The Fowler Report: All Is Forgiven

"So we created an arm's length expert panel beholden to no government and reporting to me as chairman of the relevant Security Council sanctions committee. I then went to Angola and interviewed half a dozen UNITA defectors and learned in exquisite detail where all the bodies were buried..."
On 20 March 2000 I issued the first of those two reports... For the first time in UN history, it 'named and shamed' a long list of those complicit in supporting UNITA [blood-drenched diamond trade], contrary to the dictates of a whole raft of Security Council resolutions outlawing such behaviour. The provisioning of UNITA had sustained the devastating civil war which over 25 years had killed over half a million people, displaced 4.3 million others, or a third of Angola's population and caused that country to be judged by UNICEF 'the worst place in the world to be a child'."
"Most prominent among the sanctions busters named in our report were two sitting African presidents, Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo and Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso."
"On the few occasions I ran into President Compaore between the publication of that Security Council report and my capture at Niger, it was clear that he had not welcomed the publicity I had provided."
"I told President Compaore that his cartons had nourished our bodies and his 'On va vous sortir de la' had sustained our wills. I said we would be eternally grateful, for he had done exactly what he said he would do..."
"Blaise Compaore, President of Burkina Faso, was, Omar allowed, the only one willing to step forward and endeavour to save our lives. 'Your future', he concluded, 'is now entirely in the hands of President Compaore'."
"The next morning we flew to Ouagadougou to pay our respects to President Compaore and to thank him, too, for the essential part he had played in allowing us to keep body and soul, indeed body and head, together and in bringing our ordeal to a happy conclusion.... President Compaore could not have been more gracious and welcoming..."
Robert Fowler -- A Season in Hell, My 30 Days in the Sahara With Al-Qaeda

And so, that in a nutshell, is former Canadian Ambassador to the UN Robert Fowler's account of his acquaintanceship and subsequent reconciliation/appreciation with the now-deposed leader of Burkina Faso, a dictator who had usurped the previous government by force to install himself as leader of the country for almost three decades. And, while leader, earning a stern rebuke from the United Nations investigation that led to the revelation that he had broken sanctions earned through devastating a population.

President Compaore was first portrayed in Mr. Fowler's account of his time as a prisoner of jihad, as what he represented, a dictator with no conscience, imposing his will on a population for whom he produced nothing to further their advance as an emerging African economy. A man who supported Charles Taylor, in Liberia, the warlord-turned-president now serving a 50-year sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone.

Whom Mr. Fowler knew well through his UN stint as an investigator in Niger that President Compaore had supported rebel groups in Ivory Coast and Angola. But it is the dictator's role in helping to free Mr. Fowler and his colleague, Louis Guay from their tense and fearful hostage stage that he is a celebrated hero, in the opinion of the former diplomat who feels he owes his life to this dictator's intervention.

Anti-government protesters gather in the Place de la Nation in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, October 31, 2014.    Credit: Reuters/Joe Penney

It took, finally, a popular revolt within the country when demonstrators in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso's capital set fire to their parliament in a massive protest over plans to change the constitution to enable President Blaise Compaore to extend his 27-year-rule. One imagines that he felt if a great nation like Russia could allow its constitution to be altered so that Vladimir Putin could exchange the presidency for the prime ministership and then play revolving chairs with Dmitry Medvedev he could do likewise.

Four times elected simply wasn't enough for Mr. Compaore. After all, the great man extended his good will not to those civilian dependents of his own nation, but to the plight of foreigners taken captive by Islamists to negotiate their release. As an elder statesman which was how he envisioned himself, he had his legacy to look to, and a reputation to repair in the process, so negotiating with rebels became his valued speciality.