Leader’s departure ends standoff in Gambia
After 22-year reign of fear and recent election loss, Jammeh goes into exile
BANJUL, GAMBIA— Gambia’s defeated leader Yahya Jammeh and his family headed into political exile Saturday night, ending a 22-year reign of fear and a post-election political standoff that threatened to provoke a regional military intervention when he clung to power.
As he mounted the stairs to the plane, he turned to the crowd, kissed his Qur’an and waved one last time to supporters, including soldiers who cried at his departure.
The flight came almost 24 hours after Jammeh announced on state television he was ceding power to the newly inaugurated Adama Barrow, in response to mounting international pressure for his ouster.
Jammeh landed in Guinea an hour later. He and his family then took off for Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, according to an airport official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak to the press. Equatorial Guinea, unlike Guinea, is not a state party to the International Criminal Court.
Barrow won the December elections, but Jammeh contested the results as calls grew for him to be prosecuted for alleged abuses during his time in power. A regional force had been poised to force out Jammeh if last-ditch diplomatic efforts failed to persuade him to leave.
The situation became so tense that Barrow had to be inaugurated in neighbouring Senegal at the Gambian Embassy on Thursday, after Jammeh’s mandate expired at midnight.
Shortly after Jammeh’s departure, the United Nations, the African Union and the West African regional bloc, ECOWAS, issued a declaration saying that any country offering him and his family “African hospitality” should not be punished and that he should be free to return to Gambia in the future. It said Jammeh was leaving “temporarily.”
The joint statement did not include promises of amnesty but said the world and regional bodies “commit to work with the government of the Gambia to prevent the seizure of assets and properties lawfully belonging to former president Jammeh or his family and those of his cabinet members, government officials and party supporters.”
Jammeh, who seized power in a coup in1994, once vowed to rule for a billion years.
His departure has brought an end to the political crisis in this impoverished nation of 1.9 million, which promotes itself to overseas tourists as “the Smiling Coast of Africa” while being a major source of migrants heading north toward Europe.
As Jammeh prepared to leave the country after hours of last-minute negotiations with the leaders of Guinea and Mauritania, human rights activists demanded that he be held accountable for alleged abuses, including torture and detention of opponents.
“Jammeh came as a pauper bearing guns. He should leave as a disrobed despot. The properties he seeks to protect belong to Gambians and Gambia and he must not be allowed to take them with him. He must leave our country without conditionalities,” said Jeggan Bahoum of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy in Gambia. ECOWAS had pledged to remove Jammeh by force if he did not step down. The group assembled a multinational military force that rolled into Gambia on Thursday, after Barrow’s inauguration and a unanimous vote by the UN Security Council supporting the regional efforts.
Troops will stay to secure the capital before Barrow’s arrival.