Terrorism survivor in Cameroon takes road to recovery: UN News special report
The words of 29-year Wala Matari from Cameroon may be uncompromising, but they are a heartfelt and honest window into the suffering she has experienced, and the enduring torment of the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by ruthless terrorists against this mother of six.
Twenty-nine-year-old Wala Matari, a former terrorist hostage, attends church with her children in the village of Zamai in the Far North region of Cameroon. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
Every Sunday, she told UN News in her new home town in the far north of the country, she walks the dusty paths which cross-cross the parched and sparsely-vegetated landscape, to bring her children to church.
Today she has come to St Joseph’s, this airy and high-ceilinged Catholic church in Zamai, to hear a pastor deliver his homily on peace and acceptance to a congregation of perhaps 200 worshippers, many of whom have been subjected to similar horrors.
“I go to church to drown my sorrows, to move on from the bad memories. We sleep better after hearing the word of God. After church, I am happy to be alive,” she told UN News, following the service.
One Wednesday night in September 2014 armed insurgents attacked her previous home in the village of Zelevet, ransacking and burning down homes and then dragging their occupants into the bush.
Unimaginable cruelty
They came at night, in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping with my children and my husband; they surrounded our neighbourhood, our house” she said. “They were completely masked, with only slits for their eyes.”
Her brother and his seven sons, her nephews, had their throats cut in front of her, an act of almost unimaginable cruelty; an example of the casual brutality deployed by armed insurgents in the region who terrorize and subjugate civilians in their path.
Hundreds of thousands of people, like Wala Matari, have been displaced and many thousands killed across the region over the past decade or so, as a result of an insurgency which continues to this day.
The reign of terror began in the north-east of Nigeria with the formation of a group which called itself Boko Haram – which roughly translates as Western-style education is a sin – and has since spread to include Cameroon, Niger and Chad.
