Gambia: It makes no sense, Jammeh at it again

By Abdoulaye Saine
Against a backdrop of mounting international ostracism and suspension of much needed financial assistance from the EU - the consequence of a poor human rights record, Jammeh’s threat to execute forty-seven inmates by September was designed to attract attention from Western media and human rights organizations. He has consistently courted media attention with outrageous comments and acts when things are not going well at home. This, to deflect attention from failed policies, which are too many to recount here. Did he not claim to have “discovered” the cure for HIV/AIDS, hypertension, infertility and diabetes, to name a few? Did Jammeh not orchestrate a so-called “witch-hunt” to supposedly purge the country of witches?

Yahya Jammeh’s threat to carry out death sentences of “death-row” inmates is simply outrageous! It makes no sense at all! But Jammeh’s rule and decisions have hardly made sense to most right-thinking individuals. Did he not defy religious and cultural sensibilities when he announced his threat to a group of religious elders on Islam’s most sacred Holiday- Eid-ul-Fitr? Who in their right mind would issue such a threat on a day of forgiveness and goodwill other than to attract attention?  This time, it is not a threat against gays but “criminals.” Perhaps, a more interesting question is, why the threat(s)?

Jammeh’s most recent threat may well be another attempt to cover his failings- both personal and national. This odious threat to hang “death-row” inmates is/ was intended to douse dissent in a population already fatigued by mounting economic hardship and subdued by extra-judicial killings. Whether Jammeh carries/ carried out his threat or not (I pray he did not) is now immaterial, as he has already achieved his intended goals- deflecting attention from a country and people gripped by famine and soaring food prices, and perhaps more importantly, attracting media coverage, including worldwide attention and condemnation. Each time Jammeh makes a threat, or announces a  medical “discovery,” Western media houses and rights organizations fall for it, which they should, as he has killed enough already. Yet in the same vein he manipulates them for self-serving purposes.

Jammeh’s so-called medical “discoveries,” “witch-hunts” and threat to execute forty-seven inmates are/ were simply outrageous and sure to get his name in the news. Yet Jammeh thrives on the outrageous, as he has accomplished little of distinction in his personal life, or eighteen-year rule. Did he not want to be crowned king or emperor of Gambia?  Does he not insist on being called professor, Dr., Sheikh- all unearned titles and awards?

While I am not a psychiatrist, I suspect Jammeh suffers from a mental disorder called “Histrionic personality disorder” (HPD), which according to the American Psychiatric Association “is defined as a personality disorder characterized by a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking, including an excessive need for approval and inappropriately seductive behavior, usually beginning in early adulthood. These individuals are lively, dramatic, vivacious, enthusiastic, and flirtatious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder ,August, 24, 2012).

Jammeh must come to his senses and stop toying with the lives of so-called death-row inmates like Dr. Amadou Janneh, whose only “crime” is saying “No” to his madness- a disorder that must be taken seriously.

 Gambians the world-over join the AU, EU, the US and all right-thinking individuals and condemn Yahya Jammeh’s threat to execute of so-called “death-row” inmates. It would be wrong, unjust and cruel.

Abdoulaye Saine

Oxford, OH

Gambia:EU demands 'immediate halt' to executions in Gambia

The European Union called Sunday for an "immediate halt" to executions in Gambia after reports that President Yahya Jammeh had begun carrying out a threat to clear death row by mid-September.

"I strongly condemn the executions which have reportedly taken place ... and I demand the immediate halt of executions," EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement.

Rights watchdog Amnesty International said Friday it had "received credible reports that nine persons were executed last night in Gambia and that more persons are under threat of imminent executions today and in the coming days."

Jammeh said in an address to mark this year's Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr last Sunday: "By the middle of next month, all the death sentences would have been carried out to the letter.

"There is no way my government will allow 99 percent of the population to be held to ransom by criminals," he said.

According to Amnesty those executed included a woman and two Senegalese citizens.

Death sentences in impoverished Gambia, a tiny west African state wedged into Senegal, are carried out by hanging.

Jammeh, a former military officer who seized power in a 1994 coup, brooks no dissent in a country often blasted by rights bodies for abuses.

