Burkina Faso: Steps Forward,Steps backward

BURKINA FASO

Steps Forward, Steps Backward

BBC reporters recently discovered a sad date scribbled on a school blackboard in Foubé in northern Burkina Faso: December 15, 2018.

That’s the last time children attended class in the building.

“A lot of schools have been torched. Teachers have been attacked and some even killed,” headteacher Samuel Sawadogo told the BBC. “When a teacher is killed, no one does anything – so we have to save ourselves.”

Education and other services have stopped in sections of the landlocked West African country following an explosion of violence stemming from Islamist militants who became active around three years ago.

The tragedy is that, until recently, Burkina Faso had been one of the rare countries in the region that avoided jihadist violence. The fighting started, however, when an insurrection toppled former president Blaise Compaoré after 27 years in power, noted an Al Jazeera video. Now, unrest that has been rampant in Mali, Niger and Libya has bled into the country.

Now potential links between al Qaeda and the jihadist groups have led the US to consider whether to send military advisers and drones to the country on the edge of the Sahara, CNN reported.

The jihadists have sparked further violence between ethnic communities in the north, where the majority Mossi people have accused Fulani herders of supporting the terrorists. The fighting has also prompted 115,000 people to seek safety in emergency camps, overloading government officials and international aid agencies, the United Nations Refugee Agency said in a press release. It warned that the situation would likely grow worse.

Bibata Diande was in her last year of high school when she fled torch-wielding terrorists who rode into her village on motorcycles in January. “We brought nothing,” she told Reuters at the camp for displaced people where her family now lives. “I do nothing all day.”

This year, the government of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré declared a state of emergency, giving expanded power to security forces fighting Ansarul Islam and other jihadist groups, wrote the Defense Post.

Those forces have come under criticism, however. The Burkinabé Movement for Human and Peoples’ Rights recently reported that while the government claimed it had “neutralized” almost 150 terrorists, in fact the troops had summarily executed 60 people who were mostly Fulani – raising questions about whether the military was acting illegally against a minority group.

On March 24, voters in Burkina Faso are slated to vote in areferendum that would reduce the power of the president and enact other reforms, like an independent judiciary.

It’s a pity the country might soon take a step forward even while still losing ground.