Gambia: Cooling Fires

Cooling Fires

After 22 years, Yahya Jammeh’s victims of sexual violence, torture, forced disappearances and other crimes in Gambia finally have a chance at justice.

Earlier this month, the 11 members of the tiny West African country’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission started their deliberations.

Under the commission’s purview are alleged crimes committed during the regime of Jammeh, a former president who left office in early 2017 after armies from neighboring countries entered Gambia and forced him to recognize the victory of current President Adama Barrow.

The first witness to testify before the commission painted a bleak picture starting from the moment Jammeh seized control in a 1994 coup, reported Reuters.

“He used to come to me to beg for money and other things,” said Ebrima Ismaila Chongan, who trained Jammeh as a police cadet, then spent two years in prison for opposing the coup. “When I knew that he was the leader, I knew that Gambia was going to be in trouble.”

Jammeh went on to hunt alleged witches and wizards, suppressed the media, persecuted the LGBTQ community, and forced HIV sufferers to forego medical treatment and take his self-made cure of herbs instead. It’s not clear how many of them died.

A session on the “Junglers,” a paramilitary group accused of atrocities, is on the commission’s agenda, too.

“We demand that light be shed,” Baba Hydara, the son of slain journalist Deyda Hydara, told Al Jazeera. “They really have to give us facts and do their homework.”

Deyda Hydara’s former colleagues are among the most aggressive trying to rebuild the country as the commission’s work continues, the Associated Press reported. Gambian journalists have set up a self-regulatory body to make sure government officials don’t meddle with the press.

The commission will work for two years. It can give out compensation to victims and recommend charges to prosecutors. That could help avoid the disappointments that followed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was criticized for too liberally doling out amnesties for offenses committed during the Apartheid era.

Even so, Jammeh will probably not appear before the commission. He’s now safely in exile in Equatorial Guinea under the protection of President Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue.

Still, many hope that the commission will do enough to “cool the fires burning for justice.”

“You can’t just kill my dad today, and then the next day, I see you passing,” Fatoumatta Sandeng, whose father was killed by security forces six months before Jammeh left office, told Foreign Policy. “There is something that needs to be cooled, like there is some fire in you that needs to be cooled off,” she said. “There needs to be justice. Let them face it.”