When Civilians Become Targets | Council on Foreign Relations

In the last few years, several encounters between members of the Burkina Faso Armed Forces and ordinary Burkinabes have led to unprovoked confrontations, often resulting in untold massacres of the latter. In the most recent case in February this year, the Burkinabe military allegedly summarily killed an estimated 223 people, many of them women and children, in the villages of Soro and Nondin, both in the country’s northern Yatenga Province. The country’s military authorities have described the allegations as “baseless.” Specifically, communications minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo has accused Human Rights Watch, which first reported the incident last month, of acting “with boundless imagination, to identify ‘the guilty’ and pronounce its verdict” while an “inquiry is under way to establish the facts and identify the authors.”

Doubling down, the junta has suspended both the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), U.S. broadcaster Voice of America, and other foreign media for reporting on the Human Rights Watch publication.      

Watchers of Burkina Faso are bound to notice a pattern in this sequence of allegation, trenchant denial, and official vow to identify and bring the perpetrators to book. In April last year, after men in military uniforms killed at least sixty people in the village of Karma near the border with neighboring Mali, the country’s prosecutor opened an investigation that, a year later, remains inconclusive.   

Just before the Karma killings, seven young boys were reportedly killed inside a military base in the northern city of Ouahigouya by soldiers who recorded the gruesome proceedings while apparently shouting: “We will kill you.”

In November last year, the European Union (EU) called for an official investigation after nearly one hundred villagers of Zaongo in the country’s Centre-North region were allegedly massacred by soldiers who reportedly carried out their attack “with mounted pickup trucks, guns and drones.”

According to the U.S.-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), across Burkina Faso, “Civilian deaths at the hands of security forces increased by 70% from 2022 to 2023 — to 735 people killed from 430.”     

The above pattern of deliberate slaughter of civilians is hardly unique to Burkina Faso. In neighboring Mali, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk was forced to issue a strong statement back in January following “credible allegations that Malian armed forces accompanied by foreign military personnel summarily executed at least 25 people in Welingara village, in the central Nara region.”  In March 2022, in what the Human Rights Watch described at the time as “the worst single atrocity reported in Mali’s decade-long conflict,” Malian troops massacred at least 500 people in the central Malian town of Moura.

Similar to Burkina Faso, official investigations into military atrocities in military-led Mali have typically come to nought.  

In rare cases, civilians have been the ones doing the killing, at least initially. In March this year, some suspected residents of Okuama community in Nigeria’s South-southern Delta State reportedly ambushed and murdered 17 military personnel who were apparently on a peace mission. Across the country, the military authorities’ immediate vow to be “firm, strong, decisive and professional” in its investigation was, perhaps not wrongly, widely seen as instigation to indiscriminate killing. Afterall, Many Nigerians still remember with horror the events of November 1999 when Nigerian soldiers seeking revenge for attacks by a local armed gang launched an assault on the village of Odi in South-southern Bayelsa State, killing an estimated 900 civilians in the process.

The recurrence of these encounters—and, needless to add, their increased deadliness—points to a need to place them within the dynamic backdrop of civil-military relations in the region. The first thing to note in this regard is that they, i.e. the encounters, belong within an economy of deregulated violence involving a range of actors, including but by no means limited to members of the armed forces, foreign security forces like the Moscow-sponsored Wagner group, insurgents of various stripes, armed bandits, and sundry local vigilantes. Ordinary civilians are regularly caught in the crossfire among these groups, the latter invigorated by the collapse of central authority and the subsequent, if sometimes unwitting, outsourcing of state duty to various non-state actors. It is hardly breaking news that in many West African states, police duties have increasingly defaulted to members of the armed forces who typically have all of the muscle and none of the restraint and discipline needed for such responsibilities.         

If state retrenchment has given members of the armed forces unlimited and arbitrary powers of arrest, detention and prosecution, the sometimes-chaotic pursuit of Islamist insurgents has translated into a carte blanche to go after real and imagined “enemies of state”.  After seizing power in September 2022, Burkina Faso junta leader Capt. Ibrahim Traore “enrolled and armed more than 50,000 civilian militia fighters and urged citizens to turn in neighbors or others suspected of collaborating with extremists.” A situation in which every citizen is a potential “extremist” gives members of the armed forces the pretext to attack innocent civilians in the name of going after extremists. At the very least, a pervasive climate of mutual suspicion means that soldiers, often succumbing to fear and anxiety, are primed to shoot first and investigate later.

In any event, given the license to act with impunity, members of the armed forces do not, perhaps unsurprisingly, limit themselves to random killings of the very citizens they are paid and constitutionally obligated to protect. Apart from massacring civilians, security forces have also looted villages and been credibly accused of carrying out systematic sexual violence. Last year, UN sanctions monitors accused “Mali’s troops and its foreign security partners” of using violence against women to “spread terror” among the population. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), “Since 2016, West and Central Africa has recorded more than 21,000 children verified by the United Nations (UN) as recruited and used by armed forces and non-state armed groups, and more than 2,200 children victims of sexual violence. More than 3,500 children were abducted and more than 1,500 incidents of attacks on schools and hospitals were recorded.”  In December 2022, a Reuters investigation revealed that “at least 10,000 abortions had been performed at military and civilian facilities under the auspices of the Nigerian Army since at least 2013.”

Finally, there is a real sense in which military malevolence (male-violence?) reflects, in a manner of speaking, a certain powerlessness on the part of the armed forces. In countries like Nigeria where the military is no longer the center of the political galaxy for example, the throes of an institution simultaneously struggling to reconcile itself to its diminished social status and ruing the psychological legacy of prolonged involvement with political power are on stark display. Even in countries like Burkina Faso and Mali where it recently stole to power and, by all indications, rules the roost, there is a palpable feeling, not just that its reign is temporary, but even more important, that military rule is an abberation.      

In brief, military assault on civilians is a lingering totem of a culture of impunity that citizens across West Africa are desperate to put behind them.

Reina Patel contributed to the research for this article.