Burkina Faso Police clash with protesters as they protest against their longtime... Read More
The army has dissolved all the country’s institutions, and plans to appoint a new head of state before restoring the constitution in 12 months, Colonel Aboubacar Ba told reporters late yesterday at army headquarters in the capital, Ouagadougou.
Compaore’s situation wasn’t immediately clear. The president, who’s held power since 1987, said in a televised address after the army statement that he’ll hand over to an elected successor after a “transition period.” He thanked the armed forces for “their professionalism and
their sacrifice, which have prevented an irreparable catastrophe.”
Compaore said he was ending the state of emergency he had declared earlier yesterday, after bowing to pressure from demonstrators by canceling a vote on a parliamentary bill allowing him to run for president again. Protests broke out this week over the legislation. Several people have been injured and Agence France-Presse reported that one person was killed, while the parliament building was set on fire.
Ba, who described himself as spokesman for a military council, said that a curfew has been imposed from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. State television has stopped broadcasting, since protesters looted the building.
Students and members of the largest labor coalition marched in the capital,... Read More
Cotton, Gold
Burkina Faso is the second-largest cotton producer in sub-Saharan Africa and fifth-biggest gold producer. It ranks 181st out of 187 nations on the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures life expectancy, literacy, education and gross domestic product per capita.Shares in two Canadian gold-mining companies that have interests in Burkina Faso plunged amid the unrest. Toronto-based Iamgold Corp. (IMG), which said its Essakane mine was functioning without interruption, dropped 12 percent. St. Laurent-based Semafo Inc. (SMF), which slumped 17 percent, also said it was business as usual at its mine in the country.
Compaore, a 63-year-old former army officer, seized power in a 1987 coup that killed head of state Thomas Sankara, whom Compaore had helped install in an earlier putsch.
“Compaore’s regime now faces its gravest crisis since he seized power almost 27 years ago,” Chatham House, the London-based policy institute, said in a statement on its website. “These events demonstrate the depth of urban disenchantment with Compaore, who has never commanded the sort of popular affection felt for Sankara.”
Hundreds of angry demonstrators in Burkina Faso storm parliament today before setting... Read More
‘Key Ally’
Compaore won an election in 1991 that was boycotted by the opposition. He was re-elected three times, each time claiming 80 percent of the vote, and had been seeking to amend the constitution to allow another term.As ruler of the landlocked former French colony in West Africa, he reversed many of Sankara’s Marxist policies and showed little tolerance for dissent.
Compaore was accused of involvement in civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and considered a longtime ally of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was handed to an international court in 2006 and later convicted of aiding war crimes in Sierra Leone.
Compaore subsequently recast himself as a regional peace broker, mediating in conflicts in Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali and Togo. The president and his aides became “indispensable mediators” and monitors of the security situation in the Sahel and the Sahara, Brussels-based International Crisis Group said in a report last year.
“A crisis in Burkina Faso would not only mean the loss of a key ally and a strategic base for France and the U.S., it would also reduce the capacity of an African country in dealing with regional conflicts,” the group said.
The country’s economy depends heavily on remittances from an estimated 4 million migrant workers in neighboring Ivory Coast, according to the World Bank. Agriculture employs about 85 percent of the population, with cotton as the main cash crop.
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