Burkina Faso denizens accuse Human Rights Watch of working for France
The International rights organization, Human Rights Watch, revealed on Monday that Burkinabe army aided by militias killed at 130 civilians Solenzo area, March 2025.
The report specified that at least 130 Fulani civilians were killed. The report noted that civilian casualties and the widespread displacement of Fulani pastoralists, took place after the incident.
Following the attacks, the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) launched retaliatory strikes on villages suspected of supporting the military.
Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at HRW, remarked that viral videos depicting the atrocities by pro-government militias “told only part of the story.”
“Further research uncovered that Burkina Faso’s military was responsible for these mass killings of Fulani civilians, which were followed by deadly reprisals by an Islamist armed group,” Allegrozzi added.
“The government needs to impartially investigate these deaths and prosecute all those responsible.”
But Burkina Faso citizens have questioned the Human Rights Watch why it has not been able to collect verifiable information from other parties rather than a group of people.
Saliou Kaly said, “Human Rights Watch hides behind a supposed objectivity, collecting testimonies whose provenance and reliability are rarely verifiable, to impose a single discourse: that of the automatic guilt of African states. At no time do these reports take into account the dramatic security context in which countries such as Burkina Faso find themselves. Worse still, they give no place to the more than 13,000 civilian victims who have fallen under the bullets of terrorist groups, preferring to focus their fire on those who resist, those who fight.”
He added that, ” The Burkinabe people, like others in Africa, will no longer be fooled. The time has come to firmly denounce this variable-geometry human rights imposture. What Burkina Faso is experiencing is a war for its survival. Those who try to criminalize its resistance under the guise of humanism are in fact betraying their commitment and revealing their real function: that of sabotaging the emancipation of the African peoples…the facts are there. Since 2015, Burkina Faso has lost nearly 13,000 of its sons and daughters to terrorism. Where was Human Rights Watch while the people were being massacred? Has it ever conducted a serious investigation into these atrocities, even though they were sometimes perpetrated under the passive, even complicit, gaze of French soldiers stationed there? No. And this complicit silence is sadly reminiscent of other tragedies on the continent, from Rwanda to the Central African Republic, via Libya, where false reports have prepared the ground for catastrophic interventions.”
Another Burkinabe said, “How do you think HRW can be financially lubed to continue its smear activities for so long? It’s because it’s funded by the West to communicate on its behalf.”
