Vagner Group in Burkina Faso
A Russian private military company with links to Russia's Defense Ministry is withdrawing from Burkina Faso due to Ukraine's incursion into Kursk Oblast, French newspaper Le Monde reported on 29 August 2024. According to Le Monde, the 100-strong unit known as the Bears Brigade arrived in the West African nation of Burkina Faso in May to support the junta of Captain Ibrahim Traore, who came to power in a coup in September 2022. The Bears Brigade was formed in March 2023 and is part of a Russian military grouping called Redut, which claims to be a private military company, but is actually controlled by the GRU.
Gold is Burkina Faso's top export ahead of cotton. There are two main types of exploitation: industrial and artisanal mining. As many as 2,000,000 people working artisanal mines, out of a total population of 20,000,000, half of whom are below the age of 18. In round numbers, it may be estimated that approximately half of the adult male poplation is engages in artisanal gold mining. Started in the 1980s, artisanal mining was considered a survival activity due to the periods of drought that the country had experienced before.
In 2014, when millions of Burkinabes ended the 27-year rule of Blaise Campaore by forcing him to step down, observers and analysts dubbed the occurrence West Africa’s version of the “Arab Spring”. The following year, sustained nationwide protests also deterred an elite force he founded to stage a coup against the interim government. As Roch Marc Christian Kabore was elected as president in the 2015 elections, hopeful masses were chanting, “nothing will be like before.”
What started as a rebellion in neighbouring Mali by marginalised Tuaregs in 2012 has now set the entire Sahel region ablaze. By tapping into deep-seated tensions among communities, under-governed spaces and security issues, various armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) are grabbing territories, controlling economic activities and triggering political instability. Burkina Faso has had its fair share of the crisis, largely driven by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the fastest-growing violent group in the world.
By 2022 the landlocked country had replaced Mali, the birthplace of the conflict in the Sahel, as the epicentre of the crisis. According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a leading aggregator of conflict statistics, a total of 1,315 events of organised political violence, including explosions and violence against civilians, were recorded in Burkina Faso last year. It was a twofold increase from 2020’s figures. The increased wave of violence in 2021 led to at least 2,354 fatalities, exceeding that of Mali for the second time in the past three years. The Burkinabe military’s approach to quelling the conflict as far from exemplary. Last year, the army killed almost as many people as the al-Qaeda and ISIL-affiliated groups combined.
Reports that Russia is connected to the coup in Burkina Faso made their way to the Pentagon, though U.S. defense officials decline to say whether the allegations had merit. Burkinabe soldiers went on national television 24 January 2022, announcing they had deposed President Roch Kabore due to "the continuous deterioration of the security situation which threatens the very foundations of our nation." Pro-Russia protests had been held in Burkina Faso since another military coup took place on 30 September 2022.
A day later, Alexander Ivanov, the official representative of Russian military trainers in the Central African Republic, issued a statement offering training to the Burkinabe military. The CAR has been employing mercenaries with Russia's Wagner Group to help with security since 2017. "The Department of Defense is aware of the allegations that the Russian-backed Wagner Group may have been a force behind the military takeover in Burkina Faso," Cindi King, a Defense Department spokesperson, stated.
The Daily Beast first reported the allegations that Wagner was tied to the coup in Burkina Faso, citing sources close to the deposed president as saying his final acts in office were to oppose requests by the Burkinabe military to hire Wagner. "The president quickly rejected the idea," one official told The Daily Beast. "Kabore didn't want to run into any problems with the West for aligning with Russia."
Speakers at a rally of about 1,000 people in Ouagadougou, the capital, repeatedly called for Russian military intervention. Major General Andrew Rohling, the commander of the U.S. Army Southern European Task Force, Africa, said "It is a way that Russia of course is able to influence [a] military without actually putting a Russian flag on it," calling the situation in Burkina Faso "a little bit of an unknown right now."
The Burkinabe government on 08 December 2022 awarded a new exploration permit to Russian firm Nordgold for a gold mine in Yimiougou, in the centre-north region. The company has been active in Burkina Faso for more than 10 years. The four-year permit at the Yimiougou site in the centre-north of the country will allow total production of an estimated 2.5 tonnes of gold, the government said. The output will at the mine will bring in 5.3 billion CFA francs ($8.5 million) for the government budget and 648 million CFA francs to the local mining development fund. Nordgold already exploits three gold mines through two local subsidiaries in northern Burkina Faso, a region beset by jihadist violence since 2015.
Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo caused controversy by stating in December 2022 that Burkina Faso had hired mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner group to help it fight armed non-state actors. “I believe a mine in southern Burkina has been allocated to them as a form of payment for their services,” Akufo-Addo said, speaking to reporters alongside the United States’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the US-Africa Summit.
Burkina Faso’s mines minister denied an allegation by the president of Ghana that its northern neighbor had paid Russian mercenaries by giving them the rights to a mine. “We have not granted any permit to a Russian company in southern Burkina,” Minister of Mines Simon Pierre Boussim told reporters on 21 December 2022, after a meeting with civil society groups that were concerned about the allegations.
Burkina Faso’s government had not formally confirmed or denied the allegation that it has made an agreement with Wagner, but it summoned the Ghanaian ambassador for a meeting to explain the president’s remarks. “We made a list of all the exploitation or research permits for large industrial mines in the south, so they can see clearly that there is no hidden site,” Boussim said.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