Amnesty said the last official execution took place in 1985. However AFP's correspondent in Banjul reports that executions have continued unofficially with the most recent taking place in 2007.

According to a tally by AFP, 47 people have been sentenced to death since July 2010. Last year eight military top brass, including the former army and intelligence chiefs and the ex-deputy head of the police force, were sentenced to death for treason.

Many top officials have found themselves charged with treason, often related to coup plots which observers have said are a sign of paranoia by Jammeh, who won a fourth term in office in November 2011.

In her statement, Ashton said: "I recall the (Gambian government's) international commitments, as well as the commitments concerning the respect of human rights contained in the Cotonou Agreement, which governs relations between the European Union and The Gambia."

She added: "In light of these executions, the European Union will urgently consider an appropriate response."

© ANP/AFP

Gambia: President Jammeh must retract call for execution of death row inmates | Amnesty International

(Amnesty International) --- Gambian president Yahya Jammeh’s reported comments that people sentenced to death in The Gambia will be executed by September must not be acted on, and must be retracted, Amnesty International said today.

President Jammeh made the comments in a televised address broadcast on Sunday evening and again on Monday to mark the Muslim feast of Eid-al-Fitrt.

If executions are carried out in Gambia, it will mark an end of a 27-year period without executions. The last execution in The Gambia took place in 1985. 

Amnesty International presently classifies The Gambia as abolitionist in practice, and therefore as one of the 141 countries [more than two thirds of states] worldwide which have abolished the death penalty either in law or practice.
 
"President Jammeh’s comments are deeply troubling and will undoubtedly cause severe anguish to those on death row and their families,” said Audrey Gaughran, Amnesty International’s Africa director. “Any attempt to carry out this threat would be both deeply shocking and a major set-back for human rights in Gambia.”

“The President’s statement is in stark contracts to the trend, both in West Africa and globally, towards ending the use of the death penalty.”

This is not the first time President Jammeh has made such threats. In September 2009, he announced that executions would resume to counter rising crime. In October of that year, the Director of Public Prosecutions was reported as saying that all prisoners sentenced to death would be executed by hanging as soon as possible.

While no executions were carried out following these statements, the current threat remains a matter for serious concern.

According to the Gambian government, there were 42 men and two women on death row as of 31 December 2011, 13 of whom had been sentenced during that year. In The Gambia, capital punishment can be imposed for murder and treason.

"Unfair trials are commonplace in the country, where death sentences are known to be used as a tool against the political opposition and international standards on fair trials are not respected”, said Audrey Gaughran. 

“The number of grossly unfair trails is shocking and an especially serious concern in cases where the death penalty is handed down.”

Background

No West African country has executed prisoners in recent years and the death penalty for all crimes has been abolished in Togo in West Africa, as well as in Burundi, Gabon and Rwanda in the last five years.

In July, Benin became the 75th state worldwide to join the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1989, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty. 

Gambia is a party to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. In 2008, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the body monitoring this regional treaty, adopted a resolution calling on States Party to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights to observe a moratorium on the execution of death sentences with a view to abolishing capital punishment.

During a session of the Commission in Banjul, Gambia, in May 2011, the Chairperson of the African Commission’s Working Group on the Death Penalty in Africa, stated that “capital punishment… represents a most grave violation of… the right to life under Article 4 of the African Charter”. 

Under international standards, the death penalty can only be imposed for crimes where there is an intention to kill which results in the loss of life. According to the United Nations, this excludes the possibility of imposing death sentences for activities of a political nature, including treason, espionage and other vaguely defined acts described as 'crimes against the State'.

For Africa: 38 of the 54 member states of the African Union are abolitionist in law (16) or practice (22), also more than 2 thirds.

Amnesty report

An Amnesty International Death Penalty report in 2011 stated:

Thirteen new death sentences were handed down for murder and treason in Gambia in 2011 after often grossly unfair trials, although no executions were carried out.

Seven out of eight people on whom such sentences were imposed in 2010 for plotting to overthrow the government were confirmed by the Court of Appeal in April.

Gambia abolished the death penalty for drug-related offences, which had been extended only in 2010, and replaced it with life imprisonment on 4 April.

