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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The revolution and the emancipation of women - 0 views

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  • Sankara vehemently and publicly denounced odious debt and rallied African political leaders to do the same.
  • What distinguishes Sankara from many other revolutionary leaders was his confidence in the revolutionary capabilities of ordinary human beings. He did not see himself as a messiah or prophet, as he famously said before the United Nations General Assembly in October of 1984. It is worth quoting from Sankara at length, when before the delegation of 159 nations, he said: ‘I make no claim to lay out any doctrines here. I am neither a messiah nor a prophet. I possess no truths. My only aspiration is…to speak on behalf of my people…to speak on behalf of the “great disinherited people of the world”, those who belong to the world so ironically christened the Third World. And to state, though I may not succeed in making them understood, the reasons for our revolt’.
  • In an interview with the Cameroonian anticolonial historian Mongo Beti, he said, ‘We are fighting for the equality of men and women - not a mechanical, mathematical equality but making women the equal of men before the law and especially in relation to wage labor. The emancipation of women requires their education and their gaining economic power. In this way, labor on an equal footing with men on all levels, having the same responsibilities and the same rights and obligations…’.
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  • Sankara was somewhat unique as a revolutionary leader - and particularly as a president - in attributing the success of the revolution to the obtainment of gender equality. Sankara said, ‘The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph’.
  • Thomas Sankara, a Burkinabé with military training, had witnessed the student and worker-led uprisings in Madagascar.
  • Blaise Compaoré remains the president of Burkina Faso today and has been implicated in conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, and in arms trafficking and the trafficking of diamonds. There has been no independent investigation into Thomas Sankara’s assassination, despite repeated requests by the judiciary committee of the International Campaign for Justice for Thomas Sankara, a legal group working in the name of the Sankara family. The UN Committee for Human Rights closed Sankara’s record in April of 2008, without conducting an investigation into the crimes.
  • The revolution’s promises are already a reality for men. But for women, they are still merely a rumor. And yet the authenticity and the future of our revolution depend on women. Nothing definitive or lasting can be accomplished in our country as long as a crucial part of ourselves is kept in this condition of subjugation - a condition imposed…by various systems of exploitation.
  • He locates the roots of African women’s oppression in the historical processes of European colonialism and the unequal social relations of capitalism and capital exploitation. Most importantly, he stressed the importance of women’s equal mobilisation. He urges Burkinabé women into revolutionary action, not as passive victims but as respected, equal partners in the revolution and wellbeing of the nation. He acknowledges the central space of African women in African society and demanded that other Burkinabé men do the same.
  • Meaningful social transformation cannot endure without the active support and participation of women. While it is true that women have been deeply involved in each of the great social revolutions of human history, their support and participation has historically often gone relatively unacknowledged by movement leaders.
  • He criticised the oppressive gendered nature of the capitalist system, where women (particularly women with children to support) make an ideal labour force because the need to support their families renders them malleable and controllable to exploitative labour practices.
  • US-backed militarisation of Africa takes a couple of different forms.
  • First, it means an increase in troops on the ground. US Special Ops and US military personnel have been deployed in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Mauritania, South Sudan, and (potentially) Nigeria.
  • Second, US military personnel conduct training sequences with African militaries.
  • Third, the US military funds social science research into African society, culture and politics. This takes various forms, one of which is the use of SCRATs (or Sociocultural Advisory Teams) for the purposes of preparing US military personnel for deployment and missions.
  • A strong military structure paves the way for the resource plunder and large scale dispossessions that are seen in neoliberal states in the so-called Global South. In this system, the state ensures profit for class elites (both international and domestic) by guaranteeing the super-exploitation of labour and the dispossession of millions of people of their lands and livelihoods for resource extraction at serious costs to local ecology, health and wellbeing. This guarantee can only be made through an increased militarism that stifles political mobilisation.
  • Thomas Sankara and the August Revolution of 1983 tells us another story. They provide a different way of thinking about social organisation. Sankara understood that capitalism is dependent upon the unequal deployment of and distribution of power, particularly state power. But, as he showed us, the state is not unalterable. The state is a complex system of human relationships that are maintained through violent power/coercion and persuasion. And what Sankara did was work to bring the state apparatus down to the level of the people, so to speak.
  • The image of my daughter’s grandfather entering his home and collapsing onto the sofa, holding his face in his hands and crying emerges in my head each time I think of Sankara. This image of a middle aged Cameroonian man, Jacque Ndewa, thousands of miles away, who had never travelled to Burkina Faso, crying quietly on his sofa. This is the resonance that Sankara had, across the African continent and among disenfranchised and dispossessed people everywhere.
Arabica Robusta

