Good afternoon. My name is Serge Blais. For the past 17 years, I have been working for a Canadian organization called Development and Peace. Since the early 1980s, I have also been working with African and Canadian civil society organizations. I salute this initiative and, with our African partners, we feel that it is time to ask questions about Canadian foreign policy and Canadian cooperative policy in Africa. As someone who has regularly visited Africa for the past 30 years, I see that the situation throughout the continent is now worse than it was 30 years ago, in terms of development, security and the humanitarian situation. We are talking in particular about Central Africa, since we will be using the Democratic Republic of Congo as our reference point.
Living conditions are getting worse. Infrastructure has become large-scale ruins and we can question Canadian diplomatic policy, in my opinion. When we meet with our civil society partners from Central Africa, these questions get asked.
Today, massacres occurred in North Kivu. There were some yesterday. For the past week there has been an increase in the number of people killed in North Kivu. Rebels were pushed out of North Kivu about a month or a month and a half ago, but they have regrouped and built new headquarters in South Kivu.
Canada had applauded the agreement between the Congolese and the Rwandan armies which was presented as a solution to the problems being caused by the rebels, who are creating insecurity, terrorizing the populations, raping women and trafficking in natural resources.
Once again, we feel that this is a short-term approach, a sort of half measure, like all of the solutions that Canada has supported with regard to resolving the problems in Africa. I don't want to go back too far in time, but with regard to Central Africa, we can all look to what happened in Rwanda.