Amendments were also made to the Criminal Code Act and the Trafficking in Persons Act 2007, to make them compatible with the 1997 Constitution which contains Article 17(2), prohibiting the death penalty for offences not involving violence, or the administration of a toxic substance, resulting in the death of another person.

OPINION: The Gambia: A nation tranformed into a country of liars, griots and self-serving megalomeniacs

By Mathew K Jallow

Outgoing U.S Ambassador, Pamela White, was diplomatic and gracious in her unambiguous assessment of the Gambia's predicament under Yahya Jammeh, but she did not mince words in her verdict of the country's sickening political culture and embarrassing governance system. Her contemptuous disregard for Yahya Jammeh was unmistakable and her parting words summed up the mess into which Yahya Jammeh has put the Gambia. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that beneath the surface tranquility, the Gambia is a country in turmoil. Just two weeks ago, eight former senior government officials, three of them holding doctoral degrees and the rest possessing university degrees in various fields, were remanded in Mile 2 Prisons. At the same time, in faraway Abuja, Nigeria, Gambia's five-member permanent parliamentary delegation to ECOWAS, led by Paul Mendy, was meeting ECOWAS officials to discuss the Gambia's human rights crisis. But, unlike the eight former agricultural officials who were remanded in Mile 2 Prisons, none of the Gambia's ECOWAS parliamentarians has a high school education, not to speak of a university degree. The five Gambian permanent ECOWAS parliamentarians created a public outcry when one of them, Lamin Jadama, declared in Abuja, Nigeria that there were no human rights abuses in the Gambia. The five ECOWAS representatives, it turned out, are a microcosm of the broader Gambian National Assembly, where most of the National Assembly delegates have never seen the inside of a high school classroom.

Over the past decade and half, the Gambia has succeeded in creating the only society in West Africa where mediocrity and amateurism trumps professionalism and excellence; a country that values ignorance and timidity over intellectual curiosity and creativity. Lamin Jadama is a reflection of what the Gambia has become, and that fact that he courted the eerie of a segment of the Gambia’s population after his bold-faced lies to an ECOWAS committee probing into Gambia's worsening human rights violations, is a natural reaction to cultural decadence that has taken root in our country. His denial of human rights violations was particularly perplexing since Lamin Jadama knows the murdered Sgt. Illo Jallow, as his village Katamina and Illo Jallow village Sare Mali are separated by only a hundred meters wide cattle trail. But Lamin Jadama's denial is not a new thing, but he personifies the dumbing down of Gambian society. In lying to ECOWAS officials, he has become the metaphor of how ordinarily decent Gambians have by necessity turned into unadulterated liars. Today, every official of the regime has become a liar; a frightening development has totally changed the character of Gambian society. Gambia is now a place of make-belief; a place where deceptions, deceit and hypocrisy is the new normal. It is a social anomaly motivated by the necessities of self-preservation. It is a phenomenon that is particular to autocratic societies like The Gambia, where the rule of tyranny has replaced the rule of law.

Lamin Jadama's denial of human rights violations in the Gambia which came barely a week after Ousman Sonko's outrageous statement regarding Chief Ebrima Manneh, is a pernicious pattern that harkens back to the days of Ms. Marie Saine Firdaus and Edward Gomez and beyond. In countries ruled by dictatorship as in The Gambia over the past decade and half, the denial of the obvious becomes second nature to officials of the regime. And around the globe and throughout history, it is a practice that has stood the test of time and bought time for regimes that would eventually collapse under the weight of their own tyranny. As in The Gambia, lies, deception and deceit are designed to delay the inevitable day when Yahya Jammeh's regime will collapse, because there is not historical precedence where dictatorship have survived the lies and brutality they visit of their people. But, for now, given the caliber of the Lamin Jadamas and Paul Mendys who represent us at both ECOWAS and at the National Assembly, we cannot expect anything better than the nefarious and self-serving machinations used to drag Gambian in the proverbial mud. Paul Mendy who heads the Gambia's ECOWAS parliamentarians, is also the senior laborer at Yahya Jammeh's Kanilai Farms and his appointment to that position in late 2011, published as a Press Release in The Daily Observer on March 31, 2011, was greeted with absolute incredulity and reads as follows. "The Office of the President wishes to inform the general public that Honorable Paul L. Mendy, National Assembly Member, has been appointed as the Operations and Logistics Manager, Kanilai Family Farms Limited, with immediate effect. This information is also extended to all Farm Managers and employees of the Kanilai Family Farm." If this is not truly the picture of Gambia at its very worst abuse of power, then nothing else is, for we have become a country of liars, griots, and self-serving megalomaniacs 

UTG’s Professor Kah in court

(The Point)The Vice Chancellor of the University of the Gambia, Professor Muhammed Kah, yesterday made his appearance in the trial involving Dr Gumbo Ali Touray at the Banjul Magistrates Court.

