Sahel Juntas Systematically Crush Free Speech and Opposition Across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger
The military rulers who seized power across the Sahel promised order. They have delivered repression instead.
In Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, three military juntas that came to power through a cascade of coups between 2020 and 2023 are systematically dismantling what remains of civil society. Independent radio stations have been shut down. Journalists, bloggers, and activists have been arrested under sweeping anti-terrorism and criminal defamation laws. Those who can leave have gone into exile. Those who stay live in fear of being denounced and sent to the front lines.
A detailed report by DW, based on interviews with regional analysts and human rights activists, lays out the scale of the crackdown. It is not a side effect of the security crisis that brought these juntas to power. It is the point.
In Mali, General Assimi Goita — who led two coups, in 2020 and 2021, and has since placed the country under full military rule — cemented his hold last year when the National Transitional Council passed a law securing his rule for another five years. The council also imposed criminal defamation statutes and anti-terrorism laws that give the state broad powers to detain anyone it accuses of undermining national security. The definition is flexible enough to cover any journalist who reports critically on the government.
Ulf Laessing, former director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Sahel program in Mali, told DW that the situation has become steadily worse. “It has become more repressive. It’s no longer as easy to speak out,” he said. “People have become more cautious.”
In Burkina Faso, the situation is even starker. President Ibrahim Traore’s government has virtually eliminated public space for dissent. Binta Sidibe-Gascon, a Burkinabe human rights activist and president of the NGO Observatoire Kisal, put it bluntly: “In the case of Burkina Faso, I would say that public space no longer exists at all. Everyone is forced into silence and pressured to self-censor. Anyone who dares to speak out about the national situation is sent to the front lines.”
The juntas have presented themselves as anti-Western liberators, breaking ties with former colonial power France, expelling French troops, and pivoting to Russia for security support. They formed the Sahel Alliance (AES) in 2023 and withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the regional bloc that had attempted to pressure them back toward democratic rule. This narrative of sovereignty and resistance to foreign interference has real appeal in populations that have seen decades of ineffective intervention. But the domestic record tells a different story.
The security situation that justified the coups has not improved. Laessing noted that while conditions initially stabilized in some parts of Mali, allowing farmers to return to their fields, that progress has since reversed. Jihadist insurgents linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State still control large areas of the country. “I don’t think any government will succeed in recapturing those areas,” Laessing said. “Even if there were more coups or eventually an elected government,” he sees little chance of restoring peace.
The tragedy of the Sahel’s military rulers is that they have created a trap for their own populations. Laessing observed that the people of Bamako want neither Sharia law nor Islamist governance. There would be reasons to protest. But people understand a grim reality: if this government falls, the next one is likely to be more Islamist. Fear of what comes next keeps a repressive regime in place.
The Sahel now faces a paradox its rulers will not acknowledge. By crushing the very civil society that could hold them accountable, they are eliminating the only alternative to the jihadist insurgency they claim to fight. A population that cannot speak, cannot organize, and cannot dissent is a population that has no defense against either the junta or the terrorists. The juntas have not brought stability. They have merely closed the door on the possibility of anything better.