DAKAR, Senegal – The day after the army officers take power in Burkina Fasoresidents face uncertainty about what will happen next, even as the situation has become all too familiar in the struggling West African nation. second coup in eight months.
Calm returned on Saturday morning precariously toward the capital Ouagadougou, near the presidential palace, where gunfire rang out early Friday. Shops have reopened and traffic is slowly returning to the streets that the soldiers had guarded the day before.
After a day of unrest and rumors about the fate of Burkina Faso’s military junta, military officers announced Friday evening that they had removed the country’s leader, Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who took power in January.
It was a coup within a coup: Captain Ibrahim Traoré was now in power, officers said on national television.
“We have decided to carry out our responsibility, driven by a single ideal: restoring the security and integrity of our territory,” said one officer as Captain Traoré sat sternly. next to him, surrounded by a dozen other officers covering their faces with sunglasses and neck guards.
Many people remained unknown on Saturday about Colonel Damiba’s whereabouts – and about Captain Traoré in general.
But just as in January, officers blame the leader they removed for failing to quell a growing Islamist insurgency that has displaced nearly 10 percent of the population. and economic hardship in this country of about 21 million people.
“We just want security,” Théophile Doussé, a travel agency employee, said Saturday in Ouagadougou. “Without security, business is too complicated.”
When in power, Colonel Damiba blamed the civilian, democratically elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, for failing to contain the worsening security situation. Hailed as a strong-willed officer with field experience, Colonel Damiba vowed to restore security and demanded national supplies until September.
Constantin Gouvy, a Burkina Faso researcher based in Ouagadougou with the Clingendael Institute, a research organization funded by the Dutch government, said when he spoke to residents last month, Colonel Damiba had very little progress.
For months, the insurgents blockaded towns and villages in the north and east of the country, attacked the convoys supplied to them by military escorts, and sowed similar insecurity. which Colonel Damiba vowed to solve.
“There’s a great deal of frustration in the military and the population on the basis that he’s going to make things better, but they’re actually getting worse on a number of fronts,” Mr. Gouvy said.
Burkina Faso’s situation resembles that of Mali, a neighboring country also facing two coups just a few months apart – in 2020 and last year – and where the military has so far been unable to stop Muslim insurgents from gaining ground in the southeastern part of the country, near the border with Burkina Faso.
Last month, 35 people died as a convoy leaving a blockaded town was hit by a roadside bomb, and this week 11 soldiers were killed when rebels attacked another convoy en route to the same town.
Nearly one-fifth of the country’s population is in urgent need of humanitarian aid, The United Nations said this weekand more people were displaced from January to June than in the whole of last year, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Colonel Damiba has just returned from the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he describe his coup in January is “absolutely illegal” and “perhaps reprehensible,” but “necessary and indispensable.”
“Above all, it’s a matter of survival for our nation,” he said.
On Friday, the officials who removed him made similar arguments.
Mr Gouvy said: “Damiba’s justification of the coup became his act of undoing. “But what else does Traoré have to offer? What will be different, and how will he deliver? “
Oumar Zombre contributed reporting from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
