MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, November 27 (IPS) – Three years in the past, Captain Ibrahim Traoré seized energy in Burkina Faso with two guarantees which have proved hole: to handle the nation’s deepening safety disaster and restore civilian rule. Now he has postponed elections till 2029, dissolved the unbiased electoral fee and pulled the nation out of the Financial Neighborhood of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Worldwide Prison Courtroom (ICC). Burkina Faso has turn out to be a navy dictatorship.
The journey started in January 2022, when protests over the civilian authorities’s failure to handle jihadist violence opened the door for Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba to seize energy. Transitional authorities promised a return to democracy inside two years, agreeing to a timeline with ECOWAS. However eight months later, Traoré led a second coup, accusing Damiba of failing to defeat insurgents.
When Traoré’s promised deadline of June 2024 approached, the navy authorities convened a nationwide dialogue that almost all political events boycotted. The ensuing constitution prolonged Traoré’s presidency till 2029 and granted him permission to face within the subsequent election, reworking what was meant to be a transitional association into consolidated private energy. The dismissal of Prime Minister Apollinaire Joachim Kyelem de Tambela and the dissolution of his authorities in December 2024 eliminated the pretence of civilian participation in governance.
Because the navy has entrenched its rule, civic freedoms have evaporated. The CIVICUS Monitor downgraded Burkina Faso’s civic area score to ‘repressed’ in December 2024, reflecting the systematic silencing of dissent by arbitrary detention and a very sinister tactic: compelled navy conscription of critics. 4 journalists kidnapped in June and July 2024 disappeared into the navy, with authorities saying they’d been enlisted. In March 2025, three distinguished journalists who spoke out in opposition to press freedom restrictions had been forcibly disappeared for 10 days earlier than reappearing in navy uniforms, their skilled independence erased at gunpoint.
Civil society activists have suffered comparable fates. 5 members of the Sens political motion had been kidnapped after publishing a press launch denouncing the killing of civilians. The organisation’s coordinator, human rights lawyer Man Hervé Kam, has been repeatedly detained for criticising navy authorities. In August 2024, seven judges and prosecutors investigating junta supporters had been conscripted; six reported to a navy base and haven’t been heard from since. This weaponisation of conscription transforms civic engagement into grounds for compelled navy service, successfully criminalising dissent whereas claiming to mobilise nationwide defence.
In the meantime the safety scenario that supposedly justified these coups has dramatically worsened. Deaths from militant Islamist violence have tripled underneath Traoré’s watch, with eight of the ten deadliest assaults in opposition to the navy occurring underneath his rule. Army forces now function freely in as little as 30 per cent of the nation. The navy has dedicated mass atrocities: within the first half of 2024, navy forces and allied militias killed at the least 1,000 civilians. In a single incident in February 2024, troopers summarily executed at the least 223 civilians, together with 56 youngsters, in obvious retaliation for an Islamist assault.
Battle has displaced hundreds of thousands, with unbiased estimates putting the numbers of internally displaced folks at between three and 5 million, far exceeding the federal government’s final official rely of simply over two million in March 2023. Some are fleeing throughout the border. Round 51,000 refugees arrived in Mali’s Koro Cercle district between April and September 2025, overwhelming host communities already scuffling with fragile public providers. A number of concurrent epidemics, together with hepatitis E, measles, polio and yellow fever, compound the humanitarian disaster in Burkina Faso.
To keep away from accountability for these failures, the junta is withdrawing from worldwide oversight. In January, following their joint exit from ECOWAS, which they characterised as being underneath overseas affect and failing to assist their combat in opposition to terrorism, military-run Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger fashioned the Alliance of Sahel States. In September, the three juntas introduced withdrawal from the ICC, mischaracterising the physique that holds human rights abusers to account as a instrument of neocolonial repression. These strikes go away victims of extrajudicial killings, torture and struggle crimes with no sensible prospect of accountability.
The regime’s on-line propaganda machine has proved remarkably efficient in justifying its intensifying repression. Traoré has cultivated a picture as a younger pan-African hero combating western imperialism. To some younger folks throughout Africa and the diaspora, he represents the charismatic management wanted to interrupt with discredited politics and colonial relationships. This fame is constructed on intensive disinformation that overstates progress, downplays human rights violations and portrays withdrawal from worldwide establishments as daring resistance reasonably than an evasion of accountability.
The junta’s anti-imperialist rhetoric obscures a easy actuality: it has changed one troubling relationship with one other. Having expelled French forces, Burkina Faso has turned to Russia for navy assist. Russian mercenaries now function extensively alongside nationwide forces, bringing no stress to respect human rights whereas providing Vladimir Putin a protect from accountability for his struggle in Ukraine. The junta has not too long ago granted an organization linked to the Russian state a licence to mine gold.
But the democratic excellent survives. Civil society leaders proceed to talk out, journalists proceed to report and opposition figures proceed to organise, regardless of the big private dangers. Their braveness calls for greater than statements of concern.
Within the face of the Trump administration’s sudden termination of USAID programmes, different worldwide donors should step up and set up emergency funding mechanisms to assist civil society organisations and unbiased media working underneath extreme restrictions in Burkina Faso or in exile. Regional establishments should impose focused sanctions on officers chargeable for human rights violations and preserve stress for democratic restoration. With out sustained worldwide solidarity with Burkina Faso’s democratic forces, the nation dangers turning into one other cautionary story of how navy rule, as soon as consolidated, proves terribly tough to reverse.
Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Analysis and Evaluation, co-director and author for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She can also be a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.
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