Posted Oct 1, 2022, 8:55 AM
For the second time in eight months, Burkina Faso experienced a new coup on Friday. Came to power by a putsch at the end of January, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba was, in turn, dismissed from his post by the military. After a day peppered with shooting in the district of the presidency in Ouagadougou, about fifteen soldiers took the floor, Friday evening, on the plateau of the national radio and television.
“Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba is removed from his position as president of the Patriotic Movement for Safeguarding and Restoration”, the MPSR, the ruling body of the junta, they announced. In his place, they presented the country’s new strongman, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who has been appointed president of the MPSR.
Border closures and curfews
At 34, he was until now the head of the Cobra anti-jihadist special forces unit in the Kaya region (north). The fate of Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba remained unknown on Friday evening, said AFP.
The putschists also announced the closure of the country’s land and air borders from midnight, as well as the suspension of the Constitution and the dissolution of the government and the Transitional Legislative Assembly. In addition, a curfew is also in place between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.
Jihadist attacks
The soldiers invoke “the continuous deterioration of the security situation” in the country. “Far from liberating occupied territories, once-peaceful areas have come under terrorist control,” they continued. When he came to power on January 24, also in a statement read by armed men on television, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba had promised to make security his priority, in this country undermined for years by bloody attacks. jihadists. But these have multiplied in recent months, especially in the North.
The putschists promised to convene “immediately the living forces of the Nation” in order to designate a “new president of Faso, civilian or military”.
Appeal from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), whose authorities Burkina has been suspended since the January coup d’etat, “condemned in the strongest terms the seizure of power by force which has just operate”. Adding the two putsches in Mali and the one in Guinea, this is the fifth coup in West Africa since 2020.
The European Union expressed its “concerns”, the same feeling on the side of the United States, which said they were “extremely worried”. The French Foreign Ministry has asked its nationals in Ouagadougou, estimated at between 4,000 and 5,000, to stay at home.
Influence from Moscow
On Friday afternoon, several hundred people, some of whom were waving Russian flags, gathered in the large Place de la Nation in Ouagadougou to demand military cooperation with Russia, reject the French military presence in the Sahel and demand the departure of the Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba, noted AFP.
Moscow’s influence has been growing in several French-speaking African countries in recent years and it is not uncommon to see Russian flags in such demonstrations.
