The former president of Burkina Faso Blaise Compaoré was sentenced on Wednesday April 6 in absentia to life imprisonment for his participation in the assassination of his predecessor Thomas Sankara, killed with twelve of his companions during a coup d’etat in 1987. The military tribunal of Ouagadougou also sentenced to life imprisonment the commander of his guard Hyacinthe Kafando and General Gilbert Diendéré, one of the leaders of the army during the putsch of 1987. The three men were sentenced for “attack on state security“. Blaise Compaoré and Gilbert Diendéré are also found guilty of “complicity in murder” and Hyacinthe Kafando, suspected of having led the commando which killed Thomas Sankara, of“assassination”. The judges went beyond the requisitions of the military prosecutor’s office which had asked for 30 years in prison against Compaoré and Kafando and 20 years against Gilbert Diendéré.
He wanted “decolonize mentalities” in his country and in Africa where he has become an icon, but Thomas Sankara, young president of Burkina Faso, could not realize his dream: in 1987, he was assassinated, four years after the coup d’etat which had brought to power. Born on December 21, 1949 in Yako (north), Thomas Sankara, raised in a Christian family and whose father was a veteran, was twelve years old at the time of decolonization. After obtaining his baccalaureate in Ouagadougou, he underwent military training abroad, notably in Madagascar where he witnessed the insurrection in 1972 which overthrew President Philibert Tsiranana, considered to be subservient to France, a former colonial power. .
After a coup in November 1980, the new Head of State, Colonel Saye Zerbo, entrusted him with the post of Secretary of State for Information. But his progressive ideas made him slam the door of the government a year and a half later. He returned thanks to another putsch and was appointed Prime Minister in January 1983. A silent struggle for power then began between soldiers. First arrested in May 1983, he resurfaced in August, this time for good, following a new coup led by his close friend, Captain Blaise Compaoré. Aged 33, Sankara symbolizes the Africa of youth and integrity. He renamed his country Burkina Faso in “land of upright men“.
Its relations with the former French colonial power and several neighboring countries, including Félix Houphouët Boigny’s Ivory Coast and Gnassingbé Eyadéma’s Togo, are strained. His positions, his links with the Libya of Muammar Gaddafi and the Ghana of Jerry Rawlings, are worrying. To French President François Mitterrand, who had officially welcomed the Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi and the President of the South African apartheid regime Pieter Botha to Paris, he gave a lesson in human rights during a visit to Ouagadougou in 1986. “It goes further than it should in my opinion”, Mitterrand replies. Sankara calls on Africa not to pay its debt to Western countries, denounces wars before the UN “imperialists”apartheid, poverty, defends the right of Palestinians to self-determination.
The Sankarist parenthesis will be short-lived: on October 15, 1987, when he goes to an extraordinary council of ministers, he is assassinated during a putsch which leaves Blaise Compaoré alone in power. He was only 37 years old.