Clair MacDougall
OUAGADOUDOU, Burkina Faso—Dressed in green leopard-patterned fatigues, Gen. Gilbert Diendere was ready for battle in early November as he stood in the witness dock of a converted court room in Ouagadougou. Lawyers fired questions from all directions about his involvement in the assassination of Burkina Faso’s revolutionary president, Capt. Thomas Sankara, as well as eight of his bodyguards and four civilians on Oct. 15, 1987.
Diendere, who has been accused of complicity in the killings, seemed to have an answer for all of them. He heard gunshots and saw Sankara’s dead body, he claimed, but didn’t see the shooter, echoing similar testimony from those among the 14 other men who now stand accused of participating in the assassination.
Last week, Diendere also denied the testimony of a retired soldier named Abdrahamane Zetiyenga, who claims Diendere told him of plans to arrest Sankara on the day of his assassination and sent one of the other soldiers who has been charged with witness tampering to convince Zetiyenga to recant his testimony prior to the trial.
Burkinabe journalist Richard Tiene has been following the trial closely with a sense of realistic optimism. “I don’t think we will get to know the whole truth,” he told me. “But we will get closer to understanding what happened.”
Tiene has spent almost a decade making a documentary, “Thomas Sankara: The Human,” which screened in October at a pan-African film festival, FESPACO, that was created by Sankara’s administration. Despite a ban on filming the proceedings inside the conference center where the trial is taking place, he takes copious notes in the courtroom and has a team ready to pounce with a video camera whenever a lawyer exits, in order to capture what will become the final chapter of his film.
During his youth growing up in neighboring Cote d’Ivoire in the 1980s, Tiene would scan the papers searching for news about Sankara, whose ambitions to create an independent African country, free of corruption and colonial interference, had put Burkina Faso, a small, former French colony, on the global map. Tiene’s film focuses on Sankara’s life and the four years he ruled the country before his assassination. But it also explores his legacy and the eventual overthrow of the regime of his successor, former President Blaise Compaore, who was Sankara’s close friend and confidante, but now stands accused of being the mastermind behind his assassination.
Compaore, who went on to rule for 27 years, currently lives in exile in Cote d’Ivoire, after having been ousted in 2014 by mass demonstrations inspired by ideals that also informed Sankara’s anti-corruption and egalitarian message. Although a warrant has reportedly been issued for his arrest, Compaore has not been extradited. His lawyers, Pierre-Olivier Sur and Abdoul Ouedraogo, released a statement before the commencement of the trial claiming that the process was “political” and the court illegitimate. Hyacinthe Kafando, the man accused of leading the hit squad against Sankara and a key military figure during Compaore’s rule, remains at large. That leaves Diendere and the 13 other men accused of participating to varying degrees in the assassination and its cover up to face the court; Diendere is already serving a 20-year sentence in prison for attempting a failed coup against the post-Compaore transitional government in 2015.
While Burkina Faso’s revolutionary days are a distant memory, many young Burkinabe activists continue to see Sankara as a role model.
Among the mainly young activists who were inspired by Sankara’s legacy to rise up against Compaore’s government in 2014, few actually lived through or remember his four years as president. Nevertheless, Fatumata Souratie, a 36-year-old teacher who was on the frontlines of these demonstrations, sees the trial as vindication.
“We have waited 34 years for this trial,” she said. Regardless of the verdict, she added, “it’s already a victory.”
While Burkina Faso’s revolutionary days are a distant memory, Souratie and other activists continue to see Sankara as a role model, someone who lived modestly and according to the ideals he championed.
“He lived his values,” she told me, citing Sankara’s initiatives to combat corruption, launch mass vaccination campaigns, reduce government salaries and build social housing, schools and village clinics, some of which are documented in Tiene’s film. Sankara also established quotas for female representatives in local councils known as Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, while speaking out against female genital mutilation, early marriage and economic inequality between men and women.
"He embodied the best hope of the entire continent, and he truly pushed the limits of the imagination of what was possible for post-colonial Africa,” said Mohamed Keita, a Malian writer based in Chicago who has reported on Sankara’s symbolic influence on grassroots protest movements throughout the region. Though admitting Sankara wasn’t perfect, Keita lauded his qualities, describing him as “exceptionally charismatic, principled, eloquent, visionary, candid, self-critical, knowledgeable and detail oriented, highly demanding of himself and others in terms of work ethic and rigor, and totally uninterested in the pomp and trappings of power.”
