The Fulani are primarily pastoralists (herders) living mainly in West Africa but are also distributed across the Sahel from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. There are approximately 1,800,000 people of Fulani descent living in Burkina Faso, or about 8.4% of the total population, according to wikipedia..
A significant proportion of the Fula – a third, or an estimated 7 to 10 million[26] – are pastoralists, and their ethnic group has the largest nomadic pastoral community in the world.[27][28] The majority of the Fula ethnic group consisted of semi-sedentary people,[28] as well as sedentary settled farmers, scholars, artisans, merchants, and nobility.[29][30] As an ethnic group, they are bound together by the Fula language, their history[31][32][33] and their culture. The Fula are almost completely Muslims.[34][35]
While neighboring Ghana has welcomed refugees from Burkina Faso and provided them with camps and aid, those of the Fulani ethnic grouped are rebuffed and expelled.
www.thenewhumanitarian.org/…
The thousands of Burkinabè – both Fulani and non-Fulani – who fled into Ghana in late 2022 and early 2023 were initially hosted by Ghanaian communities on the border. They opened their homes, shared food and water, and helped coordinate with immigration and disaster management personnel.
In April 2023, the Ghana Refugee Board and the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, began building the reception centre in Tarikom, in the Upper East region. Within a month, the basics had been established, and the government began registering people in the border areas, and then transporting those who wanted to settle in the new camp.
But that hospitality was not extended to the Burkina Fulani. Instead, in July 2023, soldiers and immigration officers descended on at least a dozen small towns and villages across northern and central Ghana, detaining hundreds of Fulani and forcibly returning them to Burkina Faso, local officials and rights groups told The New Humanitarian.
Those that return find their lives in danger.
Barry received the same warning, but rather than dodge the authorities, he decided to return to Burkina Faso. “Ghana did not want us. At least if we ran by ourselves [instead of waiting to be arrested], we would be on our own [and safer],” he reasoned.
But the threats and violence that forced so many Fulani to leave Burkina Faso have only worsened. After just a few days of being back, Barry was detained and taken to a prison outside the capital, Ouagadougou. He was interrogated for six weeks, along with 40 other men who had been expelled from Ghana.
When he was released in September, he believed his name had been cleared, so he reunited with his family in the small town of Youga, in southern Burkina Faso.
There, he learned that another group of Fulani who had recently arrived from Ghana had disappeared. Their bodies later washed up on the banks of the White Volta river, peppered with bullet holes.
When The New Humanitarian last spoke to Barry in February, he was resigned to the dangers, stating matter-of-factly: “We know we are not wanted in Ghana, but they will kill us in Burkina Faso.”
Since 2009, upon realizing that terrorist groups were infiltrating the Sahel, The U.S. began to increase military aid to Burkina Faso and other Sahel nations.
US Security Assistance Laid Ground work for the Coup
This is the same military that, in the name of fighting supposed jihadism, has been implicated in widespread human rights abuses and targeted killings of ethnic Fulani people, a minority group that made up about 6.3 percent of Burkina Faso’s population in 2019 (though some estimates put it at 8.4 percent as of 2010). The Fulani traditionally are Muslim pastoralists who live across West Africa and herd cattle semi-nomadically.
Most Burkinabe explain the violence tearing apart their country in terms of local dynamics and intimate, person-to-person interactions. When asked, very few see the United States as having any role at all in the current conflict in the tri-border region of the Sahel between Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.
Nonetheless, closer examination reveals the U.S. role in promoting the idea that terrorism in Burkina Faso required a military response—even though the local dynamics were far too complicated to align neatly with the U.S. view that “good” government forces battle “evil” terrorists.
“It’s not that all Fulani are terrorists, it’s that most terrorists are Fulani,” a Burkinabe army communications officer, speaking in an unofficial capacity, told me over a lunch of chicken and rice in a bustling outdoor eatery in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, in January 2019.
The officer’s comment revealed more about his own prejudice than about the true makeup of militant groups: Research has shown that people from several different ethnic groups are involved. Yet state forces, along with government-backed citizen militia groups, have systematically targeted the Fulani.
U.S. forces also participated in training exercises with Burkinabe forces. From 2020:
pulitzercenter.org/…
During visits to the west and east of the country, the M&G spoke to three high-ranking security officials from the army and gendarmerie (police), who each said they had been trained by the US in recent years in counter-IED operations, first aid, and hostage-negotiation and border patrol-tactics, as well as how to engage with communities.
One army officer based in Fada N’Gourma, the main town in the east, said teams have been receiving training from the US since 2018. Sessions run for two weeks and include 30 people from the army and police. The men are trained by up to 20 Americans and taught the importance of winning civilian trust and counter-IED training, he said. They were given explosive detection kits, cameras, and bags that could be used to send samples to a laboratory.
“The training was very good and very practical. Short but intense,” the officer said. He was not authorised to speak on the record. Another training session was supposed to take place this year but because of Covid-19 it’s been put on hold.
The aid was blamed for strengthening the armed forces to the point they felt comfortable staging the coup. Most direct aid to the Army from the U.S. was cut in 2022 after the coup.
crsreports.congress.gov/…
After the January 2022 coup, the Biden Administration applied coup-related restrictions on certain aid to the government under Section 7008 of annual aid appropriations measures. This primarily affects military aid, along with some economic aid in which the government plays an important role. Some security assistance and military cooperation has continued, either because it is not bound by Section 7008, or because it is authorized or appropriated “notwithstanding” other provisions of law.
Many of the atrocities are said to be committed by the VDP, the People’s Volunteer Defense Force.
