Deyda Hydara -Campaigning Gambian journalist who defended freedom of speech. #Gambia

By Shola Adenekan 

The murder of the Gambian journalist Deyda Hydara, aged 58, as he was driving away from his newspaper, the Point, comes after prolonged tension between authorities and the Gambia's independent press. Just a couple of days before his death, lawmakers had approved a bill setting out jail terms for reporters found guilty of sedition or libel and stipulating that newspaper proprietors must sign a $16,600 (£8,648) bond, with their houses as guarantees, to be allowed to publish.

The government had also been trying to set up a media commission with the power to shut down newspapers and imprison reporters. After pressure from journalists, led by Hydara, the law was dropped on December 13.

President Yaya Jammeh has threatened to bury journalists "six-feet deep". Last year, when asked about journalists criticising his attempts to force them to register, he told the state radio that he believed in "giving each fool a long rope to hang themselves". Journalists, he went on should "either register or stop writing or go to hell".

In an open letter to the president, Hydara condemned his words as "totally repugnant and reprehensible".

Hydara first clashed with the authorities in 1994. Together with six other journalists he was summoned under an act not used since the days of British colonialism. Their crime had been to criticise the coup d'etat which ousted the elected president and installed the then army sergeant Jammeh, and to call for a return to civil rule. After 1994, Hydara campaigned for press freedom and democracy as Jammeh brought in draconian laws against political and media opposition.

In 1998 Hydara called for opposition parties to be given equal general election air time and newspaper space, which got him labelled as an opposition mouthpiece. Soon after, the British-based global campaign for free expression, Article 19, accused the Gambian government of harassing opposition activists and journalists.

Hydara received his elementary education in Banjul before his parents moved to Senegal. There he learned French and Spanish. After a journalism degree at the University of Dakar, he returned to the Gambia to take up his first journalism job with a Banjul-based radio station. While still with the station, Hydara set up the Senegalese government-funded SeneGambia Sun in 1983, which soon folded.

In 1988 he moved full-time into print journalism setting up the Point with two friends. It became one of the voices against the recklessness of the country's first president, Dauda Jawara.

In 2003, he was among the group of African journalists who met in Johannesburg to seek support for a continent-wide media charter. But the only significant backing from an African leader came from South African President Thabo Mbeki.

Back in the Gambia, Hydara and his colleagues continued to face intimid ation. The residence of the BBC correspondent, Ebrima Sillah and the premises of the Independent newspaper, for which Hydara was a columnist, was burnt down. The BBC was also warned of biased reports against the president.

Since 1974 Hydara had been the local correspondent for Agence France-Press (AFP) and was one of the longest-serving correspondents of the press freedom organisation, Reporters Without Borders.

He is survived by Maria, his wife of 33 years, and four children.

· Deyda Hydara, journalist and campaigner, born June 9 1946; died December 18 2004

First published by The Guardian January 2005

Gambia: On Gambia Election Day, President Displays Contempt for Press Freedom

IPI Clarifies that Media Freedom is Not Just for Journalists
By: Naomi Hunt, Press Freedom Adviser for Africa

VIENNA, 28 Nov. 2011 – As Gambians went to the polls last week to vote, incumbent President Yahya Jammeh rejected international criticism over the country’s press freedom record, which, since Jammeh took power in a 1994 coup, has been characterised by the intimidation, jailing and torture of journalists, and control of the media.

"When they talk about rights, freedom of the press and [saying] this country is a hell for journalists … There are freedoms and responsibilities," the BBC quoted Jammeh as saying. "The journalists are less than 1% of the population and if anybody expects me to allow less than 1% of the population to destroy 99% of the population, you are in the wrong place."

The International Press Institute (IPI), a global press freedom organisation comprised of publishers, editors and leading journalists, criticised Jammeh’s reported remarks.  

“The reason that journalists must be permitted to work without interference, detention or torture, and the reason the media should not be compelled to report only the current government’s version of events has nothing to do with protecting a small segment of the workforce, as President Jammeh suggests,” said IPI Executive Director Alison Bethel McKenzie. “Responsible journalism upholds democracy by holding government accountable; a free media provides space for a robust and critical public discourse.” 

The election was monitored by observers from the African Union (AU) and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), but the West African regional organization, Ecowas, said the vote was not legitimate and that their investigations had revealed “"an opposition and electorate cowed by repression and intimidation,” the BBC reported.  

In cases brought by the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), the Ecowas Community Court found the Gambia responsible for the 2006 torture of journalist Musa Saidykhan and ordered the country to pay him reparations. The Gambia has failed to comply with the order. In 2008, the court also ordered The Gambia to release missing reporter Chief Ebrimah Manneh and pay him reparations. Again, The Gambia has failed to comply, denying instead that he is in their custody. In October this year Justice Minister Edu Gomez told the Daily News that Manneh was alive but not in government hands, although he refused to provide more information.

Source:http://www.freemedia.at

Gambia: Commentary: The Gambia’s darkest hour!

By Mathew K Jallow

Friday 25^th November 2011, will in the annals of The Gambia’s history, be forever remembered with consternation and utter disbelief as one of our country’s darkest hour; a dark day in which Gambians everywhere descended to the lowest points of our political lives. The shocking results of Gambia’s recently concluded presidential elections are a manifestation of the power of tyranny and the length to which Yahya Jammeh will go to remain in power.

There is hardly a soul that is not surprised by the election results; and even more telling still, hardly anyone who does not think that the results are blatantly fraudulent.

