People of Burkina Faso should forget about democracy, says military ruler

People in Burkina Faso should forget about democracy as it is “not for us”, the military president, Ibrahim Traoré, told the country’s state broadcaster.Traoré took power in a coup in September 2022, toppling another junta that had taken power just nine months earlier. He has since stifled opposition and in January banned political parties outright.A transition to democracy had originally been planned for 2024, but that year the junta extended Traoré’s rule until 2029.“We’re not even talking about elections, first of all … People need to forget about the question of democracy … We must tell the truth, democracy isn’t for us,” Traoré said in an interview on Thursday with the state broadcaster Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina (RTB).Democracy was “false”, the 37-year-old said, adding: “Democracy, we kill children. Democracy, we drop bombs, we kill women, we destroy hospitals, we kill civilian population. Is that democracy?”Traoré has won fans across Africa with anti-French and anti-western rhetoric that often invokes the legacy of the revolutionary Burkinabé leader Thomas Sankara. Sankara, a Marxist, was president of Burkina Faso, which he renamed from Upper Volta, from 1983 until his assassination in 1987.However, Traoré has failed to stem a jihadist insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives since 2014 and had displaced 2.1 million people, about 9% of the population, when official data was last released three years ago.More than 1,800 civilians had been killed by the military, allied militias and al-Qaida-linked Jama’at Nusrat al‑Islam wa al‑Muslimin (JNIM) since 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released on Thursday.The group accused all sides of committing crimes against humanity and war crimes. It alleged the junta and allied militias had ethnically cleansed Fulani civilians that it accused of supporting JNIM, carrying out targeted killings and forcibly displacing communities.In April 2024, HRW accused the military of executing 223 civilians in a day two months earlier. The government denied this and banned the group, along with several international media outlets that had reported it, including The Guardian.