Amnesty International Report 1996 - Burkina Faso

An opposition political party leader imprisoned for criticizing the head of state was a prisoner of conscience. Eight Cameroonian refugees were detained and deported after attending meetings of local non-governmental organizations. A number of villagers were tortured or ill-treated after they were detained: seven were reported to have been extrajudicially executed. Two school students were killed by the security forces during a demonstration. Reports emerged of extrajudicial executions of criminal suspects in 1994. Ernest Nongma Ouédraogo, Secretary General of the Bloc socialiste burkinabè (BSB), Burkinabè Socialist Bloc, an opposition political party, was arrested on 8 August and brought to trial three days later, before he could obtain a defence lawyer or adequately prepare his defence. A former minister in the government of President Thomas Sankara, who was overthrown and killed in a military coup in 1987, Ernest Nongma Ouédraogo was convicted of insulting the head of state and sentenced to six months' imprisonment. He appealed against his conviction and sentence but they were upheld in December. He was a prisoner of conscience. The charges arose following the publication in a newspaper of a statement by the BSB executive committee which claimed that President Blaise Compaoré had accumulated personal wealth through fraud. Ernest Nongma Ouédraogo appeared to have been singled out because of his opposition to President Compaoré. No legal action was taken against the newspaper or other BSB leaders. Eight Cameroonian students who had been recognized as refugees in Burkina Faso were detained in late September and accused of disturbing the peace and engaging in political activities incompatible with their refugee status, after they had attended meetings of local student and human rights organizations and had openly criticized the Cameroonian Government. They were held without charge until mid-October and then expelled to other countries in West Africa. Seven men from the village of Kaya Navio, Nahouri Province, were reported to have been extrajudicially executed after they were detained in February by forces of the Centre national d'entraînement commando (CNEC), National Centre for Commando Training, based at Pô. They were among more than 100 people who were detained after a confrontation between villagers and gendarmes in which four people, including a gendarme, were killed. Most of those detained were released a week later. Some had been tortured or ill-treated: photographs showed severe lesions on their backs. One elderly man was reported to have died in detention, possibly as a result of torture, but no investigation into his death or the allegations of torture and ill-treatment was known to have taken place. Some detainees were held incommunicado in Pô until April when they were transferred to prison in the capital, Ouagadougou. They were then permitted to receive visits. They were provisionally released in August. In October, however, it was reported that seven detainees who had remained held in Pô had been extrajudicially executed in early March, apparently in reprisal for the death of the gendarme, and secretly buried in a mass grave. They included Akou Agoudwo, Kossi Gounabou and Akandoba Kibora. No investigation into their deaths was known to have taken place. Two school students, Blaise Sidiané, aged 18, and Emile Zigani, aged 14, were shot dead by security forces in early May at Garango, Boulgou Province, during a demonstration in support of a teachers' pay increase. Initially peaceful, the demonstration became violent when stones were thrown, injuring several members of the security forces. In response, they fired into the air to disperse the protesters and then apparently shot at the fleeing students, hitting Blaise Sidiané in the back and Emile Zigani in the head. The government publicly condemned the killings, suspended the gendarmes involved and established a commission of inquiry, headed by a judge, to investigate what had occurred. Its results had not been made public by the end of the year. Reports were received of extrajudicial executions of criminal suspects by the security forces during a campaign against crime in several parts of the country, including the towns of Ouagadougou, Tenkodogo and Koudougou, during 1994. Dozens of young people were reported to have been killed by the security forces and their bodies left in the streets. In May Amnesty International called for an independent and impartial inquiry into the killings of two demonstrators by the security forces in Garango and for steps to be taken to establish strict guidelines to regulate the use of lethal force by the security forces, in accordance with international standards. The government responded that there would be an official investigation into the deaths. In a report published in October, Burkina Faso: Killings by the security forces in Pô, Amnesty International called for an investigation into the seven alleged extrajudicial executions and for those responsible to be brought to justice. It also called for urgent measures to protect all detainees from torture. Amnesty International also called for the immediate and unconditional release of Ernest Nongma Ouédraogo.