Kah, who is regarded as the prosecution’s star witness in the case, gave his testimony before Principal Magistrate Alagbe.

Gumbo Ali Touray, former Director of International Affairs at the University of The Gambia, is being tried for the offence of giving false information to a public officer.

Prof Kah told the court that he is the vice chancellor of the university, as well as professor in the area of Information and Technology at the university.

He added that he was appointed vice chancellor in 2009, after graduating from different universities with different degrees.

His written resume was tendered in evidence, and marked as an exhibit.

He added that he knew the accused person, and that Dr. Touray was no longer in the employment of the UTG.

Professor Kah told the court that the accused person at one time had a contract with the university, and that his contract expired like that of any other staff at the university.

He added that the accused wrote to the university management for renewal of his contract, but unfortunately it was turned down.

At that point, the prosecuting officer, Superintendent Joof, applied to tender email correspondence between the accused and the management of the UTG.

He added that the said email correspondence was very important because it indicated how the accused person’s services were terminated, and that the said documents were prepared by the accused person himself.

Defence counsel Badou S.M. Conteh raised an objection to tendering of the email correspondence, citing the Evidence Act.

Lawyer Conteh further argued that the said email correspondence had no link to his client’s case, and that all what was in the email was about one Kojo.

However, the trial magistrate ruled that the said documents be tendered in court, and they were admitted and marked as exhibits.

He added that exhibit A was the petition letter the accused person wrote to the Office of the President against the Vice Chancellor of the University of The Gambia for frequent travelling, among others.

Prof Kah further in his evidence said vice chancellors all over the world periodical travel on the business of the university at all times, and that he as the vice chancellor travelled not only on the ticket of the university, but when the state asks them to attend meetings.

He added that he had a successful academic career before coming home, in at least three continents in world, such as at the American University, in Dubai, and in a university inNigeria.

He said sometimes when he travels, it is because international organizations needed him as the vice chancellor to attend their meetings on behalf of the UTG.

Designated as the sixth prosecution, Prof Kah added that the public was aware of most of his travels, because there used to be an annual report, and he must seek clearance and other supporting documents from the executive.

He added that the annual report is usually prepared by the management of the UTG, and all the activities of the university must be indicated in the annual report.

He said that the reason for stopping staff loans after consultation with the management of UTG, was due to the financial status of the UTG, which was the duty of any vice chancellor, especially after he took up the office newly.

“I found out that the account was in the red, and there was a big financial mess in the accounts of the UTG. Imagine during my first week in office, the creditors were coming to my office for settlement of their bills.”

He said he realized that the UTG is not there for individual interest, but instead for the larger interest, by restructuring the financial arrangements at the UTG.

Mr. Kojo is a Ghanaian national, he told the court, pointing out that when he worked at other foreign universities, he was never treated like Gambian, further stating that at the university level what mattered was merit.

He added that Kojo’s wife is a Gambian and his wife’s father is a Gambian, also pointing out that professor Stigen (Kah’s predecessor) was not a Gambian.

Prof Kah further adduced that the position of financial director was advertised with The Daily Observer and The Point newspapers, but with the requirement that a candidate graduates from a higher recognised institutions with at least an MBA in finance.

He added that the matter went to the UTG governing council and members included Bai Matarr Drammeh, the president of the Gambia Chamber of Commerce, Baboucarr Bouy, permanent secretary for Basic and Secondary Education, some from the Human Resources Directorate, and the secretary of the UTG.

He added that the vice chancellor was not part of the governing council for the interview.

The case was adjourned till 18 August 2012, for cross-examination.

Author: Bakary Samateh