LONDON, August 7 (IPS) – Burkina Faso’s charismatic younger army chief, military captain Ibrahim Traoré, has stopped pretending. In April, he declared that individuals ought to ‘overlook concerning the query of democracy’ as a result of ‘democracy isn’t for us’. When Traoré seized energy in September 2022, ousting a pacesetter who’d staged a coup earlier that yr, he promised elections by June 2024. The junta broke that pledge, pushing any transition again to 2029. Now Traoré has confirmed he has no intention of restoring democracy. As a substitute, Burkina Faso’s army junta is tightening its repression, whereas working with neighbouring states to internationalise its dangerously undemocratic mannequin.
Crackdown intensifies
Repression has unfolded in a context of jihadist insurgency. Frustration with the democratically elected authorities’s safety failures helped gasoline the circumstances that led to army rule, however the military hasn’t turned issues round. The insurgency has grown, and civilians are paying the value. All sides are accused of crimes towards humanity and conflict crimes, and because the coup, there’s proof that Burkina Faso’s armed forces and allied militias have more and more focused civilians, significantly members of the Fulani ethnic group.
A army seen to be failing towards the insurgency and killing civilians would lose any claims to legitimacy. That makes the junta decided to regulate the narrative, silence dissent and crush any perceived problem to its energy.
Traoré backs his anti-democratic rhetoric with actions. In January, the federal government dissolved all political events, claiming they sowed division and weakened the social material. The junta can be focusing on civil society organisations (CSOs). In current months, authorities have suspended over a thousand organisations. In April, the federal government dissolved 118 CSOs, citing non-compliance with a July 2025 regulation that imposed strict and onerous registration, compliance and reporting necessities. The regulation supposedly gave CSOs a yr to conform, however the authorities dissolved them earlier than the deadline expired. It focused human rights organisations such because the African Assembly for the Defence of Human Rights, the Burkinabè Coalition for Ladies’s Rights and Christian Motion for the Abolition of Torture.
Spiritual associations and scholar teams have fared little higher. Affiliation As Salam and the Coordination of Younger Muslims of Burkina haven’t any specific human rights focus, however authorities have suspended each for alleged public dysfunction and actions mentioned to fall exterior their acknowledged function. In Might, the federal government suspended the Normal Pupil Union of Burkina Faso, the nation’s greatest scholar group, after it issued an announcement criticising the federal government’s safety file, which the federal government claimed glorified terrorism.
Authorities have suspended a number of media retailers, usually over their reporting on the safety scenario. In Might, the state media regulator indefinitely suspended French TV channel TV5 Monde, accusing it of siding with terrorist teams.
Anyone who speaks out dangers arrest, detention, enforced disappearance, compelled conscription into the armed forces and torture. Burkina Faso’s LGBTQI+ individuals are significantly uncovered, since in 2025 the junta criminalised same-sex relations, with jail sentences of as much as 5 years. The federal government has additionally granted itself the ability to strip citizenship from anybody deemed to be appearing towards the nationwide curiosity. Final December, repression took an much more ominous flip when the junta introduced its intention to reinstate the dying penalty.
Attributable to these actions, Burkina Faso has just lately been added to the CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist, which identifies nations the place a extreme deterioration within the high quality of civic area is going down.
Repressive alliance
Burkina Faso isn’t working alone. Underneath Traoré, it has cast shut relations with two neighbouring army regimes, Mali and Niger. Collectively, they’re selling a mannequin that rejects democracy and worldwide scrutiny. In January 2025, they accomplished their joint withdrawal from the important thing regional organisation, the Financial Neighborhood of West African States (ECOWAS), a yr after forming their rival Alliance of Sahel States. The transfer was clearly a response to ECOWAS stress to revive civilian rule.
The three states have now formally begun the method to go away the Worldwide Legal Court docket (ICC). They’ve denounced the court docket as a ‘instrument of neocolonial oppression’ and promised to arrange an alternate, though any physique they create is unlikely to retain the ICC’s energy to subject arrest warrants towards sitting heads of state and different senior figures. For survivors of human rights atrocities, withdrawal from the ICC and the ECOWAS Neighborhood Court docket of Justice removes very important potential routes to justice.
In February, Burkina Faso suspended the UN Human Rights Workplace, which had operated within the nation since 2019, in retaliation for a assertion by UN human rights chief Volker Türk urging the junta to reverse its ban on political events and open up civic area. The UN has now concluded it has no selection however to shut its workplace.
These strikes protect army leaders and safety forces from exterior accountability. They’re a part of a wider realignment that has seen Burkina Faso and its allies flip away from former colonial energy France and different democratic states and in direction of Russia, a companion with no real interest in human rights. Burkina Faso’s relations with Russia have prolonged past army cooperation to stronger financial ties. Final yr the 2 nations signed a gold-mining deal.
At the same time as he rejects worldwide scrutiny, Traoré has cultivated a worldwide following. By means of adept use of social media and a gradual stream of disinformation, he casts himself as a pan-African chief within the mould of liberation-era icons corresponding to Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s revolutionary former president. His message faucets into actual anger about colonialism and the ability imbalances in relations with western states.
However the individuals whose rights he tramples aren’t westerners. The civilians being slaughtered by the military and the activists and journalists being silenced are Burkinabe individuals. There’s nothing un-African about democratic freedoms, and nothing pan-African a couple of chief who denies them. African democracies have essentially the most to lose if Traoré’s mannequin spreads, and are essentially the most capable of problem it. They need to refuse to normalise his narrative and press him to revive basic freedoms, rebuild a path to democratic rule and recognise the worth of worldwide accountability.
Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and author for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
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