Thomas Sankara's murder trial underway
Publish date: 11 October 2021
Issue Number: 944
Diary: IBA Legalbrief Africa
Category: Burkina Faso
'While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.'
– Thomas Sankara
The trial of 14 men, including a former President, over the assassination of revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara began today. Legalbrief reports that former President Blaise Compaore – who lives in exile in neighbouring Ivory Coast – and 13 others face an array of charges over Sankara’s brutal death 34 years ago. Compaore’s lawyers have confirmed that he would not be attending a ‘political trial’ flawed by irregularities, and they insist he enjoys immunity as a former head of state. Proceedings at the Ouagadougou court are open to the public.
Sankara and 12 others were shot by a hit squad in October 1987 during a coup that brought his old friend Compaoré to power. The Guardian reports that Compaoré ruled the country for the next 27 years before being deposed by a popular uprising and fleeing to the Ivory Coast, which granted him citizenship. He and his former righthand man, General Gilbert Diendéré, who once led the elite presidential security regiment, face charges of complicity in murder, harming state security and complicity in the concealment of corpses. Compaoré, who has always rejected suspicions that he orchestrated the killing, is being tried in absentia by the military court in the capital. Diendéré is serving a 20-year sentence for masterminding a plot in 2015 against the transitional government that followed Compaoré’s ouster. Another prominent figure among the accused is Hyacinthe Kafando, a former chief warrant officer in Compaoré’s presidential guard, who is accused of leading the hit squad. He is on the run.
Al Jazeera reports that Burkina Faso has long been burdened by silence over the assassination – during Compaoré's term in office, the subject was taboo – and many are angry that the killers have gone unpunished. ‘The trial will mark the end to all the lying – we will get a form of truth. But the trial will not be able to restore our dream,’ said Halouna Traore, a former Sankara aide and survivor of the putsch. Guy Hervé Kam, one of the lawyers representing families of victims, told Radio France Internationale it was ‘a time for truth’ for the families.
During mass protests which toppled Compaoré in 2014, young people carried portraits of Sankara aloft – although many had not even been born during the Marxist-Leninist leader's rule. Sankara was appointed Prime Minister in January 1983 after another military coup. He was arrested in May 1983 but was then made President in August after yet another coup which was led by his close friend Compaoré. Aged just 33, Sankara symbolised for supporters African youth and integrity. A report on the News24 site notes that he changed the country's name from the colonial-era Upper Volta to Burkina Faso – ‘the land of honest men’. The priorities in his reform programme included reducing the size of the civil service, improving healthcare, nationwide literacy, food self-sufficiency, measures to help peasant farmers, vaccination campaigns and building pharmacies in villages. He banned female genital mutilation and forced marriages, among other measures to promote women's rights, which he oversaw with an iron fist. Sankara also urged Africa to refuse to pay its debt to Western countries and spoke out at the UN to denounce ‘imperialist’ wars, apartheid and poverty.
