Chad

As Washington ratchets up the pressure on the International Criminal Court, sanctioning two more high-ranking staff members in recent weeks, a small but growing number of the global tribunal's member states have announced they will quit.

The recent departure of Venezuela and Chad brings the number up to five, joining Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

The withdrawal comes as the ICC faces hostility from Washington and a leadership crisis.

after ousting its own chief prosecutor.

You founded the Honnold Foundation in 2012, and you donate a third of your annual income to, uh, the foundation.

It started with a climb in Chad in Africa.

Can you tell us the story?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, so actually I think the Chad expedition was in 2009, so it was a few years before, but that was kind of, you know, it germinated into this idea.

Like, I read a lot of environmental nonfiction and I, you know, read quite a bit about global poverty and things like that.

And so, you know, I kind of knew rationally that there, at the time, there were a billion people on Earth without access to power.

And but that's one thing to read about when you're in California, you know, but then when you actually fly to Chad, which is Central Africa and one of the poorest countries in the world, uh, and then to drive into the middle of nowhere, like literally the armpit of, of, of Earth, you know.

Like many who hail from Sudan's peripheries, his date of birth was not officially recorded, though he is thought to be in his late 40s.

He claims to have been born in Sudan, but his family, members of an Arab tribe of camel herders and traders, are said to have arrived in western Sudan's Darfur region in the 1980s, having fled conflict and drought in Chad.

Hemeti came of age in south Darfur, where his family eventually settled.

He dropped out of school in the third grade and later began to do business along Sudan's porous borders with Libya and Egypt.

The indigenous, sedentary African peoples of Darfur and the nomadic Arabs have different cultures, identities, religious rituals, and racial backgrounds, but have broadly coexisted for centuries.

In the early noughties, however, competition for resources, precipitated by climate breakdown and desertification, triggered conflict between local groups.

The influx of weaponry in the late nineties and early noughties in part from the civil war in Chad along Darfur's border, made the conflict bloodier.

In 2003, as a result of prolonged drought, but also decades of misrule by central governments that favoured Arab tribes over others, Darfur's disgruntled members of the non-Arab population turned to armed rebellion against the government.

In fact, the African Union where we banned military coup, and if you conducted any change of government, In an unconstitutional manner, we suspended you, we imposed sanctions, we would put you in travel bans, and we would attempt to isolate you as a member state.

But look at the number of coup d'etats that have just happened, especially in North Africa, in Niger, in Chad.

There are few areas of democracy thriving like Senegal and Ghana.

The second one is the cap to two terms.