The Devil They Know - The New Yorker - 0 views

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  • Lester Hyman says that Taylor reminds him of Lyndon Johnson, and he believes that Taylor will become a great African leader. Ramsey Clark admires Taylor personally and points out that he went to war against the repressive Doe regime, which had received close to half a billion dollars in aid and military assistance from the Reagan Administration.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News : Issue 651 - 0 views

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 26 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Whether Thomas Sankara wanted the position of leader is irrelevant, and in spite of all the accusations that have been levelled against him, it appears that for the most part he sought to unite rather than to eliminate, to deepen his understanding, working unstintingly and seeking to convince rather than imposing his will by force. These assertions appear provocative in light of what has been said about him, even by sympathisers who acknowledge the positive aspects of his action but agree on his authoritarian tendencies. Where is the truth?
  • Relationships were patiently built up that enabled the political takeover in a relatively confident climate. Unfortunately, after 4 August 1983, and although the more right-wing elements of the army had been dismissed, it was necessary to reach a compromise with the army as a whole, going against the wishes of the political parties, which found themselves outnumbered by the military in the CNR [Conseil National de la Révolution, the National Revolutionary Council].
  • To foster a spirit of enterprise among the farmers, the country’s main producers of wealth, by giving them their rightful place in the political life of the country and by trying to give them a fair price for their labour. - To try to promote a planned national economy by developing local production and processing.
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  • Basically, Thomas Sankara’s only motivation was a formidable desire to make his country progress, to put it back on the map, improve the living conditions of the poor and give his people back their dignity. He and his comrades endeavoured to put in place original policies, within the political context of the time, which would enable them to attain their objectives.
  • With eyes filled with fear, the Burkinabe intellectual who offered to act as tour guide begged that his name not be mentioned in connection with Thomas Sankara. ‘It is forbidden to talk about him in this country,’ he emphasized repeatedly.
  • The infrastructural legacy he left behind pales into insignificance when compared with the fact that by the fourth and final year of his reign, Burkina Faso had risen from a net importer of food to being self-sufficient in food production.
  • ‘We are looking for the cemetery,’ the tour guide asks two elderly Burkinabe men lounging under the shade of a tree, one of the ten million planted by Thomas Sankara, which now gives Ouagadougou an earthy, relaxed and welcoming feel, despite the scorching heat and dust.
  • Standing beside the dilapidation that is Captain Thomas Sankara’s grave, eyes, heart and mind search for answers. Is this really where lies Thomas Noel Isidore Sankara? The president who insisted on riding a bicycle to work for a long time and who would not even use the air conditioner in his office because it was only a few of his countrymen who could afford it? In opposition to foreign aid, he told his country that ‘he who feeds you, controls you.’ Thomas Sankara dared the feudal landlords of his country by redistributing land to peasants and in less than two years, production of wheat jumped from 1700 kg per hectare to 3800 kg, launching Burkina Faso into food self-sufficiency.
  • After four years of being the president of a mineral-rich country, Captain Sankara, in death, had only about $400 in cash to his name, three guitars, four bikes, a fridge and a broken down freezer as his most valuable assets.
  • Thomas Sankara was one of the few French-speaking African leaders to stand up to France. Some have said that that was his undoing; a weak nobody fighting a powerful, age old establishment with full frontal force. Thomas Sankara should have fought to live, in order to keep fighting, many say. When he spoke, during the OAU summit, urging fellow African leaders to shun debt and dependency and negotiate with the West as equals, he thumb-printed his assassination declaration. Like DR Congo’s Patrice Lumumba did with the speech during Congo’s independence ceremony.
  • Sankara made no secret of his Marxist leanings, which were not shared by many of his associates. To surround himself with competent, motivated people, he built up a group of 150 carefully selected presidential aides who, with a few political ideologists, became the best-educated administrators.
  • For Sankara, the revolution meant practical improvement of living conditions. It was a break with the past in all areas: transformation of the administration; redistribution of wealth; women’s liberation; abolition of the powers of the tribal chiefs, who were held responsible for rural backwardness; the attempt to turn the peasantry into a revolutionary social class; transformation of the army, which was placed at the service of the people and assigned production tasks; decentralisation and the introduction of direct democracy via local Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR). They all combined with the fight against corruption. On 4 August 1984 Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso, ‘land of the righteous.’
  • he aim was to promote autonomous economic development that did not depend on outside aid. Sankara said: ‘Food aid... becomes embedded in our brains. Enough of reacting like beggars living on handouts. We have to produce, produce more, because he who feeds you will also impose his will on you.’
  • As a spokesman for the Third World, Sankara criticised the international order. His themes – the injustice inflicted by globalisation and the international financial system, the omnipresence of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the vicious circle of third world debt – were similar to the modern alternative world movement. Sankara argued that third world debt was caused by the ‘alluring proposals of technical assassins’ from financial institutions. Debt was the means for ‘the deliberately organised re-conquest of Africa, a way of ensuring that its growth and development conform to stages and standards entirely alien to us.’ Burkina Faso decided not to seek any loans from the IMF, which wanted to impose its own conditions.
