Unmasking The Traitors
Gilbert Diendere, the shadowy general behind this week’s coup in Burkina Faso, is West Africa’s pre-eminent spy-master, hostage negotiator and the former right-hand man of French puppet Blaise Compaore, ousted as president a year ago in a popular uprising.
Diendere was a soldier in his 20s when he played a central role in a 1983 coup that set a group of young officers including Compaore and Thomas Sankara, now an African folk hero, on a path to reinvent the poor, landlocked former French colony.
Four years later, after Sankara was murdered during a Compaore-led putsch, Diendere emerged as the quiet power behind the new leader. He would remain so until Compaore’s 27-year rule ended amid mass street protests last year.
“He became Compaore’s shadow,” said Rinaldo Depagne, West Africa project director for the International Crisis Group. “He’s kind of a Burkinabe J. Edgar Hoover. Diendere is a master of intelligence, information, organisation and control.”