26 January 2017
Congratulations, Mr President!
At last, the good guy is in and the bad guy is out.
By Neil Tidmarsh
So the new president was finally sworn in this week. We were beginning to wonder if it would ever actually happen. After all, when the right candidate won the election last year, we did think that perhaps it was just too good to be true. But now the old president has slunk off at last, with his tail between his legs, and the new president can begin to put things right in his country, to get it back on the right track, to deliver on his promises. It’s a golden opportunity, an historic turning point for his country, his continent and perhaps for the whole globe. The rest of the world will certainly be wishing him well and cheering him on his way.
And he’s a one-time Islington resident – a Gunners supporter, to boot.
The man he’s replaced – ex-President Yahya Jammeh – has fled Gambia, flying off to Equatorial Guinea and into the sunset, though we don’t yet know where he’ll be living for the rest of his exile. Do we care? Not really – though the question of whether he’ll be extradited and brought to justice for the terrible crimes he’s alleged to have committed while in power is an important one.
He seized power in 1995 in a military coup and enjoyed four terms in office, during which hundreds (if not thousands) of opposition activists, journalists, students and immigrants disappeared, according to Amnesty International. He restricted press freedom, was intolerant of opposition (90 people were detained before last month’s presidential elections alone) and persecuted homosexuals. His security service, the National Intelligence Agency, operated by kidnap, torture and murder, according to reports by the UN’s Juan Mendez. Jammeh has also been accused of corruption – his vast personal wealth has been estimated at £2 billion (three Rolls Royces from his fleet of Bentleys, Rolls and Hummer stretch limos were loaded onto the cargo plane in which he fled the country, along with – allegedly – £11 million stolen from his people). Allegations of involvement in transatlantic drug smuggling – with cocaine warehoused in his country on their way north to Europe – have also been made against him. Last year he took Gambia out of the Commonwealth and withdrew from the International Criminal Court.
As soon as the new president Adama Barrow was sworn in, he pledged to rejoin the Commonwealth and the ICC and to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to uncover the extent of the previous regime’s abuses; he also ordered all the country’s political prisoners to be released. But he is being circumspect about whether Mr Jammeh will have to face justice. Just after the election, President Barrow’s deputy Fatoumata Tambajang said that she wanted to put Jammeh on trial, and it’s thought that it was this comment which made Jammeh change his mind about standing down, having previously admitted defeat. The deal with which other heads of state finally persuaded Jammeh to stand down appears to have involved some kind of immunity; spokespeople for the UN, the African Union and Ecowas (the Economic Community of Western African States) have said that he and his family will enjoy a former president’s privileges, be allowed to keep assets acquired legally, and be spared any “harassment or witch-hunting” – though Senegal’s foreign minister Mankeur Ndiaye has said dismissively that “President Jammeh and his team concocted a declaration that gave him every guarantee, essentially impunity” and has stressed that this declaration “signed by no one” is in no way binding.
President Barrow has said that it’s a question of “wait and see” for the time being. The situation is still volatile; the Gambian army has said it will not oppose him, Jammeh’s Republican Guards have been disarmed and troops from the Western African coalition are on the streets of Banjul, the Gambian capital, to support the UN’s resolution; but there are fears and rumours that the ex-president’s powerful National Intelligence Agency and foreign mercenaries may still have some sort of counter-attack prepared. President Barrow cannot return to Gambia (he has been in exile in Senegal since Jammeh repudiated the election results and declared a state of emergency – he was sworn in in the Gambian embassy in Dakar, the capital of Senegal) until the situation is guaranteed secure. So the Gambian crisis is not over yet.
Nevertheless, the really heartening thing about this whole episode is the way in which all the West African countries stood up for democracy and the rule of law against the obsolete tyranny represented by Mr Jammeh. A unanimous United Nations security council resolution helped, but here was an African problem which Africa solved by itself, efficiently and swiftly. Ecowas (a group of 16 countries, founded in 1975) and the African Union were determined to uphold the election result from the start. Mauretania, Morocco, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia tried to persuade Jammeh to stand down by offering him exile and a comfortable retirement. Adama Barrow found refuge and support in Senegal. An Ecowas force of 7000 troops (mainly Senegalese, but including 200 soldiers from Ghana, and supported by the Nigerian air force) was resolutely and quickly put together to support the UN security council’s resolution to use “all necessary measures” to oust Jammeh, and crossed the border into Gambia as soon as the deadline for him to step down had passed. President Condé of Guinea and President of Aziz of Mauretania flew to Banjul to confront Jammeh in the presidential palace as the Ecowas troops approached, and finally persuaded him to concede defeat.
It appears that Senegal has played a leading role in these proceedings. I’d guess that the real hero of this story is Senegal’s president, Macky Sall (although I haven’t seen his name mentioned, nor this credit acknowledged, in any other account of the Gambian crisis I’ve read so far). This isn’t the first time we’ve sung President Sall’s praises here in Shaw Sheet (see Happy Birthday, Mr President 25 February 2016, and President Sall Strikes Again 2 June 2016), but I suspect that once again we should be thanking him for bringing us good news at an otherwise bleak time in a bleak world.
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