  • The CDRs, set up so rapidly, were responsible for exercising power in the name of the people. Their work went beyond public security: political education, sanitation, development of production and participation in budget control in the ministries. They discussed and rejected several national projects. But they were also responsible for many excesses and acts of repression. They spearheaded attacks on the unions, which they considered dangerous because unions were controlled by such organisations as the PAI, which went into opposition in August 1984, and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Volta. Sankara was the first to denounce the excesses and shortcomings of the CDRs, which were often due to in-fighting among organisations supporting the revolution.
  • According to Jeune Afrique (2 June 1988), which published the writing of Jacques Foccart (1), ‘number two in a revolution in which he no longer believed… Blaise met his French counterpart Jacques Chirac, then prime minister, through the offices of the president of Ivory Coast, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, and Jacques Foccart, who introduced him to the general staff of the French right, especially Charles Pasqua.’ François Xavier Verschave claims: ‘Muammar Gadafy and Françafrique (2) had more and more causes in common, cemented by anti-Americanism and enlightened self-interest. The elimination of Sankara was probably the founding rite in their alliance. In 1987 Foccart and the people round Gadafy agreed to replace the exasperatingly honest and independent leader by the infinitely more amenable Blaise Compaoré.’ (3).
  • Compaoré’s takeover as president had consequences beyond Burkina Faso’s borders. The emerging Françafrique alliance drew in politicians, military leaders and entrepreneurs from Ivory Coast, France, Libya and Burkina Faso. It supported Charles Taylor, now being tried by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. Compaoré is portrayed as a man of peace who is sponsoring reconciliation between the warring factions.
  • The first Popular Development Plan (PPD), from October 1984 to December 1985 was adopted after a participatory and democratic process including the most remote villages. The financing of the plan was 100 percent Burkinabe. It must be noted that from 1985 to 1988, during Sankara’s presidency, Burkina Faso did not receive any foreign ‘aid’ from the West, including France, nor the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He had relied entirely on his own strength and the solidarity of friendly countries sharing the same vision and ideals. Popular mobilisation, mainly through the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), and the spirit of relying on one’s own forces saw 85 percent of the PPD’s objectives realised. In one year, 250 reservoirs were built and 3000 wells drilled. This does not even take into account the other achievements in the fields of health, housing, education, agricultural production, etc.
  • Relying on one’s own strength also means accepting to live within one’s means and make the best use of available resources. This guarantees dignity and freedom. President Sékou Touré of Guinea had the audacity and temerity to state this in front of General de Gaulle in 1958 in his famous phrase: ‘We prefer freedom in poverty to slavery in opulence.’
  • Living free also means to avoid the pitfalls and humiliations of the supposed ‘development aid’ which has contributed to the under-development of Africa and its dependency. As Sankara states: ‘Of course, we encourage everyone to help us eliminate aid. But in general, aid policies leave us disorganised, by undermining our sense of responsibility for our own economic, political and cultural affairs. We have taken the risk of borrowing new ways to realise our own well-being.’
  • for him, the state must be central in the process of economic, social and cultural transformation. It was under the leadership of the state and its institutions that the masses were mobilised to participate in the first PPD. But, after his assassination, when Burkina Faso knelt before the World Bank and the IMF, the state was vilified and stripped of its basic functions for the benefit of foreign capital, with consequences which we well know. The decline of the state led to the deterioration of living standards, as is common in other African countries. The failures of structural adjustment programs (SAP) and the collapse of market fundamentalism requires the re-emergence of the state. It is in this context that Cea (2011) and UNCTAD (2007) urged African countries to build developmental states in order to become active agents in development, like the Asian ‘Tigers’ or ‘Dragons’ and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
  • Always connected to the external debt of the continent, Thomas Sankara was one of the few African leaders, if not the only, to have criticised and rejected the adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF, which have increased the debt burden and impoverished African countries. His government refused any form of collaboration with these institutions and rejected their ‘help.’ He developed and implemented his own self-adjustment program, which had been supported by the people who understood the merits of his policies and the sacrifices required of all, both citizens and leaders.
  • Today, whilst both South Africa and Namibia are formally independent and ruled by African majorities, the people of the Western Sahara continue to remain under occupation by Morocco. Today, which African leader publicly sides with the Palestinian and Saharaoui peoples and demands the withdrawal of Morocco and Israel from the land of the Saharaoui and Palestinian people?
  • Similarly, Sankara’s internationalism extended to his visit to Grenada where he met the then Prime Minister Maurice Bishop before he was tragically assassinated by the forces of imperialism. In his address to the Harriet Tubman School in Harlem in October 1984, Sankara mentioned his meeting with Bishop and how they gave each other ‘some mutual advice.’ He also watched a ballet at the school and told the crowd: ‘As I watched your ballet, I really thought I was in Africa’ – to which he received an applause that was prolonged when he added: ‘That is why, as I have always said – and I’ll say it again – that our White House is in black Harlem.’ [12]
  • he reiterated his stand with the peoples of Afghanistan, Ireland, Grenada, East Timor, Western Sahara, South Africa, and Ireland at a time when all these peoples confronted political and economic domination. He specifically condemned foreign aggression against the island of Grenada an
  • Back in 1986 he correctly denounced ‘fallacious Malthusian arguments’ that Africa was overpopulated and made a radical proposal that ‘at least 1 percent of the colossal sums of money sacrificed to the search for cohabitation with other planets be used by way of compensation to finance the fight to save our trees and life.’ To cite him at some length, Sankara eloquently declared: ‘While we have not abandoned hope that a dialogue with the Martians could result in the reconquest of Eden, we believe that in the meantime, as earthlings, we also have the right to reject an alternative limited to simply a choice between hell or purgatory.
