APA-Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) – Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the authorities to open “an independent enquiry with the support of the African Union and the United Nations.”
The Burkinabe army summarily executed at least 223 civilians,including at least 56 children, in two villages in the north of the country on 25 February 2024, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Thursday 25 April 2024.
“Soldiers killed 44 people, including 20 children, in the village of Nondin, as well as 179 other people, including 36 children, in the neighbouring village of Soro; these two villages are located in the district of Thiou, in the province of Yatenga, in the north of the country,” the human rights organization explains.
Witnesses interviewed by HRW explained that the soldiers arrived in their village after members of terrorist groups had passed through.
They then accused them of “complicity.”
In an identical scenario in the two villages, HRW explained that the soldiers went door-to-door, ordering people to leave their homes and show their identity cards. The villagers were then herded into groups before being gunned down.
Human Rights Watch called on the Burkinabe authorities to “urgently open a thorough investigation’ into the massacres, with the support of the African Union and the United Nations, in order to ‘guarantee its independence and impartiality.”
On a visit to Ouagadougou at the end of March 2024, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights described a ‘more than alarming security situation’.
In 2023, the UN Human Rights Office documented 1,335 human rights and humanitarian rights violations and abuses, with at least 3,800 civilian casualties.
The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a project that collects and analyses disaggregated data and maps crises, recorded violent events linked to this conflict that led to the deaths of more than 8,000 people in 2023 and more than 430 others in January 2024 alone.
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