Mali pays last tribute to former President Moussa Traoré
Former Malian President Moussa Traoré on December 31, 1985. FRANCOIS ROJON / AFP
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3 min
The funeral of the former president of Mali who died on Tuesday took place on Friday.
Moussa Traoré ruled the country from 1968 to 1991.
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With our special correspondent in Bamako
,
Florence Morice
It is Assimi Goïta, the president of the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) who chaired this official tribute organized within the 34th regiment of military engineers of the Malian armed forces.
Assimi Goïta, still in camouflage uniform and green beret, did not speak.
It was the Grand Chancellor of National Orders who brought his condolences to the microphone.
Before him, a representative of the family, a former collaborator of Moussa Traoré paid tribute to the former president before bowing in front of his coffin covered with a Malian flag and in front of an audience of personalities.
An official tribute therefore for Moussa Traoré who certainly had been condemned twice to the death penalty, but finally pardoned in 2002, and who since his release had taken on
the figure of the old sage
whom everyone came to consult, including his former enemies. .
ATT present at the ceremony
Among the former heads of state present this morning, we also noted the presence of Amadou Toumani Touré, said ATT.
He was also the one who overthrew him by a coup d'état in 1991: "
History has decided it this way, but I could not but be there and offer my condolences to his family
", the former president told a few reporters after the ceremony.
On this day of tribute and mourning in any case, it is not the repressive climate that marked the end of the presidency of Moussa Traoré which the Bamakois remember.
It is not the image of the autocrat who clung to his single party either, but the memory of a patriot that is evoked, a man who had known how to preserve the territorial integrity of Mali, says -on, author of a modernization of agriculture and the education system.
This is the image of the one Assimi Goïta, the president of the CNSP,
hastened to consult
the day after the coup d'état in August.
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