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On May 11, 1973, Senegalese revolutionary activist Omar Blondin Diop was pronounced dead in a prison on Gorée Island off the coast of the Senegalese capital Dakar. His tragic life and death have continued to be a powerful symbol of Senegal’s revolutionary struggle.
Today, his image appears prominently in protests against the government and against neocolonialism. On March 2, 2021, just hours before the arrest of Senegalese opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, the Front Against the People’s Imperialist Revolution and the Pan-African Africa (FRAPP), a major youth protest organization, held a press conference against the mobilization project [opposition] entrepreneurs ”in Senegal. Diop’s portrait stood out behind the press loudspeakers.
In the days that followed, thousands of young people took to the streets of Dakar to confront the growing authoritarianism of President Macky Sall and his alleged collusion with the former French colonial ruler of Senegal. Many of them defend the revolutionary values espoused by Diop: anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and pan-Africanism.
Forty-eight years after he died in a suspicious situation, Diop defends himself as a martyr to the repressive practices of “neocolonialism and the state of Senegal,” long covered by official state accounts that present the country as an island of stability and democracy. destroyed by wars and dictatorships. This cult of recovery of the young revolutionary activist is not only a reflection of the dynamics of the streets of Senegal, but also a time to reopen his case and bring justice to justice.
Revolutionary life
Despite dying at just 26 years old, Diop managed to lead a lively political life. As a teenager, he went to France where he finished high school and enrolled in philosophy studies at the École Normale Supérieure, a school of renowned teachers. In 1968, he was a founding member of the March 22 movement that carried out a long occupation in the administration building of the University of Nanterre in the suburbs of Paris, demanding greater freedom for young people. The occupation preceded the May Uprising of that year against the conservatism of the then French President Charles de Gaulle. Diop was arrested in 1969 for participating in protests and deported to Senegal in October of that year.
Returning to his hometown, he took a research position and spoke regularly at university conferences, impressing the audience with his eloquence and subversion. He also took part in underground Marxist-inspired political organizations concerned with the government of President Leopold Senghor, who led Senegal as a one-party repressive state. In 1970, Diop returned to France to continue his studies but did not stay long.
Some of its members who returned to Senegal were arrested in an attempt to attack the motorhome of French President Georges Pompidou during a visit to the country in February 1971. Disturbed by the harsh sentences they say, Diop embarked on a journey of liberation.
He sought military training at the camp led by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Syria and the support of the Black Panther Party chapter before moving to Algeria, where he continued to prepare his plot. He was eventually arrested by the Malian secret services and extradited to Senegal, and sentenced to three years in prison for “attacking the security of the state.” Diop died after serving 14 months in prison. Senegalese authorities considered his death a suicide.
State coverage
The official version of events, however, is not credible. In particular, prison records revealed that Diop had fainted several days earlier. Mohamed heard his little brother, an ear witness in the next cell, agonize over the blows he received to the neck. This was confirmed by an autopsy performed by his father, Dr. Ibrahima Blondin Diop.
Shortly after the expulsion of Omar Blondin Diop Dakar from France, around 1969-1970 [Courtesy of the Diop family]
After a successful resuscitation attempt, a doctor on the island of Gorée ordered the prisoner to be evacuated immediately to Le Dantec Hospital in Dakar. The chief executive officer refused to take the body out of jail for fear that it could cause problems.
Diop’s father filed a complaint for manslaughter. The investigation started well, but ended badly. In the face of damning evidence, the investigating judge of the Dakar High Court, Moustapha Touré, proceeded to convict two prison guards. When interviewed by the Senegalese weekly La Gazette in 2009, Judge Touré said: “The situation seemed to show credible and agreed evidence that suicide, which was officially covered up to justify the death of Oumar Blondin Diop, was in fact a cover-up. in secret, impeachment ”.
Shortly after the complaint was made, the judge was removed from the trial and replaced by another, which ended the judicial proceedings a year and a half later, as the case was not within his jurisdiction.
At the same time, the Senghor government launched a major media campaign under President Senghor – a white paper on the Diopen case aimed at presenting him as a “drug addict” and his death as a “hanging suicide”. ”. At the behest of all the powerful interior ministers, Jean Collin, the burial was accelerated and only the young brother of Diopen and his father were present. According to Dr. Diop, he was the only person convicted in the lawsuit to pay a symbolic amount of one franc for “spreading false news” about his son’s death.
To do justice
Diop’s death is part of a long and painful history of assassinations of radical African anti-imperialists, including Ruben Um Nyobé (1958) and Félix Roland-Moumié (1960), Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba (1961), President of Togo. Sylvanus Olympio (1963), Morocco’s anti-imperialist Mehdi Ben Barka (1965), Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde independence leader Amílcar Cabral (1973), South African apartheid activist Steve Biko (1977) – to name a few. Diopen’s family, like the families of many of his fallen comrades, have yet to see justice for his untimely death.
But recent legal developments in Africa show that impunity is not inevitable. On April 13 this year, a military court in Burkina Faso charged 14 people in 1987 with the assassination of Burkinabe President Thomas Sankara, including their successor Blaise Compaoré. And in 2017, a South African court reopened the case of Ahmed Timol – a young anti-apartheid activist who died in prison in 1971 – and that his death was not a suicide, as claimed by apartheid authorities. A police officer who was at the scene of the death has been charged with homicide and is awaiting sentencing.
Senegal could do the same and reopen the case of Diop. In 2013, on the 40th anniversary of his death, the family asked for the case to be returned to the courts. A prison official, Néré Faye, who did not have time to impeach Judge Touré, then said he was “ready to reopen the case of Omar Blondin Diop” but has since died. But other key witnesses, including former guard Ibrahima Dièye and Judge Touré, are still alive.
Although Justice Minister Aminata Touré promised to reopen the Diop family case in 2013, there has been no development since her successor, Sidiki Kaba, took over the ministry from that year onwards. Now Senegal’s armed forces minister, Kaba, spoke on April 8 “against the impression [that] Blondin Diop’s state crimes have never been clarified. ” In an attempt to determine the penalties imposed on those convicted of state crimes in recent years, he admitted at the same time that he was a victim of a Diop.
The truth cannot be avoided. It is time to reopen the case with the death of Omar Blondin Diop. Giving justice to Diop will serve not only as a correct historical record, but also as an important precedent for the current abuses of power.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the attitude of the Al Jazeera editorial.
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