But Sankara’s critics have a less rosy view. Former journalist Jean Claude Meda describes the Sankara years as “demoralizing” ones, in which reporters were expected to be “propagandists” of the revolution. Some of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution were accused of abuses, and others were seen as undermining the authority of traditional leaders and religious figures.
Brian J. Peterson, a history professor at Union College in New York state and author of the recently published “Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa,” told me that Sankara’s downfall was in part due to his loss of support in the military and his rivalry with Compaore. But the rapid pace of change he set and the demands he made for community mobilization also played a role, as did the decision by France and the United States to cut aid to Sankara’s fledgling revolutionary government due to his leftist economic policies.
Among the legal team representing Sankara’s family are two French lawyers with African roots who have served on international war crimes trials, Ante Guisse and Ferdinand Nzepa. They both took on the case because of the strong impression Sankara made on them during their student years in France. “When we heard the way he spoke to [then-French President Francois] Mitterrand and the way he spoke in front of the United Nations,” Nzepa told me outside the court during a lunch break, “everyone had goosebumps.”
Although Prosper Farama, the Sankara family’s longtime lawyer in Burkina Faso, is critical of Sankara’s own seizure of power through a military coup in 1983, he admired the man himself. “I liked his presence and his way of speaking,” he told me in an interview before the trial. “It made you proud.” Before Sankara, he explained, people were ashamed to say they were from the Haute Volta, as the country was known during the colonial era, because of how undeveloped it was. “When we saw people from other countries admiring him,” he added, “we no longer felt ashamed.”
Today, spray-painted graffiti reading “Justice for Sankara” next to stencils of his face can be seen on walls throughout Ouagadougou, and t-shirts with images of Sankara, smiling and wearing his trademark, jaunty red military beret, are sold at sidewalk vending stands across the city. Dozens of visitors make the pilgrimage every day to the Thomas Sankara Memorial in Ouagadougou, to pose for photos next to a bronze statue of him punching his fist into the air that was erected in 2020. The small building in front of which he was shot down 34 years ago stands at a short distance.
The trial is now in its third month, with another month or two expected to follow. The prosecution team as well as the dozen or more lawyers representing both the defendants and the civil parties to the trial continue interrogating the accused and questioning more than 100 witnesses. To do so, they are drawing on evidence from a 20,000-page dossier that includes testimony given to a judge of inquiry over a period of five years.
Human rights activists in the country see the case as an important step toward ending impunity for the military, whose power has remained largely unchecked despite Burkina Faso’s halting transition to an electoral democracy since Compaore’s ouster. Farama says the trial sends an important message that those responsible for coup d’etats will be held accountable, a message he hopes will reverberate across West Africa, where Guinea and Mali have both recently experienced military takeovers. “For the first time we are having a judgement for a coup d’etat that didn’t fail, but a coup d’etat that succeeded,” he emphasized.
But some question the trial’s relevance against the backdrop of the country’s deteriorating security situation, which has seen jihadist groups affiliated with al-Qaida and the Islamic State gaining ground in the country’s north and east, while waging ever more deadly attacks on civilians, soldiers and volunteer defense forces recruited in conflict hit areas. The conflict has internally displaced more than 1.4 million civilians.
In recent weeks, demonstrators have taken to the streets to demand an improved response to the security situation, with some calling for President Roch Marc Christian Kabore to step down. On Dec. 8, Prime Minister Christophe Joseph Marie Dabire resigned in response to the security crisis, which by law triggered the resignation of the entire Cabinet. Over the weekend Kabore appointed Lassina Zerbo, a former head of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization with no domestic political profile, to the post.
The bitter irony is that, even as Burkina Faso belatedly pursues justice for the murder of Sankara, many observers in the country fear that another coup could be imminent due to the failures of the current administration to address the security challenges. Chrysogone Zougmore, the president of the Burkinabe Movement for Human Rights, told me, “First people started demanding the resignation of the ministers and defense and security; it was done. Now people no longer speak about ministers. They are talking about the president.”
Zougmore fears a military takeover similar what happened in Mali or another popular uprising. “If it happens,” he warned, “it will put us decades behind. If there is a coup d’etat, there will be complete disorder.”
Clair MacDougall is a Burkina Faso-based journalist and writer who is currently covering the ongoing conflict an
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