It was the end of Ramadan, the Holiest of months in Islam. But in The Gambia, while Muslims were going about their celebrations, President Yahya Jammeh had vowed to strike again. An eye will be paid for an eye, he mused. The whole country had been gripped by fear, expecting another batch of executions.
Three years ago, in 2012, on the same occasion of Eid ul Fitr – Koriteh prayers – the president threatened that he would carry out death penalty. Nine prisoners were executed. The world was shocked.
This year, when the Gambian leader again swore before Muslim leaders who paid traditional courtesy to him on Eid day at State House that he would apply the law to the letter, shivers ran down the nation’s spine. Less than a week later, he changed his tone.
“I have opened a new page,” he said. The U-turn was dramatic. All those that were to be put up for the firing squad have been granted a presidential pardon. The news came as a surprise. The world was stunned.
This was Wednesday afternoon of July 22. In Banjul, the military-turned civilian regime was celebrating a milestone: 21 years on the throne. Across the country, the immediate response to the news was euphoric. Supporters of the ruling party had since packed their bag-packs. Destination: Kanilai, the president’s native village. Yet another elaborate party had been summoned.
However, the hours leading to Friday July 24 were long, especially for the pardoned prisoners and their loved ones. Will the president change his mind before then?
Welcome to The Gambia! Where news stories sometimes read like an inventory of fiction, to expect the unexpected is not an act of witchcraft, but a normal way of life. The drama that unfolded just a week before was an example. The state media had reported that eight-five prisoners were pardoned by the president. A few days later, newspaper reports emerged that the pardoned prisoners were being rounded up and thrown back into their cells. The interior ministry reacted: the prison officials had mistakenly released wrong persons. But questions remained unanswered. Who were these wrong people? Who should the right people be? Typically, the government did not provide any further comments.
Unsurprisingly, when news of the pardon broke, there were doubters like Mai NK Fatty, leader of opposition Gambia Moral Congress (GMC). “The capacity to forgive is out of his character,” he said on his Facebook page, referring to President Jammeh. “With this man, even the saying ‘seeing is believing’ does not apply.”
Despite the tones of people like Mr Fatty, on Friday July 24, all roads led to the headquarters of the Gambia Prison Services. The office sits across the street from the Central Prisons at the outskirts of the capital, Banjul. The pardoned prisoners were lined up on wooden benches; some sat on the ground. A prison officer announced the names on the list. Hundreds of friends and family members, who crowded the area, were anxiously waiting outside. One girl escaped the security men keeping them at bay, ran towards grey-bearded man who emerged from the gates and buried her head in his arms. “Baba,” (meaning father) she said in between sobs. For her like for many others, the reunion was emotional. There were tears. There were also smiles.
“I was supposed to die in there,” said Rudy Rasoel Hamid Ghazi, pointing at the cellblock where he had been confined for five years. The Dutch national had been sentenced to 50 years imprisonment after he was found guilty of possession of record 2 tonnes of cocaine in 2009. “I am not guilty,” he insisted even after his release. “But I am happy that I am here. I am going home to see my family. Long live President Jammeh!”
According to the director of prisons, David Colley, two hundred and twenty-nine prisoners pardoned by President Jammeh were released. Only three women were on the list that had twenty-six treason convicts. Murder convicts, drug convicts and rape convicts were also released. Forty-six foreigners who were convicted for various crimes were all released and were to be deported.
That wasn’t all. High profile prisoners, including two former ministers and a former solicitor general, who were convicted on charges of abuse of office, were also released. The presidential package contains a bigger surprise: In addition to the 229 prisoners pardoned, at least twelve family members of the Diaspora Gambians, who attacked the State House in a deadly coup attempt on December 30, have been released after seven months under incommunicado detention.
“The numbers can go up,” David Colley said. It did. On Monday July 27, the list of pardoned prisoners grew bigger. According to Daily Observer newspaper, the presidential pardon had been extended to anyone imprisoned for whatever crime before he came to power in 1994. On Thursday July 30, a fresh round of eight prisoners and a detainee, were pardoned and released.
