Thank you, Mr. Chair.
In 2009, I was part of the United Nations mission to Darfur, which gave us access to the leadership of the various sects that were involved in that conflict. The aim was to assess their willingness and capacity to engage in negotiations. We had access to a perspective that was broader and structural.
Since then, I've worked with four academics from Sudan to examine the role of transitional justice in the Darfur conflict. There are strong links, as Professor Medani mentioned, between the earlier conflict and the current one. The overall objective is the same. Territorial control previously was about control of grazing rights. Currently, it's about economic control, including gold and economic corridors. They're going about that control in the same way—large-scale ethnic cleansing. We know what that looks like. Our colleagues have described how horrific that is.
The overall point about the earlier conflict and the current one is that there is a large constituency behind the current conflict, as there was earlier on, meaning a population that supports and drives and gains from the military advances of the RSF in Darfur.
That means that trying to resolve the Darfur conflict, trying to resolve the Sudanese conflict, will leave the Darfur underlying set of issues still going on. Those sorts of issues are long-term. They're deeply ingrained and are not solvable by Canada or the international community in the near or medium term.
The attention, instead, needs to focus on the current ethnic cleansing that results in what the ICC does term as genocide in Darfur. The current risk to the current situation is that international attention is diverted elsewhere—Ukraine, Syria, Gaza—so neglect prevails in Darfur and Sudan.
Severe human rights violations continue to worsen. There are massacres. Famine is a heavy prospect. Agriculture is of course not under way in Darfur, and unfortunately neither is humanitarian food aid. We have a potential spread of the conflict internationally. The Zaghawa tribe is present both in western Darfur and in eastern Chad, with linkages up into the Chadian military and government.
The U.A.E. funds the RSF in a large respect, primarily due to the flow of what we call conflict gold coming out of northern Darfur through the RSF, landing in the U.A.E. This is like conflict diamonds. It's used to fuel the war. That's a primary linkage there.
In 2019, 1,000 RSF forces were present in Libya. They were also present in Yemen and in another war. They are used internationally already as a set of combatants. The proxy war possibilities are quite large coming out of this conflict if it goes unattended.
On ethnic connections, there's large-scale poverty and unhappiness among Arab tribes in Chad, which leads to the recruitment of young Chadian individuals into the RSF. Proximity of jihadist forces elsewhere in the Sahel also means that they look for areas of instability, and Darfur is certainly that.
You're looking at the ultimate balkanization of Sudan, where, like in Libya and Somalia, you have de facto on the ground different governments in different parts of the country—the RSF in the west and SAF in the east.
Recommendations include robust and ongoing international direct threats by Canada and by the international community to the perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing in Darfur now. It's actually fairly straightforward to find out who exactly they are—not just the top commanders but the lower-level combatants as well.
When we were in Darfur in 2009-10, we were amazed at how quickly the narrative on the ground changed when former president al-Bashir was indicted by the ICC. That narrative changed from thinking you were going to be able to keep the lands that you had conquered through ethnic cleansing to suddenly questioning that. It stood down and changed a degree of the fighting there. Again, direct threats to specific combatants on the ground by Canada and the international community would be useful there.
Coercive pressure needs to be applied to the U.A.E. We've already tried diplomatic pressure, and we are where we are today. Canada can employ coercive pressure to the U.A.E. to stop the weapons that flow.
With regard to the conflict gold, just like with conflict diamonds, there are international constructs that can be used against these flows, specifically for gold. The “OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas” is an international mechanism that Canada can lean into and use to try to pinch off the gold supply from Darfur to the U.A.E., which is supplying the RSF with weaponry.
Ultimately, of course, limited kinetic action in specific areas in Darfur by Canada and the international community would make a large point.
The tools are there. The coercive, precise tools are there. In my view, Canada, along with the international community, needs to get much more precise, robust and coercive in the application of these tools.
Thank you.