YAOUNDE (AFP) — Troops on Thursday patrolled the streets of Cameroon's capital Yaounde, after violence that President Paul Biya blamed on a campaign to overthrow him, vowing to use all legal means to quell the unrest.
The violence has left at least 17 dead in towns mainly in the west of the the central African country since Saturday, according to an AFP toll.
Soldiers took up positions at Yaounde's main junctions and guarded petrol stations, the targets of vandalism in the unrest that flared up Monday in the port city and economic capital Douala, to the west on the Gulf of Guinea.
Streets were still largely deserted on Thursday in Douala, a stronghold of the opposition Social Democratic Front (SDF), where sporadic gunfire was heard in some districts overnight.
In Yaounde, a few people used their private vehicles, but buses and taxis were still not running after the violence spread to the capital on Tuesday, a day after unions called a road haulage strike over a fuel price rise.
Demonstrators also protested at the increasing cost of essential goods and basic goods, while the political opposition has been angry since Biya, 75, in January strongly indicated he planned to run for a new term of office in 2011.
The president, who has ruled Cameroon since 1982, rarely makes appearances in public but on Wednesday evening made a television address to blame strife on "apprentice sorcerers in the shadows".
"For some ... the objective is to obtain by violence what they have not achieved through the ballot box," he said. "What we're looking at here is the exploitation ... of the transport strike for political ends."
Biya said he would use all legal means to re-establish order, since the toll of "human and material (damage is) probably very high".
Shortly afterwards, security forces raided the residence halls in Yaounde's university district, where students accused them of injuring several people and ransacking rooms.
Riot police on Thursday clashed with youth gangs on the outskirts of Douala, and residents said small groups of young people were around in the city, where looters took advantage of the strike to raid shops, targeting those owned by Chinese immigrants among others.
The strike was called off Wednesday after union leaders and the government agreed a new fuel price. Petrol had gone up from 584 CFA francs (.89 euros) a litre to 600, and was brought down again to 594 (.90 euros / 1.3 dollars).
The change may appear small, but not on a continent where many subsist on less than a dollar a day or in Cameroon, where the SDF, led by political veteran John Fru Ndi, accuses the government of plunging the county into poverty.
"What's happening ... has nothing to do with a simple strike against a rise in fuel prices," SDF vice-president Joshua Osih said on Wednesday. "It's the expression of multiple frustrations among the Cameroonian people."
"The trouble runs deep," he added, pointing out that most of those engaged in vandalism were unemployed people under 30.
The unrest spread to Bamenda in the heartland of the SDF in an English-speaking part of Cameroon bordering on Nigeria, but that town was reported quiet again Thursday.
The first casualty of the latest strife on Saturday was a man killed when riot police broke up an opposition rally in Douala. Authorities in the city banned all demonstrations in mid-January.
Biya earlier said that a current constitutional bar on a third elected presidential term "sits badly with the very idea of democratic choice", and the old guard in his Cameroon People's Democratic Movement now wants it scrapped.
The business watchdog organisation Transparency International reports that Cameroon has the worst level of endemic official corruption in Africa.
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