Tony Blair the former british Prime minister in washington , Trump’s circle has embraced him. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and even hard-nosed White House aides appear to admire his diplomatic polish. The same man who helped launch a war that destabilized a region is now recasting himself as peacemaker.
EDITORIAL desk | The Independentist
It was an oddly familiar scene: Sir Tony Blair, once again standing beneath the chandeliers of the White House. Two decades after he backed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the former British Prime Minister has returned to Washington—not to beat the drums of war, but to sell a post-war peace blueprint for Gaza.
American papers were quick to frame his comeback. The New York Times noted that Blair had been “tortured” by the Middle East since Iraq and warned that his chances of redemption were “perilously slim.” The Washington Post called his reappearance unsurprising, describing his penchant for inserting himself into “the thorniest conflicts.” Trump’s circle has embraced him. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and even hard-nosed White House aides appear to admire his diplomatic polish. The same man who helped launch a war that destabilized a region is now recasting himself as peacemaker.
But for the people of the Southern Cameroons, Blair’s new diplomatic crusade feels less like redemption and more like déjà vu. Britain has a long history of inserting itself into global conflicts — and an equally long history of abandoning its solemn responsibilities when they are no longer politically convenient. Nowhere is that more painfully evident than in Buea.
In April 1961, the United Nations adopted Resolution 1608 (XV), requiring Britain to convene a tripartite conference between the Southern Cameroons, La République du Cameroun, and itself before the transfer of sovereignty. That conference never happened. Instead, London quietly lowered the Union Jack on 30 September 1961 and walked away the next day, leaving the Southern Cameroons exposed to annexation and assimilation. What was supposed to be a trusteeship with obligations became a cynical geopolitical exit.
This was not mere administrative negligence. It was a historic betrayal. Britain left without constitutional safeguards, without international guarantees, and without fulfilling its trusteeship mandate. And for over six decades, that abandonment has shaped the destiny of millions. It sowed the seeds of the current conflict and left a wound that no amount of diplomatic posturing in Washington can heal.
The betrayal deepened in 1992. After Cameroon’s first multiparty presidential elections were widely believed to have been rigged to deny John Fru Ndi and the Social Democratic Front (SDF) victory, Fru Ndi reportedly reached out to the British government led by Tony Blair for support. What he received was a cold shoulder. London showed no appetite to challenge the French-backed Yaoundé regime or to support democratic change. All signs pointed to a quiet understanding between Britain and France—a post-colonial pact in which France would dominate the former French Cameroun, while Britain would look the other way, sacrificing democratic aspirations and the Southern Cameroons question on the altar of geopolitical convenience.
And like clockwork, the same pattern has repeated itself ever since. From 1992 through 2025, each electoral cycle follows a familiar script: after the political selection exercise in Yaoundé, Britain will issue a carefully worded statement noting that “there might have been some irregularities, but the outcome would likely have been the same”. On that basis, London will declare the elections “free and fair” — even when the results are pre-determined and participation in Ambazonia is non-existent.
Once this ritual statement is made, business resumes. Banana deals are renewed, oil contracts reconfirmed, timber concessions extended, and British companies continue to quietly profit from a system built on the disenfranchisement and subjugation of the Southern Cameroons. Moral principles give way to trade and resource extraction. Justice gives way to convenience.
The irony is bitter. La République du Cameroun used the Southern Cameroons as its gateway into the Commonwealth in 1995, gaining membership in a club that prides itself on democracy, justice, and human rights. Yet in all the years since, no authentic Southern Cameroons voice has ever been heard within that same Commonwealth forum. The very people whose territory made Cameroon’s membership possible have been erased from the conversation, even as they endure occupation, mass atrocities, and diplomatic invisibility.
Today, Britain’s presence in Ambazonia has been reduced to cultural theatre. At occasional ceremonies, the King’s local representative appears in pidgin English and Lamso, dressed in traditional regalia—a spectacle of symbolism masking an absence of substance. There are no British schools, no British medical missions, no meaningful diplomatic engagement. Britain’s footprint has been virtually erased.
Meanwhile, without American support, there would be no specialist doctors to treat the sick, no critical humanitarian interventions, no real external lifeline. The contrast is striking: Britain, the administering power that once held legal responsibility for this territory, has retreated into silence and ceremony; the United States, which was never a colonial power here, provides the little tangible support that reaches ordinary people.
And yet, La République du Cameroun remains a member of the Commonwealth—a club that boasts of its commitment to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law—while occupying a people whose voices are silenced. Britain is complicit in this contradiction. It has allowed the Commonwealth to become a stage for hypocrisy rather than justice.
The ultimate irony is this: with the formal “completion” of decolonisation, Southern Cameroons remains under British rule in international law. The United Kingdom never completed the decolonisation process as mandated by the United Nations Trusteeship Council and General Assembly. The legal title to the territory was never properly transferred. By law, Britain remains the administering authority; by practice, it has abandoned its responsibilities.
And this is where the moral hypocrisy is most stark. These international legal instruments—trusteeship agreements, decolonisation protocols, and self-determination charters—were largely engineered by Western powers themselves. Yet when it no longer suits their interests, they are the first to ignore or break the very rules they wrote. Britain and its allies crafted the legal architecture for decolonisation after World War II. But when it came to Southern Cameroons, they treated international law as optional.
So one must ask, with the clarity of history: What wrong did the Southern Cameroons do to Britain? Why has London chosen silence, decade after decade, as Buea’s people are crushed under the weight of a fraudulent union and an aggressive assimilation project? Britain’s silence is not neutrality; it is complicity.
Blair’s Institute for Global Change has since taken hundreds of millions from billionaire donors, and he has reinvented himself as a global statesman. He is comfortable mediating between Trump and Netanyahu, between Hamas and Washington. Yet neither he nor any British prime minister since 1961 has shown the courage to confront Britain’s unfinished business in the Southern Cameroons.
Steve Bannon recently called Blair “an opportunist who lives large on the payroll of the world’s worst people.” That judgment may be harsh, but it points to a larger truth: Britain’s political class is far more interested in projecting moral authority abroad than reckoning with the moral debts it left behind.
The question is not whether Blair can sell a Gaza plan to Trump. The question is whether Britain will ever confront its own complicity in the dispossession of a people who trusted it to deliver self-determination. Will Britain ever regret abandoning the Southern Cameroons—or is that moral reckoning deferred to some future Tory prime minister willing to face history head-on?
For now, the people of Ambazonia watch Blair’s Washington pageantry with the cold clarity of those who have been here before: Britain talks peace abroad, while leaving unfinished wars in its wake.
The Independentist
