Assassinated in His Prime, an Iconic African Chief Haunts a Trial and His Nation

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Many years later, the scene of the crime continues to be intact: a abandoned constructing of cracked windowpanes and dust-blown corridors, its courtyard strewn with withered leaves. Gunfire erupted right here in October 1987 as Thomas Sankara, the 37-year-old president of Burkina Faso, was assembly with six aides.

“It seemed like a twister on a tin roof,” recalled one among them, Alouna Troaré, retracing his steps by the ghostly website.

A charismatic military officer of revolutionary zeal, Sankara had remodeled this landlocked West African nation in simply 4 years, with sweeping insurance policies that prioritized the poor, defied the West and impressed adulation throughout Africa. However now successful squad was at his door.

“It’s me they need,” mentioned Sankara, lifting his arms as he left to face the troopers ready exterior, Mr. Troaré recalled. Seconds later Sankara was useless, gunned down in a hail of bullets that struck him seven instances, in response to new forensic proof. Mr. Troaré was the only real survivor of the assembly.

These surprising occasions are the main target of a riveting homicide trial nearing its conclusion at a tightly guarded courtroom in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou. For 5 months, a navy tribunal has heard testimony about 14 males accused of plotting, executing or protecting up the deaths of Sankara and 12 different individuals in 1987 — the opening act of a bloody coup d’état that set Burkina Faso on a path to a long time of repressive rule.

Regardless of the problem of dissecting a 35-year-old crime, the trial has refreshed a Chilly Conflict drama with parts of Shakespeare and the Sopranos: a story of energy video games, intrigue and the fraternal betrayal of an iconic chief usually in comparison with Che Guevara. Sankara’s picture is all over the place in Burkina Faso, adorning motorbikes, murals, T-shirts, even chocolate bars. Residents hope the decision will supply some uncommon accountability for a coup — at a time when navy takeovers are rife within the area.

“We don’t want vengeance,” mentioned Fidèle Kientega, a former Sankara adviser and one among over 100 witnesses on the trial. “However we do want the reality to return out.”

That end result is much from assured. The trial was practically derailed on Jan. 24 when mutinying troopers ousted Burkina Faso’s elected president and put in a navy chief — sub-Saharan Africa’s sixth coup in 18 months. And whereas the hearings have unearthed some hidden truths concerning the Sankara assassination, others stay stubbornly out of attain.

The principle defendant, a former president, Blaise Compaoré — a once-close good friend of Sankara who seized energy inside hours of his demise, then dominated Burkina Faso with a clenched fist for 27 years — lives in gilded exile within the neighboring nation of Ivory Coast, refusing to return. Different suspects are useless or have fled the nation.

And the trial has touched solely frivolously on the vexed subject of whether or not, as occurred usually in postcolonial Africa, overseas powers had a hand within the younger chief’s demise. A number of had robust motives.

Reagan-era American officers usually clashed with Sankara, an avowed foe of “imperialism and neocolonialism,” over his alliances with Fidel Castro of Cuba and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. Rival African leaders noticed him as a pernicious affect within the West Africa area.

However the biggest suspicions have fallen on the nation’s former colonial energy — France — whose officers had been intent on toppling Sankara from the early days of his rule, in response to declassified American diplomatic cables.

That matter, nonetheless, has been excluded from the trial.

“Many nations had been sad with the revolution in Burkina Faso,” mentioned Anta Guissé, a lawyer for the Sankara household. “They seen Sankara as a risk to their affect, to their grip on the area. His probity was inspiring to many Africans, which I believe is among the causes he was killed.”

One latest night Paul Sankara sipped a beer at a loud roadside bar in Ouagadougou, considering the thrill of a metropolis he was rediscovering after years in exile.

He had fled a long time earlier, within the torrid aftermath of his brother Thomas’s demise, slipping throughout the border into Mali on a motorcycle below an assumed title. It was a nasty time to be known as Sankara in Burkina Faso.

