I am spending the evening with Burkinabe friends in Accra and they are telling us the tales about the end of the Blaise Campaore regime. He was confident he would continue in power because in spite of the initial one million-person march that took place two days before his fall, he had the National Assembly in his pocket. His advisers told him it was a few hundred water vendor boys and vandals only that were demonstrating against him. His end came when two days later, again one million people marched but this time went straight towards the tanks and APCs guarding his palace and the presidential guard refused to massacre them. It was a shock because they had clear instructions to shoot and kill if the crowd approached the palace.
This was what he was referring to when he reached Cote d’Ivoire and his first statement to the press was that he had been betrayed. That is, the presidential guard refused to engage in mass atrocities to keep him in power. The six martyrs killed on the fatal day were actually side killings because if the troops had shot into the crowd marched towards them expecting to be killed; the death toll would have been in the thousands. The story was that the young men in the front row had agreed to sacrifice their lives and the arrangement was that as they were being killed, those behind should try to outflank the troops, enter the palace and capture Blaise Campaore. The troops however held their fire.
The story of his departure is also interesting. He escaped from his palace through a side entrance and headed for Cote d’Ivoire in a long convoy of vehicles. The French however discovered that some troops and local people had set up an ambush on the road to Cote d’Ivoire to kill him. The French quickly sent a helicopter to pick him and take him to an airport from where he was flown to Cote d’Ivoire. The helicopter had place for only four people so the rest of the convoy was abandoned.
However,given his deep implication in the Ivorian civil war, he had too many enemies in the country so France made arrangements to fly him to Morocco where he is now living a lonely life of an exiled former dictator.
Another tale on the ephemeral nature of power. Other power hungry dictators should watch out.
