09/21/15 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
We do have Stephen Zunis on the line.
He's a professor of something and something.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Stephen?
Pretty good.
I'm in Austria right now.
Oh, yeah?
Looking at the mountains while the sun is setting.
Cool.
Very nice.
All right, so I'm sorry.
I don't have it in front of me, my man.
It's my fault.
What is your title at the University of what again?
I'm a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.
I knew that.
I just forgot it.
Yep.
And I unfortunately have a few minutes right now.
I understand.
But we can talk about what you wanted to talk about.
Yes, Burkina Faso.
Now, you told me you're not an expert on this, but you knew so much about Mali back when the war broke out there in 2012 and 2013.
I know that you're at least somewhat familiar with this, and you've been following the story of the coup d'etat there in Burkina Faso.
So I guess just give us ten minutes of everything you think is most important for us to know about it.
Okay.
Well, Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in West Africa, a former French colony.
It used to be called Upper Volta.
And it was one of those kind of classical neocolonial setups, you know, where they're independent name only, and the French basically, you know, bribed the folks to be friendly to their business interests and strategic interests, and a self-enriching elite, you know, kind of ruled things.
And, you know, people didn't really like that, so they only had one or two elections before they ended up staging a coup.
But in 1983, a guy by the name of Thomas Sankara, who was one of the junior officers, he was really fed up, and he staged kind of an internal coup and said, okay, we're going to do things right.
First of all, we're going to change this colonial name, Upper Volta, and that's how they got their current name, Burkina Faso.
But he did a lot more than that.
He got everybody—he sold the fleet of Mercedes Benz that all these, you know, government officials had and replaced them with Toyota Compaq.
He started a program where, you know, the country's wealth would try to go to the people, you know, rather than the foreign corporations, and he called for a non-aligned foreign policy.
He didn't want to get caught up in all the Cold War politics.
And he was very popular.
In fact, all over Africa, people are looking at him as kind of a model, a new African leader to kind of, you know, get rid of the DS they've been having since independence.
But he was murdered in a coup led by a guy named Ambrose Campari, who ended up ruling the country until last year.
He had ended up doing a series of staged elections and things like that.
But the French, the Americans really liked him because, you know, he was friendly to their business interests.
He was an ally in the so-called War on Terror.
But then what happened was the people got disgusted, and they rose up last year.
It was largely nonviolence.
I mean, there's some rioting and stuff, but it was mostly, you know, it was unarmed strikes, boycotts, street protests.
Dozens of people got gunned down by the bloody presidential guard, which was a U.S.-organized and trained paramilitary force, but, you know, one that protected the president, which went by a French acronym, the RFP.
But eventually Campari was forced into exile.
He got an interim government of the moderate opposition.
Now let me stop you right there for a second, Stephen, and ask you, is there any indication that this was the NED, the USAID, whatever, American-backed, color-coded, revolution-style thing?
It sure sounds like one.
Oh, no, no.
I mean, this was a very popular, genuine congressional uprising.
The U.S. was supporting the dictatorship.
We were not supporting the opposition.
Well, sometimes it's both, you know.
But, you know, these guys, you know, this is for real.
But they had a coalition government, but then that planned to have elections in two weeks where they would finally be able to elect a government, and the transition commission said basically, no allies to the dictatorship can run, and we should probably get rid of this RFP group.
They're kind of sketchy, given their history.
But then the RFP ended up having a coup.
This U.S.-trained elite force just, you know, last week, and they claim themselves a provisional government.
People, of course, went out in the streets and started protesting, and, again, they started shooting people, and there's still a lot of unrest going on.
Now, there's no indication that the United States was behind the coup, but, in fact, officially the Obama administration has condemned it.
But as with Mali a couple of years ago, the people who did it were U.S.-trained, were part of this militarization of Africa we've been seeing in recent years, where the United States is trying to set up this Africa command, you know, and cooperate and train these African armed forces essentially to fight in the war on terror.
But it's kind of like, you know, the School of America, you know, when we train these various army officers to fight the communists, we end up taking over these governments.
Well, it turns out that Ornur the Chechen is actually Georgian and was trained by the Rangers, is now the military leader of the Islamic State.
Yeah, so, you know, again, it's one of these things that, even though, again, I don't think the U.S. was behind the coup, but it shows, again, this kind of short-sightedness that we end up, you know, whether it be fighting against communists or fighting against terrorists, we end up supporting these thugs that end up taking over their countries and actually creating more radicals than the end of killing, because, you know, people don't want to be under a dictator, and they try to fight back.
Now, so far, the good news is that the resistance, again, has been nonviolent.
These people really are sincerely interested in democracy, but, you know, if they keep being oppressed like that, they'll give an opening to the very radicals we supposedly oppose.
Now, Stephen, Reuters is reporting here that the president of Senegal has come up with this deal for a transition and basically to roll back the coup, some kind of power sharing, this kind of thing.
Do you have anything about that?
The neighboring countries definitely want to try to get some kind of compromise, but, you know, frankly, the Senegalese president is also very tight with French and neocolonial interests.
I mean, I think what they want to do is maybe make some kind of coalition that may not be as brutal and dictatorial as some elements, but certainly not one that represents the masses, either, because what we've been seeing in Africa, you know, our stereotype of Africa is, you know, these tribal wars and all this kind of killing and corruption and all this kind of stuff, but, you know, the people of Africa, they want their freedom just as much as anybody else does.
And, you know, you have had popular pro-democracy struggles going on there for some time, and, you know, I have to leave now, unfortunately, but I just want to leave your listeners with just the idea that, you know, there's a lot of good things happening in Africa on the grassroots level we never hear about, and they're manifesting themselves in grassroots sustainable economic development, empowering and educating women, you know, trying to stop the abuses of state power, whether it be, you know, pro-socialist governments, pro-capitalist governments, you know, what they want is, you know, people power from below.
And Burkina Faso looked like a bright spot, having Alastair the 27-year-old dictatorship last year, and this coup, unfortunately, is a major setback.
But, you know, despite all this, you know, there is some signs of hope in Africa, and let's hope that these forces, not those of foreign intervention and corrupt local leaders, will be the ones that eventually come out on top.
All right.
Thanks so much for coming back on the show.
I sure appreciate it, Stephen.
Sure thing.
Take care.
Good talking to you.
All right, y'all, that's Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.
I find his great archive of really good articles going back for much more than a decade at Antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
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