Blaise Compaoré

Biography

Blaise Compaoré was born in Ziniaré, Upper Volta, in 1951. After school in Fada N'gourma and Ouagadougou he joined the army in 1971, trained at the military academy in Yaoundé, and became a close friend of Thomas Sankara.

He organised the August 1983 coup that made Sankara president, served as his deputy and minister of state, and became justice minister in 1985; during the 1985 Agacher Strip War with Mali he commanded Burkinabè troops. On 15 October 1987 he seized power in a coup in which Sankara was killed, reversed many of Sankara's policies under the banner of 'rectification', and in 1989 had his fellow triumvirs Henri Zongo and Jean-Baptiste Boukary Lingani executed.

Compaoré founded the ODP-MT party in 1989, merged into the Congress for Democracy and Progress in 1996, and won presidential elections in 1991, 1998, 2005 and 2010 that critics did not regard as free and fair. He backed Charles Taylor in Liberia and was accused of arming rebels in Sierra Leone and Angola, while also acting as a regional mediator, notably for the 2007 Ouagadougou agreement on Côte d'Ivoire.

His attempt to amend the constitution to run again set off the October 2014 uprising; he resigned on 31 October and fled to Côte d'Ivoire, whose citizenship he took in 2016. In April 2022 a military court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment for complicity in Sankara's murder.