  • The height at which he always refused, despite strong pressure from his entourage, to eliminate his opponent who was also his best friend, is enough to place him among the rank of great men of modern history. One rests in peace with himself, while the other has to live with his conscience.
  • His popularity derived from the qualities that he used while in power: in his energy, his intelligence, his creativity, his resolution, the scope of work that he was able to accomplish, his ability to lead his entourage and his people, but also in his integrity and his moral rectitude.
  • Is it only a dream to want to build a society in which this minimum can be realized? Certainly even the richest countries such as France or the United States have not managed to meet these needs for everyone. It is not because they lack the means but rather with globalization, now the motor of society is based on the search for profitability rather than the satisfaction of basic human needs. The word revolution is henceforth absent from political debate, as it has been so totally perverted. How can we make the satisfaction of basic human needs of primary importance again?
  • The only real criticisms that could be leveled against him is that he took power when he was too young; that he wanted to move very quickly in a very difficult situation with respect to the objectives of the revolution and the available means to achieve them. In the end, Sankara can be reproached for having been too human, too sensitive. It is his humanity that forced him to push his entourage to tackle a task that many thought inhumane because it was too ambitious.
  • Here we come to the limits of the action of a man facing the objective realities in a specific historical context. Productive forces were hardly developed in Upper Volta. The revolution did not consist of seizing the property of the middle-class owners of the means of production which were quasi non-existent, to put them in the hands of the people, but rather to create a national industry. This cannot be done in four years.
  • The revolution was focused above all on developing a truly national economy, on trying to break free from political and economic external pressures and on resisting efforts at destabilization. We showed (on this subject) all the obstacles from the donors that Burkina Faso faced. Finally, Upper Volta has very little mineral resources; a large part of its territory suffers from drought. It is in this context that the revolution broke out. Upon what forces could it rely in the absence of a working class or a politically aware peasantry? On the urban petit bourgeoisie made up essentially of salaried civil servants or intellectuals, on a part of the army whose commitment is necessarily limited, on young academics and on the numerous unemployed. As for organized political forces, capable of leading the process, they were weak and the best structured were dismissed in the first year. Others were lost to internal fighting. It is in this context that the army gained so much weight in seizing power then in the leadership of the revolution and finally in the tragic outcome of the crisis.
  • The journey of Thomas Sankara from childhood to the presidency of the republic did not make him a hero. Although he had a good disposition and lived, despite the difficulties that he knew, a privileged childhood compared to most of his fellow countrymen of his generation. But for the rest, the key to his rising were, work, observation, study, perseverance, resolution, listening, curiosity, a thirst for knowledge, loyalty.
  • In reviewing the different stages of his life it appears as though he was constantly on the alert and that he knew how to maximize each one of his experiences to get the best out of them. From his childhood he remembers how unacceptable injustice was; from his religious education he retains the lessons of humility from Jesus and a certain humanism; from his adolescence he recalls his classical training and assuredly lessons about the French revolution; from his encounters with Marxism the rigor of the analysis of social relations and the prospects of change; from his stay in Madagascar, valuable lessons about the economy but also a real-life experience of a revolution; and from the war with Mali, a horror of blood spilt needlessly. Is it necessary to continue?
  • Cameroonian gay rights activist Eric Ohena Lembembe wrote in his last blog post: ‘Unfortunately, a climate of hatred and bigotry in Cameroon, which extends to high levels in government, reassures homophobes that they can get away with these crimes.’ This July, his body was found in his home, covered with iron burns, his hands and feet broken.
  • He continued, asserting that homosexuality was imported from the West during colonization and as a weapon to control African governments since. The ties between sexuality and power in African politics resound, alternating between claims that politicians sexually devour women or undergo homosexual rites of passage to achieve political statue. This reaches the highest echelons including, for example, the rumour that Cameroonian President Paul Biya subsumed the office only after being ritually sodomozed by the former President Ahmadou Ahidjo.
  • The key ideas of the political ideology of Thomas Sankara - including warmth and compassion towards other humans, dignity for peasants, self-sufficiency for all Burkinabes, women’s emancipation (“l’emancipation de la femme burkinabé”), and a politics of anti-imperialism - along with his thoughtful considerations of Burkinabe traditions and histories assert Pan-African alternatives to the discourse and practices of homophobia that are based on supposedly anti-imperialist ideologies. The great irony is, of course, the importation of homophobic discourse and law to Africa from the West, namely US evangelical groups.
  • Dynamic African leaders such as Ft. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings of Ghana, Yoweri Musevini of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Isaias Aferworki of Eritrea and several others, followed in the footsteps of Africa’s founding fathers, and sought to reverse the decline of the continent and build progressive nations in which people’s rights are respected, in which different ethnic groups lived together in peace and harmony and a world in which Africans were respected on equal terms with others. ‘Developmentalism’ became the new ideology of the day. Future generations will judge them but for now, let us celebrate their good intentions.
  • It should be noted that Burkina Faso and its capital Ouagadougou is one of the most historic places in West Africa. It was the scene to intellectual and cultural renaissance before colonialism desecrated this land.
Arabica Robusta

