Calls for “extermination” of Fulani community raise fears of civil war

First modification: 08/19/2022 – 02:42

In Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in Africa’s Sahel region, calls for “murder” and “ethnic cleansing” against the Fulani minority – also known as Peul – recently circulated on social media. This Thursday, the Government strongly condemned these incitements to hatred and crime.

“These are extremely serious comments that are only paralleled by the excesses of Radio Mille Collines that led to the Rwandan genocide (in 1994), one of the worst tragedies of humanity and from which we must learn the lessons,” denounced Lionel Bilgo, spokesman for the Burkinabe government, in a statement adopted by the council of ministers.

“The tone and words used are chilling and reflect the seriousness of the situation,” he added. “There are direct and active calls for assassination, mass killings, ethnic cleansing and sedition.”

These calls, in the form of audio recordings published mainly on WhatsApp, invited “indigenous” populations to attack the Fulani in their region, especially in the south-west of the country, bordering the Ivory Coast. In the audios, they make a call to kill and abuse them.

The Burkinabe government spokesman insisted that “this is hateful, subversive, dangerous and unacceptable speech in a rich and diverse country like Burkina Faso”, which requires “decisive and firm action before the irreparable happens”.

The existence of a risk of intercommunity war

In an article published on Tuesday, Alpha Barry, former foreign minister of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who was overthrown in January this year by a military coup, warned of the “risk of a real civil war” following the release of these recordings.

To prevent this, he called on politicians, religious leaders, intellectuals, traditional chiefs and other leaders to “go out into the field, meet with the people, carry out forceful actions to advocate for cohesion and coexistence, which are the cement of our nation.

A community suffering from an increasingly dangerous stigma

On January 1, 2019, armed individuals attacked the village of Yirgou, in northern Burkina Faso, where the Mossi, the majority in the country, and the Fulani have always lived together. Six people were killed, including the village chief, prompting reprisals against the Fulani.

At least 146 people died, according to civil society organizations. Burkina Faso, a country of nearly 20 million people and some 60 ethnic groups, has never experienced such deadly intercommunal violence.

Although coexistence between communities has never been easy, in recent years there has been a resurgence of tension for many reasons. In the first place, the difficult distribution of arid lands in this country, where more than 80% of the population lives from agriculture. Between the farmers, mostly Mossi, and the herders, mostly Fulani, disputes over access to water and grazing land are multiplying.

Second, these rivalries have been exacerbated by the increased threat of terrorism. Since 2015, attacks attributed to jihadist groups have killed thousands of people and displaced almost two million others. Since some Fulani have joined jihadist groups, the “Fulani equals terrorist” association has been made regularly ever since.

This confusion has been compounded by the fact that two radical preachers in the West African Sahel are Fulani. The best known, Malian Amadou Koufa, founded the Macina Liberation Front, before being killed in a raid by French special forces in November 2018. The second, Ibrahim Malam Dicko, founded Ansaroul Islam, a group active in the northern Burkina Faso.

In this tense climate, self-defense groups developed. The growing insecurity, the lack of resources of law enforcement and the slowness of the judicial system have given rise to these rural militias, which have thousands of groups throughout the country, fueling more and more the concern of the Fulani, of the authorities and the international community.

With AFP and local media