OUAGADOUGOU —
Security forces fired tear gas to disperse angry protesters outside the French
embassy in Burkina Faso’s capital on Sunday, as unrest simmered in the
impoverished, restive West African nation following the claim of a second coup
this year.
اضافة اعلان
The latest upheaval began on Friday, when junior
military officers announced they had toppled the country’s junta leader,
sparking deep concern among world powers.
Late on Saturday, the junta leader, Paul-Henri
Sandaogo Damiba, said he had no intention of giving up power and urged the
officers to “come to their senses”.
His comments came shortly after the army general
staff dismissed the coup as an “internal crisis” within the military and said
dialogue was “ongoing” to remedy the situation.
In a statement read out on television on Sunday, the
officers who claimed the coup said they had lifted a curfew they had imposed
and called for a meeting of ministry heads for later in the day.
The officers had accused Damiba of having hidden at
a military base of former colonial power France to plot a “counteroffensive”,
charges that he and France denied.
On Sunday, dozens of supporters of the new
self-proclaimed putsch leader, Ibrahim Traore, gathered at the French embassy
in the capital Ouagadougou.
Security forces fired tear gas from inside the
compound to disperse the protesters after they set fire to barriers outside and
lobbed rocks at the structure, with some trying to scale the fence, according
to an AFP reporter on the scene.
There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Hundreds of protesters headed to the headquarters of
Burkina Faso’s public television, where Traore went in a motorcade to deliver a
national address on Sunday.
Some of them were carrying Russian flags and chanted
slogans hostile to France and Damiba. Traore supporters were also continuing to
occupy several main squares and roads in Ouagadougou, an AFP correspondent saw.
The French foreign ministry condemned “the violence
against our embassy in the strongest terms” by “hostile demonstrators
manipulated by a disinformation campaign against us”.
It marked the latest incident against a
France-linked building in two days, after a fire at the embassy on Saturday and
a blaze in front of the French Institute in the western city of Bobo-Dioulasso.
A French institute in the capital also sustained
major damage, the French foreign ministry said.
Traore called for an end to the attacks on Sunday.
An officer, reading a statement on television from
Traore, who stood by his side, told the public “to refrain from any act of
violence and vandalism”, notably against the French embassy and military base.
The officers said they had carried out their putsch
because Damiba had failed to quell jihadist attacks in the country.
Traore said talks with Damiba were ongoing and that
order was progressively being restored, although the country’s borders remained
shut on Sunday.
Damiba himself came to power in the nation of 16
million people in a January coup, accusing elected president Roch Marc
Christian Kabore of failing to beat back radical Islamist extremist fighters.
But the insurgency has raged on and more than 40
percent of Burkina Faso remains outside government control.
Thousands have died and about two million have been
displaced by the fighting since 2015, when the insurgency spread to Burkina
Faso from neighboring Mali.
The events Friday sparked a wave of international
criticism, including from the US, the
African Union, the European Union and the
regional grouping ECOWAS.
“Burkina Faso needs peace, stability and unity to
fight terrorist groups and criminal networks operating in parts of the
country,” said a statement by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
Extremist violence has also prompted a series of
coups in Mali since 2020 and fueled instability in neighboring Niger.
The new self-proclaimed Burkina putschists said they
were willing “to go to other partners ready to help in the fight against
terrorism”.
No country was explicitly mentioned but Russia, whose
influence is growing in French-speaking Africa including Mali and the Central
African Republic, is among the possible partners in question.
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