Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
The trial of 14 men, including a former president, is poised to begin in Burkina Faso over the assassination of the country’s revered revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara 34 years ago.
Captain Thomas Sankara |
The killing of Sankara, an icon of pan-Africanism,
has cast a shadow over Sahel state, fuelling its reputation for turbulence and
bloodshed.
Sankara and 12 others were shot by a hit
squad in October 1987 during a putsch that brought his friend and
comrade-in-arms Blaise Compaoré to power.
Compaoré ruled the country for the next
27 years before being deposed by a popular
uprising and fleeing to neighbouring Ivory Coast, which granted
him citizenship.
He and his former righthand man, Gen
Gilbert Diendéré, who once led the elite presidential security regiment, face
charges of complicity in murder, harming state security and complicity in the
concealment of corpses.
Compaoré, who has always rejected
suspicions that he orchestrated the killing, will be tried in absentia from
Monday by the military court in the capital, Ouagadougou.
His lawyers announced last week that he
would not be attending a “political trial” flawed by irregularities and said he
enjoyed immunity as a former head of state.
Diendéré, 61, is serving a 20-year
sentence for masterminding a plot in 2015 against the transitional government
that followed Compaoré’s ouster.
Another prominent figure among the accused is Hyacinthe Kafando, a former chief warrant officer in Compaoré’s presidential guard, who is accused of leading the hit squad. He is on the run.
Sankara with Blaise Compaoré |
Sankara, an army captain and
Marxist-Leninist, came to power in a coup in 1983 aged 33.
Often referred to as the African Che
Guevara, he tossed out the country’s name of Upper Volta, a legacy of the
French colonial era, and renamed it Burkina Faso, which means “the land of
honest men”.
He pushed ahead with a socialist agenda
of nationalisations and banned female genital mutilation, polygamy and forced
marriages.
Like Ghana’s former leader Jerry Rawlings, he became an idol in leftwing circles in Africa, lauded for his radical policies and defiance of the big powers.
Burkina Faso has long been burdened by
silence over the assassination – during Compaoré’s long time in office, the
subject was taboo – and many are angry that the killers have gone unpunished.
“The trial will mark the end to all the
lying – we will get a form of truth. But the trial will not be able to restore
our dream,” Halouna Traoré, a comrade of Sankara and survivor of the putsch,
said in a TV interview.
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