ISW Africa File
www.understandingwar.org/…
VDP units serve both counterinsurgency and regime-security purposes. These units directly report to the nearest military detachment, gendarmerie brigade, or police unit in their home area. The units have improved Burkina Faso’s capacity and made state forces more tactically effective through their local knowledge.[57] However, VDP members only receive two to three weeks of training before deploying, limiting their independent effectiveness.[58] Many VDP members also strongly support Traore, creating a useful and armed support base that provides some regime security against rival security force factions.[59]
VDP units had already perpetuated ethnic-linked violence before Traore took power and are now spreading those issues at an even greater scale due to their growing role. The government built the initial VDP units on preexisting self-defense militias that had mobilized since the beginning of the Salafi-jihadi insurgency in Burkina Faso in 2015.[60] This meant that the units were primarily recruited from these sedentary communities or people relatively unaffected by the insurgency.[61] Fulani communities, one of the most stigmatized and affected ethnic groups, have very few VDP members or village-level VDP forces.[62] This led to a consistent pattern of ethnically motivated VDP violence against Fulani villages that persisted before Traore’s rule.[63] However, the VDP has also increased the rate and severity of violence against civilians under Traore as their operations expand, which has continued to disproportionately affect Fulani civilians.[64]
As reported in Update #6, based on reports from VOA and the World Socialist Web Site, the Burkinabe army went on a rampage, murdering hundreds of civilians in a series of killings at the end of February. These reports have been confirmed by Human Rights Watch.
www.hrw.org/…
Witnesses said that between 8:30 and 9 a.m., about 30 minutes after a group of armed Islamist fighters passed near the village yelling “Allah Akbar!” (God is great), a military convoy with over 100 Burkinabè soldiers arrived on motorbikes, in pickup trucks, and in at least two armored cars in Nondin’s Basseré neighborhood located near the asphalted National Road 2. They said the soldiers went door-to-door, ordering people out of their homes and to show their identity cards. They then rounded up villagers in groups before opening fire on them. Soldiers also shot at people trying to flee or hide.
May 3rd was World Press Freedom Day.
The intense reporting of all these atrocities committed by the Armed Forces of Bukina Faso under the leadership of Capt Traore has caused the Burkinabe government to ban a number of foreign press agencies and their websites from Burkina Faso, joining such countries as Israel in doing so.
Currently banned in Burkina Faso:
BBC, VOA, TVSMonde, Deutsche Welle, Le Monde, Ouest-France, the Guardian, and African agencies APA and Ecofin.
Other non-western agencies reporting on the same story are not banned, however. This points to the internationalization of what are primarily local issues.
The Local Roots of Violence in Eastern Burkina Faso: Competition over resources, weapons and the State
Eastern Burkina Faso is dubbed “the red zone” by the Burkinabé, given the high level of criminal activity in a region that has long witnessed diffuse violence. Its porous borders with neighboring countries have historically made the region a smuggling hub, where informal networks play a crucial role in the local economy and provide a livelihood for many of its inhabitants. Eastern Burkina Faso therefore serves as an interface between the Sahel and the coasts of Benin, Ghana and Togo. Cigarettes, fuel, ivory, weapons,drugs and simple everyday goods circulate outside of any state control.
The region is characterized by the socio-economic marginalization of some of its communities and of the younger generation. Such marginalization is especially fostered by increased competition for access to land and natural resources.
In this sense, the long-term settlement of jihadist groups in the region is less evidence of a political or religious “radicalization”of the local population—understood as growing recourse to violence practices based on their adhering to an ideological system—than it reveals jihadists’ ability to exploit tensions between the central state and populations in the East.
Many of the East’s inhabitants associate the central state with the Mossi community that constitutes a majority in Burkina Faso, and is primarily found in the country’s central plateau. The other components of the population—Gourmantché and Peul [Fulani]—feel deprived of access to political and economic resources,and develop identity politics in opposition to the central state.
Land ownership laws were changed to allow sales to the highest bidder rather than transmission through the family.
As the mayor of a small town explained: “In my area there was an old man with around ten children. He sold nearly all his lands to a wealthy inhabitant of Ouagadougou. He’d never had any money—and suddenly he was offered millions of Francs. Obviously, he caved in. But what will his children live on now?”
The result of this process has been hostility from the younger generation towards the new landowners. These are often perceived as “foreigners” because they are not drawn from local family or community circles, and are accused of dispossessing the locals. This hostility sometimes extends to local traditional chieftains, who are denounced as complicit with this process. This generational divide deprives the younger generations of the ability to engage in agricultural activity, and encourages the emergence of a landowner class that is often deemed to be close to the central state.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is providing $55 million in additional humanitarian aid as announced by US aid chief Samantha Power:
www.reuters.com/…
. . . civilians were trapped by armed groups, cut off from aid by fighting and intentional impediments and suffering from severe hunger. At least 1 million people are reachable only by humanitarian helicopter airlifts or military convoys, Power said.
She warned that nearly 3 million people are projected to face levels of food insecurity requiring immediate humanitarian assistance in coming months.
"We call on all parties, including the Transition Authorities, Burkinabe military, and armed groups, to protect civilians and enable the free flow of humanitarian aid to prevent this devastating situation from getting worse," she said.
CULTURE
Typical Fulani surnames of Burkina Faso: Diallo, Diakité, Sidibé, Sangaré, Sankara, Barry and Dicko.
Oumou Sangare is a well-known Fulani singer from Mali.
One of the most famous people of Wasulu Fula origin is Oumou Sangaré, a popular singer from Mali who is nicknamed the “Songbird of Wasulu”[45] due to her powerful voice accompanied by her melodiously unique way of singing. Most of Sangaré’s songs pertain to women’s rights in Africa and the union of different tribes within Mali. She has traveled to many parts of West Africa, including Cameroon, to work with various Fula artists and to promote the Fulani cultural heritage of Wasulu. wikipedia