his three adult sons and several carts packed with furs, ivory, and a modest quantity of panned gold bought from Minkébé camp diggers, their little mule train bound for a trader’s market thirty miles to the south at the northern edge of Djoua Valley. They had made the trip through the lower Minkébé Forest every week for decades and were welcome callers at supply outposts along their sparsely traveled path. One of these posts was owned by Abasi’s older brother, Youssou.
When the Aseme family did not make their regular stop around noon, Youssou became concerned: in the remote bushland, a dangerous stalking ground for animal and human predators, locals know to travel by daylight or not at all. By early evening Youssou’s concern had turned to unease, and then to worry. The Asemes still had not appeared. Nor would they after darkness fell. Abasi did not have a telephone, and there was no way of contacting his brother’s wife to see whether anything might have occurred to delay his usual market visit.
Early the next morning Youssou and a small party of friends went out in search of his relatives, striking out north toward Garabinzam. Two hours later, the missing traders were found murdered, their wagons and merchandise gone. The killings had been savage. All four victims had their throats cut, their bodies lined in a row on the trail, their legs hacked off below the knees and tossed into the nearby brush, where it must have been evident the body parts would be discovered immediately.
Among Cameroonian bandits, mutilation of the lower extremities is considered a message to those who might be inclined toward pursuit, a well-known signal that they would best keep their own legs from leading them to certain death.
The Asemes are but the latest casualties in repetitive waves of attacks on rural Gabonese by coupeurs de route, armed thieves who have fled from antigang crack-downs in Yaoundé and Ambam in Cameroon using graft to buy the cooperation of police and slipping easily through porous border checkpoints along the Minkébé wilderness’s mountain ridges. Once believed to pose a threat only at our country’s northernmost boundaries, these thugs have in recent months formed alliances of convenience with splinter guerrilla bands made fugitive by Congolese political conflict, and together staged raids on townships such as N’Dendé, deep in our country’s interior, with scattered incidents of road ambush reported as far south as the Iguéla, Loango, and Sette Cama Forests near the coast. The stepped up violence has led Gabonese law enforcement officials to ask their colleagues across the border when they intend to take responsibility for apprehending their vicious castoffs…
From the Cameroon Tribune Online
— Editorial
(translated from the French):
GABON’S NATIONAL CREDO: IF YOU CANNOT COMPETE, CONDEMN!
by Motmou Benote
Let us begin with the obvious: gang violence and brigandage are unacceptable wherever they may originate. But unless Gabon ceases it efforts to make others accountable for the outlaw problem in its northern districts, casting blame elsewhere rather than engaging in an aggressive pursuit of homegrown malefactors and tribal agitators, its police and military forces will soon be pointing their guns skyward to guard against menaces from distant galaxies…
They toiled in the steamy midmorning heat, a dozen men in jungle fatigues swinging their machetes through the parched brown sedge and waxy clusters of euphorbia beside the dirt road. They kept their sleeves rolled down and wore heavy protective gloves, taking care to cover their skin; the succulents were filled with burning latex juice, and had thorny spurs all along the ribs of their fat, tangled branches.
The men thrashed at the dense vegetation. Their head wraps were drenched with sweat. The camouflage hoods they would put on were still stuffed in their pockets, unneeded as yet. There were no eyes about to see them, and they were not in any hurry to feel the heavyweight Nomex/Kevlar fabric slicken against their streaming wet cheeks and brows.
They worked in the heat, worked ceaselessly, creating clear fields of fire for their ambush. Their shoulder-slung Milkor 5.56-mm semiautomatic rifles were of South African origin, as were the lightweight 60-mm commando mortars and multishot barrel-loaded grenade launchers hidden farther back in their 4×4. Two Shmel RPO-A infantry rocket tubes rounded out their arsenal of heavy weapons, the “Bumblebee” variants designed to fire fuel-air explosive warheads.
A Russian military specialty used to devastating effect during their Chechen campaigns, man-portable thermobaric hardware cannot be purchased cheaply on the black market.
The job’s sponsors had been anything but close fisted.
Although some members of the band had equipped their mortar tubes with reticulated, microprocessor-controlled electronic sights, most felt the attachments were burdensome and off-balancing to their aim. Kirdi and Kulani bushmen from northern Cameroon, they had been raised with the bow and arrow as rural Americans might be with the hunting rifle. Where seasonal drought defeats cultivation of food crops, live game is a vital source of protein, and the need to kill or go hungry does more to perfect one’s weaponry skills than gun sport. For these men, the ability to acquire a target was basic to their survival, and they were masters at calculating range and determining projectile trajectories.
Five hundred feet ahead of them, the dirt track plunged eastward into a thick, shaded grove of mixed okoumé and bubinga, where a smaller group chopped at the tree trunks with axes, perspiration glistening on their muscled brown arms, their blades snarling in epiphytic vines that coiled up and up around the bark into the leafy green crowns.
The trees crashed down one by one and were rolled across the road. Then branches, brush, and pieces of slashed vines were strewn over the felled trunks to lay a screen of foliage over the ax cuts. Obscured from sight by broken patterns of shadow, the treefall blended into the overgrowth from a distance, and to the drivers of the line of approaching vehicles, would appear to be a natural phenomenon. Long before they might inspect it closely enough to learn otherwise, their convoy would be surrounded on all sides.