In Ouagadougou, the expulsions of French diplomats and aid workers are no more surprising than the arrests of any dissident voice. On Tuesday April 16, three French diplomats were accused of “subversive activities” and declared “persona non grata” by the Burkinabé Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a letter addressed to the French embassy in Ouagadougou consulted by Le Monde.
The two political advisors as well as the editor, stationed at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris but who was staying a few days in Burkina Faso as part of her duties, according to several sources based in Ouagadougou, were asked to leave the country at the latest. late Thursday evening, April 18th. The regime’s new exchange of arms with Paris is a further step in the unraveling of Franco-Burkinabe diplomatic and military relations initiated by Captain Ibrahim Traoré since his coming to power through a putsch in September 2022.
The government did not specify in its letter the nature of the “subversive activities” accused of the three French diplomats, and did not respond to requests from Le Monde. According to our information, during her stay there, the editor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs met several civil society organizations and NGOs, in the company of her colleagues from the embassy, ??”on the authoritarian excesses of the junta and the massacres of civilians carried out by the army”, specifies a Burkinabé security source. “The regime has not digested this activism because it does everything to stay in power and is wary of activities that could be supported by Western chancelleries, with the aim of organizing civil resistance,” she analyzes.
During an interview with France 24 and Radio France Internationale (RFI) on April 8, Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné stressed the importance for France of maintaining “links with humanitarian organizations and civil society” but “not with the authorities”, in Burkina Faso as in Mali and Niger, three countries from which France was ousted by the putschists after their coming to power.
“Unfounded accusations”
Following the expulsion of its four diplomats from Burkina Faso, the Quai d’Orsay rejected “the unfounded accusations made by the Burkinabe authorities” and deplored this decision which “is not based on any legitimate basis”. At the beginning of December 2023, Paris had already contested allegations, this time of espionage, made by the Burkinabe authorities against four French officials. Presented then by an official French source, cited by Agence France-Presse, as “technicians” who came to Ouagadougou to carry out a “computer maintenance operation for the benefit of the French embassy”, the four French people are in reality agents of the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE), according to several Burkinabé and Western diplomatic sources.
Initially incarcerated in the Ouagadougou remand and correction center after being indicted without the reasons for their indictment having been disclosed, they were then placed under house arrest in the capital and were not not yet released.
Their arrest forced Paris to repatriate the dozen DGSE agents stationed in Burkina Faso. An operation that several diplomatic and local security sources attribute to Russian intelligence services, certain elements of which had arrived in Ouagadougou two weeks earlier, as part of the strengthening of security cooperation between Moscow and Ouagadougou.
According to our information, the arrest of the four agents was used by the junta to push Paris to dismiss Burkinabé personalities described as subversive. A blackmail to which France had refused to accept.
Divorce
In mid-September, the military attaché at the French embassy was also accused of “subversive activities” by the authorities and asked to leave the territory within two weeks. Before him, two French people working for a Burkinabé company had been accused of espionage and expelled from the country in December 2022.
At the same time, the junta had requested the replacement of the French ambassador, Luc Hallade, in a letter addressed at the end of December to the Quai d’Orsay, without giving the reasons. Additional symbol of the divorce with Paris demanded by Captain Traoré, he then denounced at the end of January 2023 the defense agreement signed in 2018 with France to regulate the presence of some 400 French special forces soldiers from Operation “Sabre”, deployed on the outskirts of Ouagadougou.
All had packed up by February 18. Their departure was followed, a few weeks later, by that of the French soldiers deployed within the Burkinabé administrations within the framework of a military assistance agreement signed with Paris in 1961 and which the regime had also denounced at the end of February.