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President Jammeh rode to power on a wave of alleged popular support. But a few months after he overthrew the former government that was falling on its knees over alleged corruption and internal power struggle, he experienced opposition from his fellow military men. He chose the stick over the carrot to deal with the dissent. A year after taking over, he restored death penalty. He launched Operation No Compromise. The situation got no better. From 1994 to 2014, there were at least eight publicly known alleged military overthrows, though the president said the figure is higher. And, as far as he was concerned, his prerogative of no mercy is not meant for them; that he would cut their heads before they cut his.
Following the 2012 execution of nine prisoners, the local and international outcry forced the government to declare a moratorium. But the Jammeh administration appeared undeterred. In the past few months, attempts were being made to introduce an amendment to the provision on death penalty, seeking to allow courts to impose capital punishment even when death doesn’t occur from the conduct of the convict. Today, not only is that widely criticised attempt to broaden death penalty apparently shelved, but also those that were supposed to die in prison are now alive with their families.
Why the sudden change of heart on the part of President Jammeh? The debate has many sides, depending on who one talks to. In the words of the author in Jammeh, the decision was informed by his religious beliefs. He wanted to be in the good books of Allah. “If we don’t forgive each other, then how will the almighty Allah forgive me as the leader of this country?” he said. His supporters and even pardoned prisoners and their families were also reading from the same song when they attributed the gesture to what they called the president’s ‘magnanimity’.
Others, mainly critics, hold a different view. They pointed that that the President was playing electoral politics. Elections are less than a year away. Whether they have it right or wrong, the pardoning of mass number of prisoners, pundits believe, will work to the advantage of the ruling party, come 2016.
“The timing is crucial,” Amadou Camara, a political analyst told me. “To put simply, the move is a political stunt.”
There are other arguments. For these, in the end, the President was a pragmatic politician who was caught between the turmoil of the economy and the shocks of international isolation. The country’s main external donor, the EU, had in December 2014 cut 13 million euros in aid and a further 36 million euros had been blocked. Taiwan that had been the milking cow has gone. The UK’s aid agency, DFID, no longer gives direct aid to the government. The economy is debt-stressed. The value of the local currency has been on a phenomenal nosedive. The government is broke, and the IMF had to approve an emergency funding of 10 million dollars in April. “Jammeh is too smart for his own good,” Sidi Sanneh, a prominent dissident, and former foreign minister, told me. “You need not look further than the regime’s own request to the IMF for bail-out money to plug a whole in the budget in exchange for a staff monitored program. When a country effective surrenders it authority to manage its economy, particularly the day-to-day management of its national budget, that country is in deep financial trouble.”
Whether the unprecedented presidential amnesty was for Allah’s forgiveness or the EU funds or the votes, one argument that no one seems to dispute is that President Yahya Jammeh is in good moods, and his decision to pardon prisoners, has been greeted with widespread applaud. Even opposition leaders are all but full of praises.
Nonetheless, the pardon is not without pockets of criticisms. While some critics contended that the president deserves no pat on the back for releasing prisoners and detainees who should not have in the first place been imprisoned, the activists have taken issues with the pardoning of, say, rape convicts.
Yet the question as to whether murder and rape convicts are reformed enough to fit back in society has been met with a ‘yes’ from authorities. “Obviously, we vet them,” David Colley said of the prisoners. “They look very repent. We are all human beings. We are all bound to make mistakes.”
“When you’re in prison, you see your mistakes,” an Estonia national, who had been convicted for drugs, told me, remorsefully. In his bag there is a Bible. “I know God now. I am a Christian. I’ve realised my mistakes. And I know I will be a different person. I will be an example for others.
Twenty years of Gambia under President Jammeh has brought about deliverables to show off. In terms of infrastructure, much of what had been missing, he did provide them. There was no TV station, now there is. There was no university, now there is. There was only one main hospital, now there are seven. There were a total of two hundred and eight-four schools – primary, secondary and high, now there are eight-hundred and eight-nine. Schools were considered a boyzone, now girls have dominated.
