Honourable members of Parliament, I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be able to share in this hearing and to be able to share what's going on in Southern Cameroons.
A civil protest movement in Southern Cameroons against systemic oppression, and what most Southern Cameroonians consider recolonization, transformed into a major crisis in 2016. Rather than engage in peaceful dialogue, the Cameroon government cut the Internet and used disproportionate force and helicopter gunships against peaceful protesters, resulting in several deaths. As the protests continued, the killing also continued. Southern Cameroonians formed armed groups and started to fight back. The Cameroon president declared war.
This transformed into a lot of chaos and mass killings and a lot of crime going on. It has resulted in thousands of deaths, as my colleagues have already said. Hundreds of thousands of people are internally displaced. There are about 100,000 refugees in neighbouring countries, and children who have not gone to school for the last four years.
When we look at this conflict, some analysts have described it as Rwanda in slow motion due to the mass killings, extrajudicial and summary executions, and rampant human rights abuses. There is overwhelming evidence of ongoing systemic atrocities carried out on the population of Southern Cameroons. These atrocities amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The “responsibility to protect” was coined in the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty report that was set up by the Canadian government in December of 2001. The work of the committee was to make sure that the international community never again fails to stop genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, western governments so far have put economic values above human rights in their dealings with the Biya government in Cameroon and are playing bystander to genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. By doing nothing, these countries are fully supporting these atrocities.
Canada can be an exception. There is an urgency for the international community to live up to its responsibility to protect, to help facilitate negotiations, to resolve the root causes of the conflict, to carry out an international investigation and to refer perpetrators of these atrocities to the International Criminal Court.
We request that this committee and the Canadian government invoke the doctrine of responsibility to protect in Southern Cameroons and call for international mediation to resolve the root causes of the conflict and self-determination for Southern Cameroons.
We ask this committee and the Canadian government to ask the Commonwealth to expel Cameroon from the body and call for international sanctions against Cameroon's leaders and all those who are carrying out atrocities in Southern Cameroons, and to refer the case to the International Criminal Court to hold perpetrators of these crimes accountable.
Thank you very much.