Burkina Faso Use of Volunteer Militia Drives Increase in Civilian Deaths

By ADF On Apr 16, 2024

Burkina Faso’s junta relies increasingly on its Volunteers for the Defense of the Fatherland to serve on the front lines against extremists, a situation that has led to a sharp increase in civilian deaths, retaliatory attacks and blockaded communities. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Since Burkina Faso’s ruling junta came to power in September 2022, the leadership increasingly has relied on the poorly trained and lightly armed Volunteers for the Defense of the Fatherland (VDP) to serve as front-line forces to battle extremists. Experts believe the strategy has led to thousands of civilian deaths, driven attacks on communities providing volunteers and shredded the country’s social fabric.

“The use of VDPs is a double-edged sword,” analysts with the Crisis Group wrote recently. While the volunteers help extend the reach of the Burkinabe armed forces’ counterinsurgency operations, they also suffer heavy casualties and have frequently targeted Fulani pastoralists as suspected extremists, worsening relations between herding groups and settled ones, the Crisis Group observed.

“Reports of extortion, forced disappearances, abductions, summary executions, and other abuses committed by VDP recruits against Fulani communities are a testament to the challenges of integrating armed civilian units into official security strategies without exacerbating inter-ethnic conflict,” analysts with the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project reported in late March.

Fulani members have told authorities that, while they fear the extremists, they also fear the VDP fighters who suspect them of supporting the extremist groups. VDP fighters are suspected in the deaths of 28 people found murdered in the community of Noura in the final days of 2023. A month earlier, in November, men dressed in military uniforms massacred men, women and children in Zaongo, a community in central Burkina Faso where residents had refused to join the VDP.

Survivors told The Associated Press that the men stormed the community on motorcycles and killed people at random, mostly likely believing residents sided with the extremists who later took control of the community.

The Burkinabe civil society organization the Collective Against Impunity and Stigmatization of Communities reported 250 extrajudicial killings of Fulani members in the last three months of 2023, nearly triple the number from the four months before. Daouda Diallo, the collective’s leader, vanished in December 2023 and was apparently conscripted into the military under a decree being used increasingly against critics of the junta, according to Amnesty International.

The VDP is a legacy of former President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who formed the group in 2020 to fight the extremists who had spread from neighboring Mali. The inability to control the extremists was used to justify military coups in January and September of 2022. After the second coup, Burkina Faso’s de facto leader, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, expanded the VDP to nearly 90,000 people drawn from communities across the country.

The escalation in VDP recruitment was met with violence by extremists, particularly the al Qaida-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin and Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, which launched retaliatory attacks on communities that supplied VDP fighters. They have also attacked camps sheltering the 2 million people displaced by violence.

Extremists have blockaded communities across Burkina Faso that they suspect of supporting the government. The blockades hold an estimated half a million people under restrictions that keep farmers from their fields and herders from their livestock. At the same time, extremists intercept aid convoys trying to bring relief. The scale of the blockades has grown as the junta increased its attacks on extremist groups.

The blockades have turned once-thriving communities such as Pama into disaster zones.

“Our brothers and sisters, cousins and nephews, our elderly, they live in total poverty,” a teacher who escaped Pama told The New Humanitarian. Pama has been blockaded for more than a year.

As the junta continues its fight against extremists, Traoré announced at the beginning of 2024 a 30% bump in monthly bonus pay for VDP fighters along with a payment if they are disabled while fighting.