OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso
The body of Burkina Faso's revered revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara is to be buried alongside 12 comrades at the spot where in 1987 they were assassinated, the country's ruling junta said on Friday.
The ceremony will take place
"in February" at the site of a memorial that already marks the
location, the government's spokesman, Communications Minister Jean-Emmanuel
Ouedraogo, said in a statement, without giving a date.
Sankara came to power in
August 1983 as an army captain aged just 33.
Nicknamed Africa's Che
Guevara, he was a fiery Marxist-Leninist who blasted the West for
neo-colonialism and hypocrisy.
He changed the country's name
from the colonial-era Upper Volta to Burkina Faso -- "the land of honest
men" -- and pushed through a range of reforms, including promoting
vaccination and banning female genital mutilation.
Sankara was idolized by
supporters of Pan-Africanism and egalitarianism, but his tenure was
short-lived.
He and a dozen other leaders
were gunned down by a hit squad at a meeting of the ruling National
Revolutionary Council in the capital Ouagadougou on October 15, 1987.
The killings took place on the
same day that Sankara's comrade-in-arms, Blaise Compaore, seized power.
He went on to rule for 27
years, during which Sankara's death was a strict taboo. He was ousted by public
protests and fled to Ivory Coast.
After Compaore's downfall, the
13 bodies were exhumed from a cemetery on the outskirts of the city for an
investigation.
It led to a lengthy trial that
culminated in April 2022 in life terms in absentia for Compaore and the
suspected hit squad leader, and a similar term for a detained general who had
been army commander at the time.
In the light of this trial,
the 13 should be buried "honorably," Friday's statement said.
Burkina Faso, a landlocked
state in the heart of West Africa's Sahel, is battling a seven-year-old
jihadist insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives and driven more than
two million people from their homes.
Anger within the military at
failures to stem the bloodshed helped spark two coups last year.
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