However, his critics say he has also taken away from Gambians what had been the country’s pride in Africa: human rights and democracy. The regime originally claim democratic principle of free speech, but it did not take long before the honeymoon with democracy was over, and the ‘revolutionary’s’ military organ was on the whole naked. Decrees were rolled out. Political parties were banned. The press was and is still gagged. The democratic space has shrunken. Imprisonment of people, including enemies – real or perceived and allies who kicked the rules buried in the sand – has become the norm rather than an exception. The situation is to the point that in August 2013, the president who calls Mile 2 Central Prisons a 5-Star Hotel, himself said he was ‘shocked’ there were numerous cases of prisoners ‘languishing’ in jail.
“Take example of me,” the prison director, David Colley acknowledged. “I was detained here. Later, they knew I am innocent. They released me.”
He added: “We spend 1.5 million dalasis on feeding on prisoners every month.” To him, this figure is huge, but it doesn’t necessarily mean life in prison is humane.
According to the US Human Rights Report, the prison conditions are degrading. Every indicator has been given a grade of poor. The food: poor. The health facilities are poor. The cells are poor. Sanitation: poor.
As the regime suppresses dissent and constantly sweeps ‘lackadaisical’ and ‘unpatriotic’ elements with the President’s ‘electric broom’, his 5-Star Hotel is run full season. For many Gambians, exit has become the only way out.
According to recent reports, Gambia with a population of 1.8 million people has at least 70,000 people abroad. A 2010 World Bank report reveals that among African countries, Gambia the tiniest in mainland Africa, has the largest number of expatriates after Nigeria. A high number of them are exilees. These unfailingly include ‘illegitimate sons’ in journalists and human rights activists. They include opposition politicians. They include religious leaders who were critical of the government’s policies. But they also include former top government officials, among them ministers and security officers. Irregular migrants have now swollen their ranks.
Together, these groups of Gambian Diaspora have presented the greatest opposition force to the government. They’ve set up more than two dozen anti-government online platforms. They’ve ‘occupied’ Gambia’s embassies in New York, London and Dakar. They’ve staged public demonstrations at the UN during the president’s visits. And, in December, they’ve attacked the State House.
Yet the president has not left them out in his gesture, offering them an olive branch. “For those people in the Diaspora, whether you have lied [against me] and ran away or got involved in a coup plot, you are all pardoned,” he said, putting an icing on what has become a grand July 22 coup celebrations cake.
The presidential amnesty has triggered divergence of positions among Gambian Diaspora community. There are some who have been calling on their colleagues to embrace the president’s ‘genuine’ offer, though no one has so far been seen on camera boarding the next flight to Banjul. While some are on a wait-and-see mode, others have visibly clenched their fist. Referring to President Jammeh, Sidi Sanneh said: “He will be opening a new page only when he invites the UN or an independent arbiter of his choice to discuss the terms and conditions under which he will be accorded safe passage out of State House and the country.”
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As I walked across the streets from the prison department, I saw a crowd of prisoners, mainly young people, peeping through holes of their cellblocks, waiving and screaming: How about us? The crowd they were waiving at was too busy for them. President Jammeh has since his announcement reclined behind the bunkers of the State House, letting his propagandists do his talking. For now, the release of nearly three hundred prisoners and detainees means more space for those screaming ‘how about us’. But for many analysts, it will take more than pardoning of hundreds of prisoners to avoid checking in more guests in the 5-Star Hotel.
“This is an opportunity for all Gambians, regardless of our political, social, or religious leaning to reconcile and put behind our difference,” said Majority Leader of the National Assembly, Fabakary Tombong Jatta.
However, going forward, commentators are of the view that the writings on the new page that the president has opened should be done in the language of democracy. The press has to be free. The judiciary has to be independent. The economy has to be fixed and free market policy should be pursued. And, Gambia’s versions of Guantanamo Bay should be shut down. But will the opposition, religious leaders, the Diaspora, and the international community make hay while the sun is still shining on The Gambia?
Saikou Jammeh is the Gambia-based correspondent for Radio France International and Inter Press Service News Agency
By Saikou Jammeh
Source:The standard.gm