Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Burkina Faso: "Sankarist" party appoints presidential candidates

The lawyer and politician Bénéwendé Sankara was appointed Sunday at a conference, candidate of "Sankarist" in the presidential election to be held on October 11 in Burkina Faso.

Aged 56, Mr Sankara, who has no family relationship with Captain Thomas Sankara , was appointed on May 17 at a convention attended by nine political parties and associations called Sankarist, in which several hundred people attended.

"The next step is to go to coal and achieve what we promised our activists (...) bring victory, nothing but victory on the evening of October 11, 2015," he told Bénéwendé Sankara who founded in 2000 the Union for the Renaissance / Sankarist Party (UNIR / PS). Twice elected MP, he had called - in vain - Compaore to resign in 2011 after a wave of protests and riots.

Twice an unsuccessful candidate in the 2005 presidential and 2010 against Blaise Compaoré toppled in late October by a popular uprising after 27 years in power, Mr Sankara has long been described as "lawyer of lost causes" in Burkina Faso.

Defender of striking students pursued by the old regime, it is illustrated in the case of Norbert Zongo, a journalist murdered in 1998 while investigating the disappearance of driver of François Compaoré, the younger brother of President Compaoré. He is also the lead counsel in the iconic Thomas Sankara case , reopened in late March after two decades of political and legal battles no further under the former regime .

Mariama Sankara "guest star"

Present at the convention, Mariam Sankara, the widow of the former president killed on 15 October 1987 during the coup that brought Compaoré to power, called for an "electoral insurrection" in favor of Sankarist. She returned on May 15 in Burkina Faso, for only the second time since the assassination of her husband, to be heard by a military investigating judge in connection with the murder of her husband.

The figure of Thomas Sankara Revolutionary praised for his integrity and icon of Pan-Africanism, was widely claimed during the popular uprising that led to the fall of President Compaoré.

Presidential and parliamentary elections will be held on October 11 in Burkina to equip poor Sahelian country new leadership after the "democratic transition" one-year implementation after the fall of Blaise Compaoré.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/(With AFP)

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