Italian revelations on the assassination of Thomas Sankara | Pambazuka News - 0 views

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  • Those who sent him know themselves. The big hand. They know everything. He did not come here alone. Taylor was in prison in the US … and all of a sudden, he was in Monrovia. How did he get out of a US prison? How was he able to escape?
  • Taylor fled Liberia after President Doe accused him of stealing millions of dollars from state coffers. He was arrested and was due for extradition to Liberia. It is noteworthy that Taylor’s lawyer, Ramsey, one of the best in the country, was attorney general under Jimmy Carter. Taylor was incarcerated at a federal prison in Massachusetts, one of the most secure. It seems to me especially difficult to escape from a federal prison…
  • I believe that Taylor was nothing but a pawn in this game. The US was against Libya, but at the same time was eager to overthrow Doe. It is for this reason that they needed an ally, and authorised Taylor going to Libya for training to fight these people. Even before he triumphed and became president, he was in constant contact with the US.
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  • Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, Blaise Compaoré, Thomas Sankara, Domingo Guengeré, and ... Foday Sankoh, as well as the man from Chad, whose name I can’t recall, had all been trained in Libya and were all friends. They are the ones who actually organised the Burkina revolution and installed Sankara as president. Once in power, he set about putting in place his plans. The next thing you know, the US had infiltrated the liberation movements and set about overthrowing Sankara, who was leaning too far left. The Americans were not happy with Sankara. He was talking of nationalising his country’s resources to benefit his people. He was a socialist so he had to go.
  • But the spectre of external debt racked up by past corrupt governments loomed. Sankara was fighting on the global stage against this new debt-slavery.
  • We must speak in one voice, saying this debt cannot be paid. And since I am the lone voice, I will be assassinated. We must say together, we cannot pay, because we have to work to build a future for our people. If only Burkina Faso refuses to pay, I will not be here at the next conference.
  • My boss told me to approach Sankara for help in taking power in Liberia. In return, he offered lucrative business opportunities. Thomas Sankara told him he was not interested and asked him to leave the country. He told him that he would not help and asked him to find another staging point for his rebellion. Guengere, who is currently Burkina Faso’s minister of defence, Blaise Compaoré, Charles Taylor, and Chad’s current president … you know who he is?
Arabica Robusta

