BURKINA FASO: Assassination of Thomas Sankara: Roland Dumas takes his testimony to the grave

 

Roland Dumas died on 3 July 2024 at the age of 101.

Born on 23 August 1922 in Limoges, he joined the Resistance against the Nazi occupation at the age of 20. His father Georges, also a member of the Resistance, was executed by the Germans on 26 March 1944.

After studying law in Paris, Roland Dumas became a leading barrister before entering politics. Elected as a Member of Parliament in 1956, he rose to the highest echelons of government with the election of his friend François Mitterrand in 1981.

He had an honourable career: Minister for European Affairs (1983-1984), Minister for External Relations (1984-1986), Minister for Foreign Affairs (1988-1993), then at the end of his career President of the Constitutional Council. A busy life and career, albeit a rather sulphurous one for a long time. Roger-Patrice Pelat, a friend of the President, is quoted as saying: ‘Mitterrand has two lawyers, Badinter for the law and Dumas for the twisted’. This shows the darker side of this personality, who embodied the darker side of Mitterrand's policies, particularly in Africa, where he supported despotic old dinosaurs and set up networks of corruption, to such an extent that the man nicknamed the ‘vice-president’ had several run-ins with the law. He was tainted by the Elf Acquitaine affair, in which one of his many mistresses, Christine Deviers-Joncour, was implicated, the Taiwan frigate affair and many other cases that have damaged his reputation, even if he has never been accused of anything. 

Nor will we forget that the elegant Dumas was one of the living symbols of this caviar left, who wore Berluti shoes paid for by Elf Acquitaine at 11,000 French francs at the time.

The people of Burkina Faso, particularly the Sankarists, will never forget the role that France and some of its top clerks played in the assassination of Thomas Sankara with the complicity, it is said, of certain neighbouring countries. Did Roland Dumas have first-hand information about the macabre chain of events that led to the bloody afternoon of 15 October 1987? We will probably never know. During the trial into the assassination of Thomas Sankara, which ran from 11 October 2021 to 6 April 2022, the military court, at the request of the civil party, had wanted to hear as witnesses Roland Dumas, Jacques Lang, former French Minister of Culture, and Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, son of François Mitterand and his father's adviser on African affairs at the time of the events, but nothing came of it. On this point, Dumas will take his testimony to the grave, much to the chagrin of the Sankarist galaxy, who wanted to hear him recount what he knows or does not know about the death of the father of the Burkinabe Revolution.

Another of his more or less dangerous African liaisons is the support he and Jacques Verges gave Laurent Gbagbo at the height of the Ivorian crisis.

In a way, then, he is one of the last vestiges of françafrique that is still with us.

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