The brand new ruler, Mr. Compaoré, had performed his utmost to erase the reminiscence of the assassinated chief, who was buried unexpectedly at night time in a commoner’s grave by prisoners who labored below the headlights of a navy truck. His household’s request for a Catholic funeral was refused. The demise certificates mentioned he died of “pure causes.”

Paul Sankara returned to Burkina Faso in August, for the primary time in 32 years, from his residence in Washington D.C. For the Sankara household the trial is “an opportunity to heal,” he mentioned — and to ascertain the realities a few younger chief whose story has been blurred by years of mythmaking, dissimulation and lies.

Burkina Faso, a poverty-stricken and landlocked nation with restricted water and pure assets, appears an unlikely setting for a stirring revolution. However after Thomas Sankara got here to energy in 1983 on the age of 33, one of many youngest leaders in trendy African historical past, he launched into an bold program that sought to fully redefine it.

He scrapped the nation’s colonial-era title, Higher Volta, in favor of Burkina Faso, which implies “land of upright males.” He vowed to interrupt its dependence on the West whereas eradicating corruption and waste at residence. The federal government fleet of Mercedes limousines was bought and changed with cheaper Renault sedans, and the president hitchhiked rides to worldwide conferences aboard the jets of different African leaders.

He launched reforms that had been years forward of their time — a quota for ladies in authorities jobs, bans on compelled marriage and genital chopping, and a marketing campaign to plant 10 million timber and stave off desertification. He cultivated an air of revolutionary stylish, arriving to conferences with an ivory-engraved pistol — a present from the North Korean chief, Kim Il-sung — and posing alongside musicians together with his crimson Fender Stratocaster guitar.

“This isn’t a toy,” he declared to an viewers in Harlem in 1984, brandishing the pistol. “And after we hearth these bullets, will probably be towards imperialism.”

He steadily clashed with the leaders of France, who seen him as a difficult affect in a area that Paris thought of its strategic yard. “This man is a bit disturbing,” President François Mitterrand mentioned throughout a tense go to to Burkina Faso in November 1986, in response to a speech by Sankara lashing France’s tolerance of leaders from apartheid South Africa. “He goes additional than is critical.”

Mr. Kientega, the Sankara aide, was alarmed by the change. “I informed him, ‘You’ve got began a battle,’” he recalled.

Sankara’s rule is also harsh and illiberal. His authorities muzzled the free press, imprisoned some opponents with out trial and confronted accusations of human rights abuses. In 1986 Amnesty Worldwide reported {that a} soldier had died in custody after being tortured with a blow torch.

By then, Sankara’s revolution was waning. Opposition from unions, civil servants and factions inside his personal navy was rising. Many unusual individuals had been tiring of unpopular measures like a ban on beer that was scheduled to return into impact the next yr.

However after his demise on Oct. 15, 1987, Sankara entered the pantheon of martyred African revolutionaries alongside figures like Patrice Lumumba of Congo, the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko of South Africa and the nationalist Amílcar Cabral of Guinea Bissau.

And 27 years later, when the crowds lastly rose to topple Mr. Compaoré, torching the Parliament and sacking his brother’s mansion in 2014, they invoked Sankara’s title and waved placards bearing his picture.

“Homicide! Homicide!” cried protesters throughout early demonstrations.

As we speak it’s the sufferer who stands tall. A towering bronze statue of the slain chief, erected in 2019 in entrance of the constructing the place he died, has turn out to be Ouagadougou’s essential vacationer draw. Rosine Boussini got here to pay her respects one night whereas visiting household on a visit from her residence in California.

“Issues had been by no means the identical” after Sankara’s demise, Ms. Boussini, 42, mused as her guffawing youngsters posed for photographs, fists clenched, in imitation of the gleaming bronze determine behind them.

However Ms. Boussini was skeptical that the high-profile homicide trial might actually get hold of justice. “Blaise Compaoré is not within the nation,” she mentioned. “So who’re you going to punish?”

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The hearings happen in a cavernous, wood-paneled corridor in Ouaga 2000, an upmarket neighborhood of broad avenues that features the presidential palace and the high-walled mansions of Burkina Faso’s tiny elite. Each morning the accused — former troopers and their commanders principally — enter by a aspect door, passing by an extended, luminous curtain to take their locations.

