Enemies of the State in Burkina Faso
The authorities, now routinely facing (real or exaggerated or fabricated) coup plots, are quick to call all challengers and critics "terrorists."
At the BBC, Wycliffe Muia reports:
Burkina Faso's military government has said it foiled a "major plot" to overthrow junta leader Capt Ibrahim Traoré, with the army alleging the plotters were based in neighbouring Ivory Coast.
Security Minister Mahamadou Sana said the coup attempt was led by current and former soldiers working with "terrorist leaders". The intention was to attack the presidential palace last week, he added.
As Muia goes on to note, this is not the first alleged coup plot under Traoré; for example, authorities stated that they had blocked coups in December 2022 and September 2023, as well as in September 2024.
The idea that Traoré could be overthrown is eminently plausible. He himself came to power in a coup in September 2022, overthrowing Paul-Henri Damiba who had himself taken power in a January 2022 coup. Previously, the country experienced a short-lived coup in 2015 as well as, in the more distant past, six successful coups between 1966 and 1987. Since approximately 2016, moreover, the country has faced a serious and escalating insurgency and multi-sided civil war involving jihadists, community-based militias (some of whom have been rebranded as state-backed vigilantes), and the state security forces. Widespread insecurity, battlefield losses, discontent within the ranks, severe political repression, and massive displacement all combine to produce a coup-prone environment.
At the same time, it is possible that the authorities are exaggerating or even inventing coup plots as a way of distracting from the authorities’ failures, heightening the sense of emergency and alarm, justifying repression, and spotlighting enemies. With each major coup plot, Traoré’s administration has blamed rival officers and politicians such as Lieutenant Colonel Emmanuel Zoungrana in 2022 and, amid the current reported attempt, Major Joanny Compaore and Lieutenant Abdramane Barry. Here things became so murky and almost circular that I cannot tell you which comes first - the junta’s fear that these officers are plotting against it, or the plots themselves; is Traoré preemptively accusing officers of plotting, or are his people uncovering genuine threats?
Making things blurrier still is the authorities’ use of the term “terrorist.” I’ve been meaning to write something longer about this dynamic, which has been a recurring feature of the current juntas across the central Sahel - despite their much-discussed breaks with France and to some extent with the United States, the juntas are also heirs to the War on Terror on various ways. In fact, they’ve taken the mentality of the War on Terror to its logical endpoint, which is that anyone who challenges the state is a terrorist; indeed, that logic has already been embraced by various regimes across the world from 2001 on.
Burkina Faso made news a few weeks ago, in fact, by releasing a list of thirty-two persons wanted for alleged connections to a “terrorist venture.” The list, as many journalists and observers pointed out, included not just jihadist leaders such as Ja’far Dicko but also journalists such as Newton Ahmed Barry, online activists such as Maix Somé, and former military officers such as Roméo Djassanou Ouoba (a former special operations commander who fled in 2023); many of the individuals on the list are currently in exile. The list is in keeping with the much wider pattern of arrests, disappearances, and forced conscriptions of dissidents and independent voices in Burkina Faso. But the list was particularly brazen in overtly framing a wide swath of people as terrorists or terrorist-adjacent.
If we assume, for a moment, that the authorities are exaggerating or even fabricating coup attempts, then they are playing a dangerous game. Announcing that there was a plot and that you have foiled it projects both strength and weakness - strength, in the sense of claiming that you are discovering and thwarting challenges; but weakness, in the sense that you are suggesting that top officers are routinely plotting to bring down the state or at least the current occupants of power. In the worst case for Traoré, his people might accidentally call the wolves out of the forest - that is, overhyping fake or weak coup plots could inspire someone to launch a real one.
No matter how one parses it, the ultimate image is one of serious volatility and fragility. I wrote last week about how the model Gabon and Chad have pursued (running the coup leader as a candidate in elections and then formally moving on from the “transition”) is one scenario for the central Sahel; another is further coups, especially coups from below.