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Ghana Burkina
With the coming to power of Thomas Sankara in Burkina in 1983,
relations between Ghana and Burkina became both warm and close.
Indeed, Rawlings and Sankara began discussions about uniting Ghana
and Burkina in the manner of the defunct Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union,
which Nkrumah had sought unsuccessfully to promote as a foundation
for his dream of unified continental government
(see
The OAU and the Rest of Africa
, this ch.). Political and economic ties between
Ghana and Burkina, a poorer country, were strengthened through
joint commissions of cooperation and through border demarcation
committee meetings. Frequent high-level consultations and joint
military exercises, meant to discourage potential dissidents and to
protect young "revolutions" in each country, were fairly regular
features of Ghana-Burkina relations.
Ethnic ties between the people of far northern Ghana (notably
the Mossi) and Burkina, divided by artificial borders inherited
from colonial rule, grew stronger as easy border crossings and free
exchange of goods and services contributed to marked improvements
in the material and the social welfare of peoples on both sides of
the border. The PNDC, for example, established road, air, and
telecommunications links between Ghana and Burkina.
Ghana's warm relations with Burkina received a serious but
temporary setback with the assassination of Sankara in October
1987. His successor, Blaise Campaore, was widely believed to have
been responsible for the assassination. As a result, relations
between Ghana and Burkina cooled. Rawlings and Campaore met briefly
for the first time in early 1988 in Tamale, the capital of Ghana's
Northern Region, to discuss Ghana-Burkina relations.
The outbreak of civil war in Liberia in 1989 found the two
countries on opposite sides of the conflict
(see
International Security Concerns
, ch. 5). Ghana, at great financial and human
cost, immediately repatriated about 10,000 Ghanaians living in
Liberia and, beginning in mid-1990, contributed a contingent to a
multi-national peace-keeping force second in size only to one sent
by Nigeria. From 1990 to 1993, Campaore's role in the Liberian
conflict was at odds with an ECOWAS peace initiative spearheaded by
Ghana and Nigeria, because Burkina was believed to be supplying
arms to Charles Taylor's forces, long regarded as the main obstacle
to peace. In 1994 relations between Burkina and Ghana showed signs
of warming at a time when Campaore appeared to be reassessing his
policies in Liberia and toward Ghana and Nigeria.
Data as of November 1994
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