Burkina Faso opens trial for the assassination of Sankara

AFTER BARELY four tumultuous years of revolutionary government, Thomas Sankara was gunned down in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, in 1987, during a coup. It was hatched by his erstwhile best friend, Blaise Compaoré, who has said that he did not order the killing, but who then ran the show until he in turn was turfed out after an uprising in 2014. Since 2015 this poor, arid country of 22m has wobbled along more or less democratically.In the past few years, however, a wave of jihadist violence across the five countries of the Sahel (the others are Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger) has washed over Burkina Faso, too, giving everyone the jitters. So what is the point of the trial, which opened on October 11th in Ouagadougou, of 14 men accused of being involved in the killing of Mr Sankara and a dozen or so of his comrades all those years ago, seeing that the chief defendant, Mr Compaoré, is snug in exile next door, in Ivory Coast?