“All the players will come together tomorrow morning to issue the good news to the whole world”, Boni Yayi said after talks Saturday in which he and fellow mediator Macky Sall, the Senegalese president, spoke to those on both sides of this week’s coup.
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A delegation mediating in Burkina Faso after a coup this week says there has been a breakthrough and hinted the transitional government could return.
Speaking on state TV and radio early Thursday before a blue background, Lieutenant Colonel Mamadou Bamba said the country’s transitional government was dissolved and the interim president was no longer in power. “Diendere should leave”.
“We are going to relaunch the transition underway – a transition led by civilians, with Michel Kafando”, Reuters reported him saying after a meeting with coup leader Gen. Gilbert Diendere in the capital, Ouagadougou.
After his first meeting with Diendere on Friday, Sall said: “We must create a dynamic of national reconciliation…to allow the country to reposition itself on its path and on its march to democracy”.
At least 10 people have died and more than 100 others wounded in street clashes with the military since the coup started September 16.
“Haven’t you heard the radio?”
Andre, a student, added: “We got rid of Blaise”. Compaore resigned under pressure in October after attempting to extend his 27-year presidency, which sparked widespread public backlash. He vowed that elections would go forward but not on the timeframe that was set to end a period of transition after Mr Compaore was ousted late last year after 27 years in power.
But the military has lifted a curfew and reopened land and air borders that they had closed after seizing power.
In the capital, amid growing calls for civil disobedience, the homes of two former Compaore allies – former Ouagadougou mayor Simon Compaore, and Salif Diallo, who had joined opposition ranks in 2014 – were ransacked overnight Friday, an Agence France-Presse reporter saw.
The coup – the country’s sixth since it won independence from France in 1960 – unfolded overnight.
“We simply want to have proposals for elections that take place serenely and peacefully, and for results that are uncontested and uncontestable”, he told the French television channel TV5 Monde.
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On Saturday the African Union suspended Burkina Faso and said it would impose sanctions on coup leaders if they did not restore the interim government and release its senior officials.