IRIN Africa | BURKINA FASO: Stability vital to region | Burkina Faso | Mali | Conflict ... - 0 views

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  • President Compaoré responded harshly to mutineers: he took direct control of the Ministry of Defence; dismissed several important high-ranking officers, and appointed a new army chief of staff. Over 300 soldiers were arrested and a further 600 removed from the ranks.
  • Stability in Burkina Faso is vital for regional stability, said a Western diplomat, given the recent conflict in Côte d’Ivoire and the current situation in Mali.
  • The price of basic commodities - rice, oil, milk and fuel - which rose significantly in 2008, have dropped little since, with prices 20 percent above the five-year average as of August 2012, according to USAID’s Famine Early Warning System, FEWS NET. For three months following the riots, the government upped subsidies to reduce by one quarter the price of rice, cooking oil, sugar and fuel, but prices shot up after that and some say traders simply kept prices the same, using the subsidy to increase their personal profits.
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  • This year, the economy is expected to perform better with a projected 7 percent growth rate partly linked to an upsurge in gold exports and a projected stronger harvest, but vulnerability remains. Just under half of the population lives in poverty, and a lack of economic diversity means a significant proportion of Burkinabe are reliant on the cotton sector, which is vulnerable to drought and severe price fluctuations.
  • The Burkinabe government has beefed up its military presence on the Mali border. US drones are in operation, partly operating out of Ouagadougou under Operation Creek Sand, according to a Washington Post report, though US officials have not officially acknowledged this.
Arabica Robusta

Why Upheaval in Burkina Faso Matters to US National Security - ABC News - 0 views

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  • “He [Compaore] is a guy that we’ve sort of been able to work with to help with some of the issues in the region, in terms of being able to use Burkina strategically to counter the unsavories in the neighborhood,” the U.S. official said. “This change is a change that [the U.S. government] is going to have to contend with.”
  • It’s the kind of help -- along with millions of dollars yearly in foreign aid -- that the U.S. is counting on Burkina Faso needing, whoever is in charge.
Arabica Robusta

