Burkinabe President Roch Marc Christian Kabore on Thursday faced demands for tougher action against Burkina Faso’s militant insurgency, a day after the crisis claimed the political scalp of the prime minister.
Seeking to defuse anger over a bloody six-year-old campaign that has claimed about 2,000 lives and forced 1.4 million from their homes, Kabore on Wednesday accepted the resignation of prime minister Christophe Joseph Marie Dabire.
The move also triggered the departure of Dabire’s government — under Burkinabe law, the resignation of the prime minister also requires the entire Cabinet to step down.
Photo: AFP
“A new prime minister and a government who are fighters have to be found — and as quickly as possible,” the state newspaper Sidwaya said.
“The country does not need a time of drift, with stop-gap ministers just dealing with day-to-day business,” said Issouf Sawadogo, a senior member of a coalition of civil society groups.
“We are at war, and we need a fighting government to take the situation back in hand,” he said, calling for the new prime minister to be named “within 24 hours.”
Dabire’s government was “overwhelmed by the wave of discontent by people outraged at having to mourn the daily killings of soldiers and civilians,” said the online newspaper Wakat Sera.
Dabire, appointed in 2018, had been tasked with stemming the bloodshed, which began when groups linked to al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State group started launching attacks from neighboring Mali three years earlier.
The country’s poorly equipped security forces have struggled against a ruthless and highly mobile foe.
Discontent rose after a string of massacres this year. At least 13 Burkinabe defense volunteers were killed in an attack in the north of the country on Thursday, security sources said.
The peak of the deadly violence came on Nov. 14 when 57 people, 53 of them gendarmes, were killed in the country’s north.
Two weeks before they were attacked, the gendarmes had warned headquarters that they were running short of supplies and were forced to trap animals to eat.
They had been waiting in vain for several days for a relief force when they came under attack from hundreds of fighters on pickup trucks and motorcycles, according to accounts of the battle.
Late on Thursday, the armies of Burkina Faso and neighboring Niger said they had killed about 100 “terrorists” in a joint military operation against militants on the border between Nov. 25 and Thursday.
They had also dismantled two bases, one on either side of the frontier, they said in a joint statement.
On Nov. 27, 10 people were hurt, including a child and two journalists, when police used teargas to disperse a protest rally in the capital Ouagadougou.
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