Samantha Power: Motorcade Of U.S. Ambassador Strikes, Kills Boy In Cameroon
Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was travelling through Cameroon Monday when a vehicle in her convoy struck and killed a young boy, CNN is reporting.
The vehicle in which Ms. Power was riding was not the one that struck the boy.
Power was traveling through a village in the northern part of Cameroon, according to the New York Times, at about 40 miles per hour. A young boy, excited at the commotion, ran out into the road to check out the convoy of gleaming-white SUV’s. As a helicopter flew overhead, the boy stared in amazement at it. It was then that he was struck.
US diplomat expresses ‘great sorrow’ after her convoy accidentally kills a boy in Cameroon https://t.co/ShJUOwWrOA pic.twitter.com/zW2gJ8W4p3
— lagos (@lagoscitynig) April 19, 2016
An ambulance in the convoy provided aid to the boy, but he later died of his injuries.
Ms. Power, when she heard of the incident, was aghast.
“Oh, my God. I want to go see his family.”
Though her security team tried to discourage her, Power did eventually return to visit with the boy’s family.
“[We] offer our profound condolences and to express our grief and heartbreak over what the family is going through.”
Motorcade Of UN Ambassador Samantha Power Kills A Child In Cameroon https://t.co/MYLNLhgdWQ pic.twitter.com/WsBDF2zFff
— Answers Africa (@AnswersAfrica) April 19, 2016
Power is travelling through Cameroon in an attempt to win over the hearts and minds of the Cameroonian people. The West African nation has been devastated by Boko Haram, the Islamist Nigerian terrorist organization whose name means “Western education is forbidden.”
The terrorist organization has made incursions into Cameroon, leaving destruction and agony in their wake. Villagers have seen entire villages burned to the ground, their livestock stolen, their men killed, their women raped.
Most devastating, however, are Boko Haram’s atrocities against girls and young women. Those who aren’t raped and killed on the spot are abducted, then either sold as sex slaves, forced to marry Boko Haram fighters, or forced to return to their homeland to carry out suicide bombing attacks.
When the boy was struck and killed, Power and her convoy were headed to the Cameroonian refugee camp known as Minawao, which houses 300,000 of the some 2.5 million people who have been displaced by Boko Haram.
“In the refugee camp we visited with, virtually every family you encountered has some horrific memory of Boko Haram coming into their village — whether that’s Nigerians who have come across the border to Cameroon, or Cameroonians who’ve been attacked in their own homes here in this country.”
Ms. Power met individually with one such victim of the Boko Haram violence in Cameroon — a 15-year-old girl who was abducted from her home and forced to either marry a fighter or be killed. Her baby in her lap, a crude drawing of a flower in her hands, the teenager kept her eyes to the ground, unable to look Ms. Power in the eye.
“The quadruply sad part is that she thinks she made a choice. That was no choice.”
Another person displaced by the Boko Haram atrocities is Hulatu Usman, 28. She told Ms. Power of her harrowing escape from the terrorist group, traveling through the bush with her five children in the dead of night, trying desperately to escape Nigeria for the relative safety of Cameroon. Fortunately, she and all five of her children made it to safety, though life in the refugee camp is scarcely an improvement.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has provided 300 troops to an 8,700-strong multinational task force charged with fighting the terrorists.
After Power’s convoy left the refugee camp, she and her convoy resumed their journey to destinations beyond, this time maintaining a much slower speed of 25 miles per hour.
[Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Fortune/Time Inc]