Letter from Africa: Did suave Compaore outsmart Ghana? - BBC News - 1 views

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  • Without making any announcements or speeches, he became close friends with Muammar Gaddafi when the then Libyan leader was the bugbear of the Western world.A lot of Libyan money started going into Burkina Faso. Nowhere near that kind of money came into Ghana even though we were officially friends of Col Gaddafi.
  • We in Ghana got the bad name and he was alleged to have got the diamonds - charges he denied.
  • Before our very eyes, our smooth Burkinabe operator managed to shed all trace of ever having instigated or supported insurrections and he was transformed into a regional peacemaker. He became the Ecowas (Economic Community of West African States) man to pour oil over troubled waters.
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  • We look on with puzzlement as Burkina Faso exports high quality vegetables and potatoes and strawberries to France.We take refuge only in our belief that we have a democracy and Mr Compaore, for all his peace-making and sophisticated outlook, was presiding over a fragile state.
  • When he built an impressive beachfront estate in the central region of our country, some of us wondered if Mr Compaore could possibly have been making retirement plans.Unfortunately he had obviously come to believe he was so much smarter than his neighbours; he had seen off three Ghanaian presidents - Mr Rawlings, John Kufuor and John Atta Mills. So why would he not outlast the incumbent, John Dramani Mahama? But the Burkinabe people had had enough, they intervened dramatically and the smooth operator had to flee to Ivory Coast; dishevelled and ruffled.I wish I could see the photo.
  • Back then our leader, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings was best friends with Thomas Sankara, and the suspicions made it difficult for relations to be warm between the two soldiers.
  • In the early 1990s, Mr Compaore, our neighbour, always seemed to manage to get the best of both worlds.I remember Captain Valentine Strasser telling me soon after he had overthrown Sierra Leone's President Joseph Momoh in 1992 that his inspiration was Mr Rawlings.
Arabica Robusta

Morocco says Burkina Faso's Compaore to stay for limited period | Reuters - 1 views

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  • The Moroccan statement said the North African kingdom supported the political transition in Burkina Faso and congratulated its people on "the historical last phase of the country's history."
  • He initially fled to neighboring Ivory Coast, where he was welcomed by President Alassane Ouattara, a close ally, and lodged in a state villa in the capital Yamoussoukro.
  • However, opposition figures in Ivory Coast accuse Compaore of backing rebels that fought against ex-President Laurent Gbagbo in 2011 after he failed to recognize his defeat to Ouattara in an election.
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  • A civilian interim president, Michel Kafando, was appointed this week to guide the country on the southern fringes of the Sahara desert through to an election next year.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso's long-serving leader resigns - and why it matters - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-a-long-serving-leader-matters

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  • By early evening, Compaoré had announced he was dissolving the parliament and declared a state of emergency. Contradicting him, Burkina Faso's army chief made his own later announcement that the government had been dissolved: The country's military appears to have sided against Compaoré. On Friday, Compaoré announced his resignation.
  • Notably, he was an important ally for America: A U.S. base in Ouagadougou, operating since 2007, operates as a hub for a U.S spying network in the region, with spy planes departing from the base to fly over Mali, Mauritania and the Sahara, tracking fighters from the al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
  • "In Burkina Faso now it looks like citizens are making forceful demands for respect of democratic rules," Pierre Englebert, a Professor of African Politics and Development at Pomona College explained in an e-mail. "That would be an unusual degree of political ownership. And it might well give hope to movements elsewhere, first of all in the Democratic Republic of Congo where things have also been coming to a boil."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Notably, Vital Kamerhe, leader of Congo's Union pour la Nation Congolaise, has tweeted a message of solidarity for Burkina Faso's protesters, saying they are in the "same struggle." And while many analysts are hesitant to make the comparison, some Burkinabè protesters have likened the protest to the Arab uprisings that began in 2010. "October 30 is Burkina Faso’s black spring, like the Arab spring,” Emile Pargui Pare, an official from opposition party the Movement of People for Progress, told the AFP.
Arabica Robusta

Africa's Latest Democratic Awakening: Implications for Western foreign policy - By Rudy... - 0 views

africanarguments.org/...oreign-policy-by-rudy-massamba

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  • President Obama’s second term has been particularly marked by an intensification of warnings against African rulers tempted to modify their country’s constitutions for their personal ambitions. Such warnings have been delivered, either in person or in writing, by Secretary of State John Kerry, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and US Special Envoy for the DRC and the African Great Lakes Region, Russ Feingold. French president Francois Hollande, on the other hand, publicly spoke about the need for African rulers to uphold their countries’ constitutions on several occasions, including the fifteenth Francophonie Summit, a major event that gathered the leaders of 57 French-speaking countries in Dakar, Senegal in late November 2014. “Where constitutional rules are abused, where freedom is violated, where the alternation of power is prevented, I affirm here that the citizens of these countries will always find, in the Francophone sphere, the necessary support to uphold justice, law and democracy” said President Hollande, whose speech was very similar in message to the one Francois Mitterrand, France’s longest-serving president, made in 1990 at the sixteenth Franco-African Summit. President Mitterrand’s speech, delivered in the coastal resort of La Baule, France, set the tone for fresh relations between France and its former colonies, by conditioning aid on the adoption of democratic reforms.
  • Regardless of how the West decides to persuade African rulers to change their ways, a new wave of democracy is making its way throughout the continent. This is the same wave that swept away a stubborn Blaise Compaoré. The same wave that recently pushed large groups of youth to the streets of Kinshasa to protest a controversial electoral bill. And finally, the same wave that gave the people of Burundi the courage to publicly denounce their president’s decision to run for a third term.
Arabica Robusta

