The small West African state of Burkina Faso has been rocked the past month by student unrest and upheaval. The student strikes and demonstrations were sparked by the February 22 police murder of Justin Zongo, a 24-year-old student at the college in Koudougou who died from injuries inflicted while in police custody.
The Burkina government attempts to hide and avoid responsibility for the killing, and it closed the university down from March 14 to March 26. Zongo’s murder, which was the issue that initially mobilized the students, was still at center stage as the majority of students still refused to return to campus classes despite the university being reopened.
Burkina soldiers entered the social unrest when they looted shops and fired their weapons into the air on the nights of March 22 and 23, demanding the release of soldiers arrested on rape charges.
Next, judges went on strike because soldiers entered their offices and courts and ransacked them. They are demanding an apology from their government.
Whatever is happening in Burkina Faso has its roots in Burkina Faso sell-out leader Blaise Compaore’s August 1987 coup. That coup, which was supported by French imperialism, toppled the progressive government of Thomas Sankara who was attempting to implement an anti-imperialist democratic program.
Compaore has been involved in numerous wars to maintain the status quo in Africa, including Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Today he is a key player in the Cote d’lvoire (Ivory Coast) proxy war as he is behind the neocolonial power of Alassane Ouattara and Guillaume Soro who are in a contest with Laurent Gbagbo‘s faction for control of Ivory Coast neocolonialism.
We are calling on poor and working class soldiers who make up the rank and file of the Burkina Faso military to unite with African Internationalism, a workers led effort to unite Africa with one national socialist economy, one government, and one state.
We are calling on the rank and file soldiers to unite with the aspirations of African workers and poor people everywhere, and to disobey any order from Compaore’s regime to kill and terrorize the people.
And we call on Burkina Faso’s soldiers to unite with the people — peasants, workers, students, young people and progressive intellectuals — and to turn their weapons against the African neocolonialists and join the movement for social justice and revolution.
It is the duty of African workers and peasants with honest intellectual Africans to seize the time and join the effort to build the African Socialist International (ASI) in Burkina Faso. This is the only way we can build a new future for ourselves by uniting all of Africa’s human and natural resources for the benefit of our children and ourselves, where life would be free of hostile, alien police and neocolonial puppet regimes that only serve imperialism and themselves.
Build the African Socialist International!!!
