Gambian truth panel starts hearings

FORMER Gambian president Yahya Jammeh, now in exile, forced HIV-positive Gambians to drink herbal concoctions, which he said would cure them.

BANJUL - A truth commission in The Gambia began hearing witness testimony on Monday as it set about investigating rights violations committed by the regime of Yahya Jammeh.

Modelled on South Africa’s investigation into its apartheid era, the commission will hold hearings into Jammeh’s 22-year era of oppression which ended in 2016 after he was forced from power. President Adama Barrow has hailed the commission as a step towards national healing and a way to prosecute those responsible and offer some closure to victims and families.

Rights defenders accused the regime of systematic torture against opponents and journalists, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detentions and disappearances in the English-speaking country.

The first witness on Monday, Ebrima Chongan, a police deputy inspector general before the 1994 coup which brought Jammeh to power, testified that he was tortured in a rat-infested prison outside the capital Banjul after the putsch.

He said one government official put a gun in his mouth.

“They beat me and pulled me out and showed me some blood and one of the soldiers asked me to say my final prayers,” he said. “I am not embarrassed to say I was screaming. I thought I would die.” After Jammeh took over The Gambia, the smallest country on the African mainland, he installed a network of oppression, driven by the police, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and a death squad called the Junglers.