"Blaise Dégage! Sankara Vit!": Burkina Faso's Revolution | Ceasefire Magazine - 0 views

ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/a-vit-burkina-fasos-revolution

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  • Meanwhile, international commentaries on the Burkinabé protests immediately drew upon a discourse of ‘uncertainty’ in post-revolutionary moments. In the shadow of post-Arab Spring disappointments in Egypt, people have rushed to consider, ‘Will this revolution be just like Egypt?’ or to posit that‘Unfortunately, this will probably be business as usual’. This fatalistic discourse fails to appreciate the enormous energy required by people to rise up against 27-years of presidential power—indeed, the energy required by people to rise up. Period.
  • we should learn from the political situation in post-Arab Spring Egypt. However, to immediately and reflexively raise doubts over whether this revolutionary moment will bring about serious political, economic or social empowerment for the people of Burkina pays a disservice—even if inadvertently so—to the protest movement as well as to the transformative potential it represents.
  • Let us celebrate this moment and look with both an optimistic anticipation fed by this recent victory as well as a critical eye for the ways in which political mobilizations in the past have been sabotaged—not because sabotage is inevitable in Burkina today but precisely because it is preventable.
Arabica Robusta

Not so pretty now | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...-gaping-hole-not-so-pretty-now

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  • The opposition is splintered and state institutions are weak. By contrast, the military has been gobbling up resources for two decades and is likely to remain involved in running the country in one way or another. If anything, its motivation to do so has increased recently. New mineral finds mean that whoever is in charge will control growing mining revenues.
  • The American and French armed forces have used it to keep an eye on Mali and Nigeria as well as the wider Sahel and Sahara regions. Mr Zida, the interim leader, received training from the American army, as did the leader of the most recent coup in Mali.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso: is the cure more dangerous than the disease? | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rkina-faso-revolution-campaore

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  • The neighboring countries, especially Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin, but also Ivory Coast, have a vital interest that Burkina gains stability, again. But I think it will be France, and the US, in the end, which will weigh in and make the difference. The military knows that. They know there is no turning back to pre-2000 or even pre-1996. Democratisation has arrived in the heads, and, in form of mobile communication, in the hands of the people. News are traveling much, much faster today. And the Burkina-bé are proud of their democratic progress. Very much so.
  • The perspective that only the USA and France have the wisdom to sort out the Burkinabes problems is malodorous and ironic given that Mitterrand undoubtably installed Compaore in the pool of Sankara's blood replacing an African solution of full employment and equal rights with the "politique de la ventre" that they are much more comfortable with. It would be convenient in media terms if a messanaic leader rose to lead the revolution but maybe with the will of the masses, it has.
Arabica Robusta

The Guardian view on who should lead the transitional government in Burkina Faso | Edit... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...a-faso-transitional-government

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  • He won five elections, of course with the usual tricks, but he won them nevertheless. But he instituted few reforms, skirted the nation’s real problems, and was mainly preoccupied with schemes to keep himself in perpetual office, while at the same time making himself useful to France and the United States, both of which have bases in the country.
  • The army coup is an old idea that no longer works, because African populations are wiser than they were, and less starry-eyed about the capacities and virtues of soldiers. So the second direction, toward a new democratic start, is more likely. Violence could derail it, and there were worrying clashes on Sunday. But, short of such a disaster, that should mean that Burkina Faso will soon have a civilian transitional government, and elections will be held as planned next year
Arabica Robusta

U.S. expands secret intelligence operations in Africa - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gJQAHyvAbV_story.html

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  • The U.S. military is expanding its secret intelligence operations across Africa, establishing a network of small air bases to spy on terrorist hideouts from the fringes of the Sahara to jungle terrain along the equator, according to documents and people involved in the project.
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