In every way, we were all caught in the most devastating surprises of our lives, because no sane Gambian expected the results to be so insanely skewed in favor of Yahya Jammeh’s military regime.

For many months now, Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council (AFPRC) party militants have echoed and reechoed the same refrain; that the “AFPRC will win with a landslide”, but many of us took their refrain as a mere dramatization of their political demagoguery, rather than a statement of fact they knew all along.

The certitude with which AFPRC stalwarts carried themselves throughout the electoral season was buttressed by Yahya Jammeh’s own incendiary outbursts of stupidity and callousness in which his emphatic pronouncement that “neither elections nor coup’ can bring down his regime, caught the attention of both Gambians and the international community as indicative of his contempt and disregard for the democratic values of the electoral process.

In hindsight, both Yahya Jammeh and his bloodsucking leaches knew something the rest of us did not. The AFPRC cabal; which includes village alkalos, district chiefs, divisional commissioners, rural area civil servants and the formidable AFPRC machinery has collectively made sure Yahya Jammeh did not lose the elections.

Today, what really happened is still a mystery. We all know without a shadow of doubt that something egregious happened in these elections, but perhaps only the passage of time will bring the truth out. One day, some of those involved in this biggest electoral sham West Africa ever experienced, will be weighed down by the guilt of their consciences to tell the world the truth.

Just as the one of the murderers of Deida Hyrada confessed to Freedom Newspaper, the truth about these fraudulent elections will see the light of day. Meanwhile, as the paralyzing despair and the agony get the better of us, we must remember that no one said it was going to be easy. Yahya Jammeh knows what his loss of political power means; for more than any person, he has the most to lose; which includes either his life or his freedom for the rest of his life.

As incredibly painful and depressing as the situation is for us, we cannot with abandonment continue to wallow in our collective misery; rather let us dust ourselves up again to ready ourselves for the next chapter. ECOWAS’s groundbreaking castigation of Gambia’s electoral process is both a reaffirmation of our storied history under Yahya Jammeh’s tyranny and a high point of the election season, and as a nation we can wrap ourselves in the solace and comfort that their concern has provided us, as we map out the next strategy of dealing with the menace of Yahya Jammeh.

For now, UDP’s rejection of the fraudulent election results is a start. We must begin by delegitimizing the election results and bring pressure to bear on the international community to isolate The Gambia and Yahya Jammeh’s regime. We have a starting point; the regional body which knows best; ECOWAS. Unlike the African Union and the Commonwealth who come to merely observe the logistics of the polling day, ECOWAS is concerned about the entire electoral process, and how the preexisting political climate and culture lends itself or lack thereof, to the conduct of truly free and fair elections process.


PS. As we go to press, The African Union has given, what can only be described a tacitly reserved, if not an outright condemnation of The Gambia’s electoral process. The AU delegates have surprised Gambians, but we thank them for not playing to the infinite power of incumbency in African politics.

Gambia: Main opposition UDP Ambushed in Foni Kanfenda

(Dailynews)Main opposition United Democratic Party campaign caravan yesterday came under attack at the village of Kanfenda in Foni Kansala, West Coast region.
Unidentified men suspected to be militants of ruling Alliance for Patriotic Re-Orientation and Construction fired stones over the UDP convoy that was heading for its final destination in Serrekunda to wrap up the campaigns in the crucial November 24 presidential race. 
This paper is yet to have full details of the incident, but our correspondent in the caravan quoted Babanding Daffeh, a UDP parliamentarian as saying: “These people are throwing stones over us.”
Thanks to the intervention of the military personnel at military check point at the junction that links to president Jammeh’s home village of Kanilai, the tension was defused, but some UDP militants have sustained injury. 
The military personnel then escorted the opposition entourage till Bullock village where paramilitary took over the escort to the commercial town of Serrekunda. 
Meanwhile, the incident came two days after IEC warned that it will discipline any party found wanton of breaching the electoral rules.

ECOWAS Statement On the 24 November 2011 Presidential Election in the Gambia

Abuja - Nigeria — The ECOWAS Commission has informed the President of the Gambia about its decision not to dispatch an ECOWAS Observer Mission to the Presidential Election scheduled to take place in the country on 24 November 2011, because the preparations and political environment for the said election are adjudged by the Commission not to be conducive for the conduct of free, fair and transparent polls.

In keeping with the pertinent provisions of the ECOWAS Supplementary Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance, the President of the Commission dispatched a fact-finding mission to the Gambia, during which the mission interacted with a wide range of stakeholders to assess the state of preparedness of the country for the election. The Commission has also been conducting a regular monitoring of the political situation and preparations in the lead-up to the election through the ECOWAS Early Warning System. Unfortunately, the reports of the fact-finding mission and the Early Warning System paint a picture of intimidation, an unacceptable level of control of the electronic media by the party in power, the lack of neutrality of state and para-statal institutions, and an opposition and electorate cowed by repression and intimidation.

In the circumstance, the ECOWAS Commission is of the view that the conditions prevailing in the country do not meet the minimum standards set under the Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance for the conduct of elections and has, therefore, decided to exercise the discretionary powers conferred on the Commission's President under the Protocol to stand down the ECOWAS Observer Mission. While regretting the decision forced upon it by the circumstances, the ECOWAS Commission will remain seized with the situation in the Gambia, and expresses its readiness to engage the Government and other stakeholders in the Gambian polity, with a view to accompanying them in their endeavour to create a level playing field for future elections.

 His Excellency James Victo Gbeho President of the Commission