Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

In the Fragana Valley of Central Asia lies Soch, a little pocket of Uzbekistan's territory

that lies entirely within Kyrgyzstan. The valley is a tangle of such exclaves and clashes

that the many border crossings are increasing. And a word of caution if you're planning

to drive in Estonia. The country's innovation-minded authorities are running a trial in which

speeding is punished not with a fine but with a long roadside timeout.

First up though. Not so long ago, Cameroon was a stable country in a fragile region. Today,

it's anything but. For the past three years a bloody conflict has been raging.

Separatist militias want independence for the English-speaking areas of the mainly

Francophone country. The government's trigger-happy forces are burning down villages while

the militias are becoming increasingly violent. Thousands have died in the unrest. More than

half a million have been forced from their homes. I spent a week traveling in the Anglophone

regions where the effects of the war are clear for everyone to see.

John McDermott is our Africa correspondent. In village after village that I drove through,

I saw fields at a grown wild, houses that had been burned down and several buildings

that had just been pop marked with bullets. The conflict was inescapable.

The origins of the conflict go back at least a century after the First World War. The

former German colony of Cameroon was split up between Britain and France. Then when those

parts became independent in 1960 and 1961, they were spliced together to make modern-day Cameroon.

The country is officially bilingual with roughly 20% of people speaking English and 80% of

people speaking French. The English speakers claim decades of marginalisation by the central

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