Sitting reverse them is Sankara’s widow, Mariam, who fought for many years to have this trial, and returned for it from her residence in Montpellier, France.

The trial was interrupted on Jan. 24 when troopers surrounded the close by residence of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, ousting him from workplace. The coup fed off fashionable fury at Mr. Kaboré’s failure to stem the Islamist violence that has overwhelmed Burkina Faso since 2016, displacing 1.5 million individuals and killing hundreds.

Though the coup’s turmoil subsided inside days, it highlighted the fragility of a trial already affected by one keenly felt absence.

Blaise Compaoré’s function has been a central focus of the hearings. Witnesses have testified that Mr. Compaoré had plotted for months to oust Sankara in 1987, and that the commandos who killed him had set out from Mr. Compaore’s home.

Mr. Compaoré’s Paris-based lawyer, Pierre-Olivier Sur, mentioned his consumer had rejected the trial as a result of it was not internationally acknowledged. “We’re in the course of a parody, a poor piece of theater,” he mentioned by cellphone.

Again within the Nineteen Eighties, Mr. Compaoré and Mr. Sankara had been the perfect of associates. As younger navy officers, they performed in a band that toured Burkina Faso and later allied to grab energy in 1983. The Sankara household adopted Mr. Compaoré, whose mother and father died younger, as a type of surrogate son.

After Sankara’s demise, his devastated mother and father felt doubly betrayed. “I’ve two sons,” Paul Sankara, the sufferer’s brother, recalled his father saying: “Considered one of them is useless. Can somebody clarify to me what occurred to the opposite one?”

Many in Burkina Faso blame the break up between the 2 males on Mr. Compaoré’s marriage to Chantal Terrasson de Fougères, a member of the pro-France elite in neighboring Ivory Coast — pointing, in flip, to a different, much more elusive dimension of the homicide case.

Separate from the trial, the authorities in Burkina Faso are investigating the “worldwide side” of Sankara’s demise — code for the purported function of Ivory Coast and the previous colonial energy, France.

Declassified American diplomatic cables present that French officers actively sought to take away Sankara throughout his first months in energy, viewing him as a harmful affect, mentioned Brian J. Peterson, a historical past professor at Union School and the writer of a latest Sankara biography.

The day after Sankara’s demise, French brokers eliminated delicate wiretap recordings from the workplaces of the native intelligence service, the trial heard. And within the years that adopted, Mr. Compaoré grew to become a staunch ally of Paris — a lot so that in his tumultuous ouster in 2014, French troops evacuated him by helicopter to Ivory Coast, French information shops reported.

Acknowledging these suspicions, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, promised in 2017 to declassify all French paperwork associated to the Sankara case. Up to now three batches have been launched.

However they exclude many secret paperwork together with data from the infamous “Africa cell,” which coordinated France’s most delicate actions in its former colonies, mentioned Bruno Jaffré, a French knowledgeable on Sankara who runs an internet site devoted to his life.

“The story of the assassination has turn out to be a lot clearer on account of the trial,” he mentioned. “But there’s a lot we nonetheless don’t know.”

A French official, talking on the situation of anonymity to debate delicate issues, insisted his authorities had despatched all the requested paperwork to Burkina Faso.

Sankara’s enduring enchantment raises intriguing questions on what the younger revolutionary president would have turn out to be, had he lived. Different once-hopeful leaders of the identical technology, like Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, have morphed into autocrats.

But Sankara’s fame as a righteous, incorruptible determine nonetheless resonates throughout Africa, invoked by different beret-wearing firebrands so far as South Africa.

The trial paused final week, for the third time, after protection attorneys filed a movement in search of to dismiss key fees. A choice is predicted within the coming weeks.

For Sankara’s household, this can be a second for closure. As soon as the trial ends, Paul Sankara mentioned, his surviving 10 brothers and sisters intend to bury Thomas correctly — not below the lights of a navy truck, however with the funeral he deserved 35 years in the past.