Tide of change swells in Gambia
Recent wave of protests call for end to brutal reign of President Yahya Jammeh
Since taking power in a bloodless coup in 1994, Yahya Jammeh has presided over the worst dictatorship you’ve never heard of. The eccentric Gambian president, who performs ritual exorcisms and claims to heal everything from AIDS to infertility with herbal remedies, rules his tiny West African nation through a mix of superstition and fear. State-sanctioned torture, enforced disappearances and arbitrary executions — these are just a few of the favoured tactics employed by his notorious security and intelligence services.
Elsewhere in Africa, rights advocates have increasingly lamented a plague of “third-termism” as more and more leaders move to scrap constitutional limits in order to remain in power. But in Gambia, Jammeh will probably cruise to a fifth fiveyear term in elections scheduled for December. That is, of course, unless the unprecedented wave of protests that began last week boil over into a full-fledged popular revolt.
Tensions have been slowly building in Gambia for years, not least because of the repressive security environment, widespread corruption, chronic food shortages and terribly mismanaged economy.
But Jammeh has mostly succeeded in keeping discontent in check, in part because of Gambia’s Indemnity Law — signed by the president in 2001 — giving the president sweeping powers to prevent security forces from being prosecuted for quelling “unlawful assembly.”
The law was occasioned by an incident in 2000 in which security forces opened fire on a group of student protesters. In total, 14 people were murdered in broad daylight.
On April 14, however, scores of Gambians bravely took to the streets to demand electoral reforms. Citizens mobilized again on April 16, staging the largest and most sus- tained act of public defiance against Jammeh since he seized power more than two decades ago. This time, the agitated police responded more forcefully, spraying demonstrators with live ammunition and assaulting people in the streets.
Most shockingly, Solo Sandeng, the leader of the youth wing of Gambia’s main opposition movement, the United Democratic Party (UDP), is alleged to have been tortured to death while in state custody.
UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon, the African Union and the U.S. State Department all condemned the Gambian government’s severe response to the peaceful protests, the latter urging the government to exercise “restraint” and “calm.” But if the UDP goes ahead with its plan for more protests, there is a risk that Jammeh’s paranoid government will respond with additional deadly force.
The United States could sanction Jammeh’s regime by imposing travel restrictions on individuals implicated in grave human rights abuses and freeze the U.S. assets of Jammeh, his family, and members of his inner circle.
Jammeh’s lavish $3.5-million mansion in Potomac, Md., would certainly be a good place to start.
Part of the reason Jammeh’s government is so jittery is that it weathered a coup attempt less than two years ago. The putsch failed and the regime responded with fury, sentencing eight alleged coup plotters to death and indiscriminately jailing scores of Gambians suspected of being associated with them, some as old as 84 and as young as 14.
The crackdown drew harsh rebukes from rights activists.
Despite Jammeh’s egregious rights record, the U.S. government has largely refrained from speaking out against him over the years. (The Gambian leader was welcomed to the White House as recently as August 2014, when he attended the first U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit.)
But in truth, the tide had begun to turn against Jammeh months before the attempted coup, when he signed a harsh anti-gay law as part of an overhaul of the country’s penal code. The European Union responded by suspending $186 million in aid while the United States made Gambia ineligible for the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade preference program that provides duty-free treatment to U.S. imports from sub-Saharan Africa.
International isolation has made Jammeh only more vulnerable at home. Before last week’s protests, Gambia’s notoriously fractious political opposition had begun to piece together a unified front, with top decision makers from different political parties putting forward a common agenda: namely, unseating Jammeh at the polls in December.
But even if the opposition works together, it will be fighting an uphill battle against Jammeh’s ruthless political machine. So blatant was the government’s intimidation of the opposition during the last election in 2011 that the Economic Community of West African States refused to send observers. That is why it’s crucial that international donors, namely the United States, both invest in Gambia’s newly unified pro-democracy movement and signal to Jammeh that his government’s brutal and ongoing crimes will no longer be tolerated.