Civilians in Burkina Faso are being punished by the “total war” the government is waging against Islamist militant groups, with both sides accused of war crimes.
The military has been accused of targeting the Fulani ethnic group, while jihadists have sought retribution against villagers they believe support the government.
According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (Acled), 1,694 civilians have been killed over the past year by the army and Islamist militants and the number soared between April and June, after a “general mobilisation” was announced to fight a more aggressive battle against the jihadists.
Human Rights Watch said this week that the army had killed and abducted, or “disappeared”, people during raids on villages, often checking their victims’ identity cards before they were attacked. Some people told HRW they had been accused of being allied to the militants simply because they had not abandoned their villages in the conflict zones.
In a report published on Thursday, HRW said it had spoken to witnesses of three incidents in which nine men were killed and 18 others disappeared in the Séno region since February.
HRW said all the abuses it had documented involved people from the pastoralist Fulani ethnic group and quoted victims saying they were targeted because soldiers believed they supported al-Qaida and Islamic State-linked militant groups.
“Executions and disappearances by Burkina Faso’s army are not only war crimes, but they breed resentment among targeted populations that fuel recruitment to armed groups,” said Carine Kaneza Nantulya, deputy Africa director at HRW.
“The Burkina Faso authorities should anchor their counter-insurgency strategy in protecting civilians, respecting human rights and providing accountability for abuses.”
Last month, Amnesty International said there was evidence the army was responsible for a massacre in the village of Karma, where 156 people, including 45 children, were reportedly killed after soldiers rounded them up and shot them.
Earlier this month, HRW accused Islamist militants of killing civilians, looting and burning property, and expelling people from their villages.
It said the jihadists had targeted villages they accused of supporting the government’s volunteer defence force, which was launched in October by the president, Ibrahim Traoré.
Traoré, an army officer, took power after a coup in September in which Paul-Henri Damiba was ousted for his failure to deal with the Islamist militants’ six-year insurgency. Damiba, also a military officer, had himself seized power eight months earlier.
Héni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at Acled, said the previous government had taken a more broad-based approach to the conflict, which involved dialogue with the Islamist militants and offering amnesties.
“This was completely abandoned by the current regime. As explicitly articulated by the president: ‘This is total war and we are going to kill,’” said Nsaibia.
He said the result had been an increase in mass killings, summary executions and a reliance on drone strikes, none of which he believed would help the military retake territory but could well further fuel the conflict.
Nsaibia said he feared growing division within Burkina Faso along ethnic lines.
“It’s about collective punishment from both sides. It also follows the pattern of mobilisation for volunteers mainly along ethnic lines – mainly from sedentary [farming] communities and the [pastoralist] Fulani. This has accelerated the calls for ethnic cleansing, messages circulating on social media, calls for killing prominent Fulani,” he said.
Almost 2 million people in Burkina Faso have been displaced by the conflict, which spread from Mali in 2016. An estimated 800,000 are believed to be living under blockade by the Islamist militants, who have reportedly attacked water supplies and forced school closures.
The Norwegian Refugee Council has called Burkina Faso “a perfect storm of conflict, displacement and food insecurity” and recently ranked it as the world’s most neglected crisis. The humanitarian response has received only a fifth of the funding called for by aid groups.
