The once safe African nation of Burkina Faso is becoming lawless
Credit: Simon Townsley/The once safe African nation of Burkina Faso is becoming lawless
“Stay! Stay! It’s me they want!” were reportedly the president’s last words.
Captain Thomas Sankara walked out of the building with his hands held high. A firing squad gunned him down then and there.
In the 1980s, the Captain tried to forge a national identity for the Republic of Upper Volta out of the ruins of French colonialism.
He renamed the country, Burkina Faso, meaning ‘The Land of the Upright Man’. But two bullets in the head put an end to the revolutionary’s dreams.
Thirty-three years later, a statue of the Captain stands near the spot where he died in the capital, Ouagadougou. Sankara’s fist is raised defiantly in the air. But he would despair if he saw what had become of his country today.
The Land of the Upright Man is on its knees, buckling under the weight of the fastest-growing jihadist insurgency on earth, which is spreading through West Africa.
This week, the UK sent 300 frontline troops to neighbouring Mali’s beleaguered peacekeeping mission. It is the largest contribution by Britain to a UN mission since Bosnia and the most dangerous deployment since Afghanistan.
But across its southern border Burkina Faso is falling to anarchy. In the six short years since Burkina Faso suffered its first attack, terrorists allied to Al Qaeda and Islamic State have turned one of Africa’s most peaceful states into one of the most dangerous places on earth.
The jihadists have overwhelmed the military, driving the forces of law and order back towards the capital. Armed gangs, traffickers and militias have sprung up to fill the vacuum and weapons have flooded in from the Sahara and the Gulf of Guinea.
A girl plays with her doll, in a camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Ouagadougou
Credit: Simon Townsley
One does not need to go far to see how far Captain Sankara’s dream has fallen. Some 60 miles north of his statue is the small city of Kaya.
There, Daoda, a seven-year-old boy, stands mutely next to his screaming 18-month old sister, waiting for a handout of powdered milk.
Last Christmas, gunmen surrounded Daoda’s village while his family slept. The men mounted machine guns on washing stands and opened fire on the defenceless civilians to shouts of ‘Allah Akbar’.
A single bullet tore through the wall, through Daoda’s mother’s head and out into his arm, tearing it off. Another bullet cut through his baby sister’s leg.
“I don’t want to talk about my village again; my mother died there,” he mutters.
The country’s war has killed about 5,000 and forced about a million people to flee their homes. Tens of thousands have sought refuge in Kaya, with new waves arriving almost every day.
Thousands of schools have been closed across Burkina Faso because of the violence. Now more than 1,700,000 children like Daoda are in need of humanitarian assistance, according to Unicef.
“Three times gunmen attacked our village in the middle of the night,” says Ouegoudaoua Gasse, a farmer.
“Four men were going to the mosque to pray. They shot them in the back as they tried to run,” says the 50-year-old, raising his hands to mimic the rapid fire of an automatic rifle.
“They were good people. We did not even have time to bury the bodies. I have no idea why they did it. I don’t know who they are.”
Many struggle to understand how Burkina Faso fell so quickly. Yet in many ways, the crisis can be traced back to the death of the Captain.
Sankara’s rule was far from perfect. But during the authorititarian’s four-year presidency, he launched an ambitious nation-building project, investing in agriculture, promoting literacy and championing women’s rights.
The British Army have deployed a Task Force to Mali
Blaise Compaoré, who is accused of orchestrating the assassination, came to power after Sankara’s death. The nation-building projects stalled and parasitic, dictatorial rule became the norm for almost three decades.
Libya’s Civil War in 2011 was the trigger that made everything fall apart. Rebels and allied jihadists invaded northern Mali in 2012, with weapons looted from Colonel Gaddafi’s vast arsenals.
President Compaoré kept the fighting on his border at bay for several years with the help of his presidential guard and Moustapha Chafi, his Mauritanian spy chief, who boasted unrivalled connections to jihadist groups.
Today, there is a broad consensus that Mr Chafi struck a shadowy deal with the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, allowing the jihadist fighters to use northern Burkina Faso to launch attacks in Mali. In exchange, the jihadists did not attack Burkina Faso while large parts of Mali went up in flames.
“It’s no secret. I think Chafi was negotiating with the jihadists and that’s why they didn’t attack,” says Bénéwendé Stanislas Sankara, a deputy president of parliament.
But in 2014, Mr Compaoré’s house of cards collapsed amid a popular revolution. The jihadists sensed a moment of weakness and plunged into the fledging democracy, exposing the deep societal fractures left by the centralised control and underinvestment in rural areas.
Hundreds, probably thousands, of disillusioned young Burkinabe men have joined their ranks. The financial attraction is clear. Analysts say the young men can earn far more fighting for the terrorist in a month than they could earn in a year herding or farming.
The conflict has acquired an ethnic dynamic. The terrorists have cleverly setting once-peaceful communities at each others’ throats.
As the government has retreated, hundreds of self-defence militia groups known as Koglweogo — “guardians of the bush” in the local Mooré language — have formed to police rural areas.
Many of the militiamen hail from the majority ethnic Mooré community. Despite widespread accusations of egregious killings, the government, whose most powerful members are also Mooré, have turned a blind eye.
In Poessin on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, The Sunday Telegraph met a band of a dozen Koglweogo militiamen clad in brown uniforms. After showing off their ageing shotguns, bags of seized cannabis, the militiamen took your correspondent to see their main prize: four men chained to a tree.
Prisoners of the self defence force the Koglweogo in the village of Poessin near Ouagadougou
Credit: Simon Townsley
“They are thieves. We tracked them down through our sources [in the local community],” says Emmanuel Tiendrebeogo, a burly bearded man, gesturing at the chains around the men’s’ ankles.
When asked how his crew can be sure if they’ve got the right people, Mr Tiendrebeogo replies: “We have a lot of experience doing this, we know it is them.”
They are far tamer than groups found further into the bush, where bands of Koglweogo and self-defence militias roam around with Kalashnikovs and target who they please.
Several analysts in Ouagadougou said that Burkina Faso had already joined the ranks of Somalias and Libyas of this world.
“The government cannot protect people or control what happens outside Ouagadougou, Kaya and Bobo Dioulasso — Burkina Faso is a failed state,” says Mahamadou Sawadogo, a senior security analyst, referring to the country’s major cities.
Western intelligence officers say they are worried that Burkina Faso’s conflict will soon spread out into the Gulf of Guinea nations, like Ivory Coast and Ghana, a key UK partner. In June 2020, suspected jihadists killed around ten Ivorian soldiers near the border with Burkina Faso. One senior source close to the Ghanaian President said that the country’s intelligence services foiled a major terror attack in late 2019.
Back at Thomas Sankara’s statue in Ouagadougou, Serge Bayala sits on a cracked plastic chair. For much of his life, Mr Bayala has taken to the streets to protest for democracy and Sankarist ideals.
His arms are lined with marks from where Mr Compaoré’s security forces tortured him and his leg is still swollen from where a bullet shattered his bone at a protest against the authoritarian several years ago.
Mr Compaoré is away in exile but the scarred activist struggles to find any solace in that fact. “The only bit of integrity left in Burkina Faso today is the name,” he says.
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