Burkina Faso has been suspended by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) on Friday, following a military coup, but no more sanctions would be imposed for the time being, a participant at the virtual conference said. ayokinews.com reports
According to the source, ECOWAS is demanding that the new military junta free former President Roch Marc Christian Kabore and other government officials detained during Monday’s coup.
The bloc will meet again on February 3 in Accra, Ghana, it added.
The three-hour conference also resolved to dispatch a team of ECOWAS Chiefs of Staff to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, on Saturday.
The source added that ministerial-level envoys from the bloc will arrive on Monday.
Kabore, 64, was elected in 2015 after dictator, Blaise Compaore was deposed by a popular uprising.
In 2020, he was re-elected, but the following year, he faced a backlash over the rising toll of a jihadist insurgency that had surged in from Mali.
Mutinies broke out in many camps on Sunday, and Kabore was seized and hauled away by troops the next day.
A junta commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who controls military troops in the country’s jihadist-torn east, now governs the poor Sahel state.
Damiba made a televised appeal on the eve of the meeting, urging “the international community to help our country so that it can leave this crisis as quickly as possible.”
“When the conditions are right,” he pledged, Burkina Faso will “return to a normal constitutional life.”
Burkina Faso has now joined Mali and Guinea as the three ECOWAS countries that have experienced military coups in the past 18 months.
The regional bloc (ECOWAS) have put Mali and Guinea on hold and slapped a slew of sanctions, including individual sanctions.
Source (Credit): https://www.channelstv.com/2022/01/28/ecowas-suspends-burkina-faso-over-coup/
