Cameroon: arms for deportees, the deal Washington won't name

According to Courrier international, which draws on exclusive reporting from the Wall Street Journal, the agreement reached between the United States and Cameroon for the expulsion of migrants includes a military aid programme. That aid would reportedly benefit a unit known for its abuses. Courrier international notes that the word "grotesque" is being used about this arrangement. We do not, at this stage, have the details of the programme: amounts, timetable, the precise identity of the unit, the number of people to be expelled. All of that remains to be established, and we will not invent it.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Take the equation as it is reported. On one side, a southern state that agrees to receive people expelled from a country where they were not born, or where they are not necessarily from. On the other, a power that pays in military equipment and training. The migrant becomes a bargaining chip, and the armed force the return payment. Washington is outsourcing its border, the way one outsources a service: cheaper, less visible, and above all far from American courts.

So-called dependency theory teaches us to look at who sets the terms of the exchange. Poor countries are not simply "behind": their relations with the centre have been organised so that the centre dictates the conditions, whether financial or, here, security-related. Cabral, in Return to the Source and his writings on the liberation struggle, already denounced "aid" designed to prop up local pseudo-bourgeoisies dependent on international capital (our translation, by paraphrase). Replace the bourgeoisie with a security apparatus and the mechanism is the same. You arm those who will guarantee order and diplomatic docility.

The most telling detail, if the Wall Street Journal report is confirmed, lies in the unit chosen. Backing a force notorious for abuses is no accident: it is buying a partner who needs outside protectors and who, in return, will not ask questions. Independence, as Fanon and Cabral pointed out, can change the flag without changing the structure, when a local elite inherits the apparatus left behind by the colony. A security apparatus then serves two masters: the foreign capital and the government in power.

There is also the division this trade sustains. Setting "national" workers against migrants is an old recipe; the expulsion policy is its industrial version. Who gains? Not the deportees, not the populations exposed to abuses, not the taxpayers footing the bill. Only those who can show their voters figures of "toughness".

The questions are simple. What does the US Congress know? What does Cameroonian society know? And who will oversee the use of these weapons? Until Washington and Yaoundé answer, this deal has a name: a trade in sovereignty.