(Ottawa) The first bases of a potential peace agreement in Cameroon have just been laid, and it is in Canada that the plans have been made, learned The Press.
The Central African country appealed to the Canadian government last summer to invite it to act as a mediator in the dispute between the Cameroonian government and English-speaking separatists, according to our information.
Secret meetings were held in Montebello, Mont-Tremblant and Toronto to allow the parties to negotiate, said a Canadian government source who requested anonymity, not being authorized to discuss the file publicly.
The sessions made it possible to establish a roadmap towards a potential peace agreement and a series of confidence-building measures; it also formalized the role that Canada will play as arbiter throughout the process, according to another federal source in Ottawa.
Switzerland had already tried to play matchmaker in 2019, but the approach did not bear fruit. “Everything is at a standstill”, reads an article published in July 2021 in the Swiss daily Timewhere reference was also made to an insistence by the Canadian government.
“On the other side of the Atlantic, Canada, which finances with Switzerland the mission […] up to approximately 800,000 Swiss francs [près de 1,2 millions de dollars canadiens]and the United States absolutely wants Swiss facilitation to continue […] “, we read there.
“A Silent Disaster”
Historic tensions simmering in the English-speaking South West and North West regions escalated into armed conflict in 2017 between government forces and the movement seeking independence for the so-called republic of Ambazonia.
Armed separatist groups kidnap, terrorize and kill civilians, commit rape, burn schools or order them closed, Human Rights Watch denounced last June.
The conflict left more than 6,000 dead and 765,000 displaced, of whom 70,000 found refuge in Nigeria; more than 600,000 children can no longer attend school, according to the International Crisis Group.
“We can say that it is a kind of silent disaster, because it is not very publicized”, argues Mamoudou Gazibo, professor in the department of political science at the University of Montreal.
The conflict dates back to colonization — in 1961, the English-speaking regions that should have gone to Nigeria were joined to the French-speaking part to form Cameroon; Anglophones feel a “form of exclusion”, says the political scientist.
And President Paul Biya, 89, who came to power in 1982, seems helpless. “It is often said that he spends six months a year in Switzerland seeking treatment. We really wonder how the country is holding up, ”adds Professor Gazibo.
The Boko Haram Factor
To make matters worse, Cameroon is also grappling with “the repercussions of the emergence of the Boko Haram group”, notes Marie-Joëlle Zahar, researcher at the Center for International Studies and Research at the University of Montreal (CÉRIUM). .
The presence of the terrorist organization born in neighboring Nigeria “complicates the conflict, because it has given the government an additional argument for a response that is essentially security”, she elaborates.
This factor should be taken into account upstream rather than a posteriori, believes the one who is also director of the Research Network on Peace Operations.
“The question arose about Sudan. We said to ourselves afterwards that we had perhaps made the mistake of focusing on the conflict with the South, without understanding that there were very strong links with what was happening in Darfur and in other regions,” she says.
“We are, in my opinion, in a similar problem”, judge Mme Zahar.