Assassinated in His Prime, an Iconic African Leader Haunts a Trial and His Country

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Many years later, the scene of the crime remains 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 appeared like a twister on a tin roof,” recalled one among them, Alouna Troaré, retracing his steps by means of the ghostly web site.

A charismatic military officer of revolutionary zeal, Sankara had reworked 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 palms 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 focus of a riveting homicide trial nearing its conclusion at a tightly guarded courtroom in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou. For 5 months, a army tribunal has heard testimony about 14 males accused of plotting, executing or overlaying 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 components 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 in every single 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 army 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 come back out.”

That consequence is way from assured. The trial was almost derailed on Jan. 24 when mutinying troopers ousted Burkina Faso’s elected president and put in a army 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 primary defendant, a former president, Blaise Compaoré — a once-close pal of Sankara who seized energy inside hours of his dying, 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 flippantly on the vexed concern of whether or not, as occurred usually in postcolonial Africa, overseas powers had a hand within the younger chief’s dying. 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 best 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 subject, nonetheless, has been excluded from the trial.

“Many international locations 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 feel is among the causes he was killed.”

One latest night Paul Sankara sipped a beer at a loud roadside bar in Ouagadougou, considering the excitement 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 dying, slipping throughout the border into Mali on a motorcycle underneath an assumed identify. It was a foul time to be referred to as Sankara in Burkina Faso.

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

Paul Sankara returned to Burkina Faso in August, for the primary time in 32 years, from his dwelling in Washington D.C. For the Sankara household the trial is “an opportunity to heal,” he mentioned — and to determine the realities a couple of 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 sources, 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 fashionable African historical past, he launched into an bold program that sought to fully redefine it.

He scrapped the nation’s colonial-era identify, Higher Volta, in favor of Burkina Faso, which suggests “land of upright males.” He vowed to interrupt its dependence on the West whereas eradicating corruption and waste at dwelling. 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 girls in authorities jobs, bans on compelled marriage and genital slicing, 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 pink 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, it is going to be towards imperialism.”

He ceaselessly clashed with the leaders of France, who seen him as a hard 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 important.”

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

Sankara’s rule may be 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 army was rising. Many peculiar individuals had been tiring of unpopular measures like a ban on beer that was scheduled to come back into impact the next 12 months.

However after his dying 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 identify 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 grow to be Ouagadougou’s primary vacationer draw. Rosine Boussini got here to pay her respects one night whereas visiting household on a visit from her dwelling in California.

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

However Ms. Boussini was skeptical that the high-profile homicide trial may 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 means of a aspect door, passing by means of 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 dwelling 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 standard 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 position 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 shopper 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 telephone.

Again within the Eighties, Mr. Compaoré and Mr. Sankara had been the very best of mates. As younger army 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 dad and mom died younger, as a form of surrogate son.

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

Many in Burkina Faso blame the cut 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 dying — code for the purported position 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 dying, 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 turned 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 retailers 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 information from the infamous “Africa cell,” which coordinated France’s most delicate actions in its former colonies, mentioned Bruno Jaffré, a French skilled on Sankara who runs a web site devoted to his life.

“The story of the assassination has grow to be a lot clearer because 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 attraction raises intriguing questions on what the younger revolutionary president would have grow to be, had he lived. Different once-hopeful leaders of the identical era, like Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, have morphed into autocrats.

But Sankara’s repute 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 searching for to dismiss key fees. A call is anticipated within the coming weeks.

For Sankara’s household, it is 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 underneath the lights of a army truck, however with the funeral he deserved 35 years in the past.