Burkina Faso Junta Using Forced Conscription to Silence Dissent

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Anesthesiologist Dr. Arouna Louré was seeing patients when armed soldiers suddenly burst into the operating room of his hospital in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou.

“They made me understand they could make me leave using the gentle or the violent method,” the 38-year-old told the BBC.

The soldiers put him in a van and took him to a military training camp hundreds of miles away where he was conscripted, given minimal military training and deployed to the front lines of the country’s brutal war against multiple violent extremist groups.

Louré was abducted in September 2023. He served for about three months in three areas, including Koumbri, one of the most dangerous spots in the North region.

Today, Louré is speaking out about the ruling junta’s many cases of silencing critics with forced conscription. He believes he was punished for a Facebook post in which he referred to the military rulers as “constitutional deserters” and criticized the army’s response to a militant attack.

“In this country, we are no longer free to say what we think,” he said.

Louré is one of at least 15 Burkinabe men who recently have either disappeared or were forced to join the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland (VDP) militia, according to human rights groups. Burkina Faso’s civilian government formed the VDP in 2020.

The list includes journalists, civil society activists, an imam and former Foreign Minister Ablassé Ouédraogo, an opposition politician who was arrested in late December. Each of them criticized the junta for abusing civilians and for failing to defeat insurgents with a military-only approach.

“The [junta’s] goal is to humiliate,” Louré said. “If you obey, they take a photo of you and post it on social media to humiliate you. If you flee the country, they’ll call you a coward.”

Rights groups and lawyers in Burkina Faso say the junta is abusing the “general mobilization” decree it passed in 2023, which gives it the power to conscript anyone over age 18.

“The Burkinabe authorities are waging a legitimate war, but responding to abuse with abuse is not the solution,” Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at Human Rights Watch, told the BBC.

Junta leader Capt. Ibrahim Traoré uses the VDP to bolster the Burkinabe military, which has fought extremists linked to the Islamic State group and al-Qaida for more than seven years. Extremist fighters have killed thousands and forced more than 2 million from their homes, according to the United Nations.

Government officials have said 50,000 people have volunteered to join the VDP. But insurgents have managed to hold as much as half of the nation’s territory, mostly in the north.

When he seized power in September 2022, Traoré pledged to improve security within “two to three months” and restore civilian rule by July 2024. But he has backtracked.

“There won’t be an election that is only concentrated in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso and other nearby towns,” he said in a November 2023 speech, while also making clear his opinion on conscription. “Individual freedoms [are] not superior to national freedom.”

In February 2024, photos circulated on social media of the 70-year-old Ouédraogo wearing fatigues and conducting military maneuvers with an AK-47. It was the first time he had been seen since his arrest.

After Louré was released and returned home in late December, he said his forced conscription only strengthened his beliefs that the junta’s counterterrorism approach is failing, and that silencing dissidents is worsening the danger for civilians.

“This life test reinforces my conviction that the foundation for building a nation of peace and lasting prosperity remains the rule of law,” he posted on Facebook on December 13, 2023.