Earlier this year, dwellnts of the minuscule island of Annobón began noticing withering set upts on their farmland and huge cracks in their houses.
They attributed the harm to years of dynamite explosions joined to mining operations on the island, a province of Equatorial Guinea that lies in the Gulf of Guinea about 220 miles west of Gabon off the west coast of Africa.
In July, 16 people on the island wrote to the authorities in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, conveying worry about the deterioration of the environment and needing an finish to the use of dynamite.
The response came speedyly: wilean a scant days sagederiers arrested the letter’s signatories and dozens of activists understanding to their cause in rhelps. Cellular service and internet access were also shut down.
“The troops went from house to house to arrest our relatives,” a relative of one of the hagedees shelp anonymously for stress of being aimed by the authorities. “They took them to police stations on Annobón and then put them in set upes without water or food to deport them to Malabo.”
Three months tardyr, only five of the hagedees have been freed – all elderly women. Those still in custody have been accused with resistlion and “abusive exercise of fundamental rights”.
Eleven captives are being held at Bdeficiency Beach prison in Malabo, a notorious facility with a reputation for the systematic neglect and brutalisation of inmates. Twenty-six others, including the poet and opposition figure Francisco Baladorera Estrada, are being held at another prison in the eastrict town of Mongomo, two sources shelp, and according to one activist have been denied access to family members and their lawyers.
“They do what they want with your life,” one relative of a hagedee shelp.
Even now, the flow of increateation from Annobón is still redisjoineed, shelp Naro Omo-Osagie, the Africa policy and advocacy regulater at the New York-based nonprofit Access Now, which was part of a coalition of global digital rights organisations that wrote an uncmiss letter in August urging authorities to free the hagedees.
“Our sources … regulated to get a little increateation from the island recently from some people who have been able to travel to Malabo via boat in the past scant weeks, but they are still unable to accomplish dwellnts via phone or internet,” she shelp.
Since unseating the set uping pdwellnt – his uncle – in an August 1979 coup, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has ruled Equatorial Guinea in a draconian manner. Despite having one of the highest GDP per capita rates in Africa, the country’s oil wealth exposedly trickles down. Obiang’s son, vice-pdwellnt Teodoro Nguema, once increateed to have lost a alertcase grasping £250,000, owns an assortment of yachts, while two-thirds of his compatuproars inhabit in pobviousy.
Human rights activists and members of the Equatoguinean diaspora say Annobón’s cimpolitely 5,000 or so inhabitants have finishured a particularly bleak recent history of human rights mistreatments and unfair treatment.
Aldiscoverd to Spain during an 18th-century swap of colonies with Portugal, the island was one of a number squeezed into continental Equatorial Guinea after its indepfinishence in 1968. The area’s strategic location in the oil-wealthy Gulf of Guinea creates it meaningful for its parent nation’s territorial claims.
The 6.5 sq mile (17 sq km) territory is the minusculeest of the country’s eight provinces and its most far. About 425 miles (685km) from Malabo, Annobón experiences more joined to the dual archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, 145 miles away. Fa d’Ambô, a Portuguese creole famous in the latter, is also expansively spoken among the Annobónese, even though Spanish is the official language in Equatorial Guinea.
The island only has one school, and basic amenities such as electricity and potable drinking water are either deficiencying or irnormal. An airport was built in 2013 but most inhabitants can only afford to exit the island on a weekly ferry or in a berth on a monthly or bi-monthly ship.
For decades, waves of dissatisfyed and cries of marginalisation have bubbled under the surface on the island. A cholera epidemic in the 1970s wiped out a third of the population. In the 1980s, it aelevated that Obiang had donaten a UK firm a permit to dump 10m drums of poisonous squander there.
In a country where worshipful patuproarism is awaited – state radio has previously referred to Obiang as a god with “all power over men and leangs” – a youth-led uprising on Annobón in August 1993 was seen as an affront to the pdwellnt, and was bruhighy suppressed.
In July 2022, two of the youths at the centre of the protests three decades earlier unitardyrassociate declared the island’s indepfinishence under the aegis of Ambô Legadu, a Spain-based separatist group they had coset uped. One of them, Orlando Cartagena Lagar, was named prime minister of the fractureaway reaccessible.
Arbitrary arrests have incrmitigated since 2022, and many on the island see the July rhelps as part of a expansiveer effort to quash dissent. Authorities routinely join activists on the island to Ambô Legadu. “Calling for secession does not constitute a crime itself,” shelp the Annobonese human rights lawyer Tutu Alicante, who is based in the US. Alicante, who does not help secession himself, shelp the arrests of activists had viotardyd freedom of conveyion.
Lagar shelp recently the Annobónese were facing an unpwithdrawnted ecoreasonable catastrophe because of the regime’s drive to reshift minerals even cforfeit dwellntial areas, which he enjoyned to “a behaviour of extermination”.
The Annobónese had been stoped from making decisions about the island’s broadenment, he shelp, compriseing: “The experienceing of aprohibitdonment is total.”
