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| Michel Kafando (Burkina Faso's Interim Leader) |
Burkina Faso’s interim President Michel Kafando said Wednesday
he has resumed his duties a week after being overthrown in a coup by the West African
country’s presidential guard.
“Thus the transition has been
restored and this very minute I am resuming the exercise of power,” Kafando
told reporters.
Earlier, the coup’s
leaders had agreed to return to their barracks and restore the deposed
president to power, signing a deal with the army that apparently defuses a
tense standoff sparked by last week’s putsch.
The breakthrough came late
Tuesday after marathon talks in Abuja, Nigeria, where West African heads of
state had sought to break the impasse fuelled by angry threats on both sides.
The deal was signed a day after
troops entered Burkina’s capital Ouagadougou, turning up the pressure on the
elite presidential guards (RSP) who staged the coup.
Under its terms, the RSP agreed
to stand down from the positions they had taken up in Ouagadougou, while the
army also agreed to withdraw its troops and guarantee the safety of the RSP
members as well as their families.
The deal was presented to the
Mogho Naba, “king” of Burkina Faso’s leading Mossi tribe, in front of the media
early Wednesday.
The elite unit of 1,300 men
loyal to Compaore officially declared a coup Thursday and installed rebel
leader General Gilbert Diendere, Compaore’s former Chief Of Staff, as the
country’s new leader.
The breakthrough came as
Diendere told AFP that interim president Michel Kafando, who had been seized by
presidential guards but later released, would be returned to office on
Wednesday.
The return of “Kafando is
already a done deal. The (African) heads of state arrive tomorrow to put him
back in office,” Diendere had said late Tuesday.
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