Gambia has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. Shortly before the recent reported executions and/or threat of executions of all those on death row, believed to number 47, there had been the closure of an independent radio station in Banjul, Taranga FM. The tiny country is regarded by rights activists as one of the worst places in the world to be a journalist. A Gambian journalist seeking refuge in Sierra Leone reports.
By Kemo Cham, Politico
Within the last two weeks two developments have kept this small country called The Gambia at the top of international news headlines. As always, it’s all been for the wrong reasons.
First it was the closure of a stubborn radio station, Teranga FM, which the government (as a matter of fact, President Yahya Jammeh) deemed inciting for its taste.
Then there was the announcement, or what turned out to be a short notice of the subsequent execution of 9 death row inmates.
Jammeh issued the warning on Sunday, 19 August. Five days later news came in of the executions.
The latest is that he has denied executing any inmate, even though his Minister of Presidential Affairs, Dr Njogu Bah, had gone through pains to defend the move as in “compliance with the provisions” of the constitution.
Whether those executions have been carried out or not, one can only imagine the troubled state of mind of family members of the remaining 47 people on death row at the Mile II prison outside Banjul, many of whom are political prisoners whose trials have been nothing short of a political circus.
And the feeling of exasperation, according to sources in the Gambian capital, cuts across the general population.
Koriteh, as the people of Senegamabia [Senegal and Gambia] call the feast marking the end of the Holy month of the Ramadan, is supposed to be a day for celebration. It is the last day you would imagine anyone, not least a Muslim head of state who’d spent the past 30 days fasting, to be talking about taking the lives of other human beings – no matter their crimes.
Many outside Gambia may be trying to make sense of this attitude of Yahya Jammeh’s, but for ordinary Gambians this just bears the hallmark of the eccentric nature of a leader they have had to put up with for the last 18 years.
So much happens in that country yet very little is reported. Such is the implication of the tight grip with which the former military lieutenant holds on to power and the flow of information.
The Gambia has freedom of the press enshrined in its constitution. But government perpetuated systematic attacks on media houses and journalists, coupled with the threat of existing draconian media laws revolving around “false publication” and “sedition”, which carry jail terms and heavy fines, have led to severe self-censorship.
While the state-owned Gambia Radio and Television Services (GRTS) serves entirely as the mouthpiece of Yahya Jammeh and his government, independent broadcasters are so tightly monitored that no room is left for alternative views.
Gambians today rely on US and UK based online media outlets, operated by exiled Gambian journalists, for alternative news and views on happenings back home.
Jammeh makes no secret of his revulsion for free speech, and this is obvious in his endless vile utterances against journalists, whom he once described as the “illegitimate sons of Africa”.
“The journalists are less than 1% of the population and if anybody expects me to allow less than 1% of the population to destroy 99% of the population, you are in the wrong place,” he told the BBC last November, shortly after he’d been declared winner of an election that some observers said was flawed. Not that he’d ever won any flawless poll since 1994.
Jammeh has so far succeeded in closing two newspapers and two radio stations in the course of his 18-year rule. One of these is the famous Citizen FM.
Over 60% of Gambians are illiterate, and most of them rely on only radio for information.
Through daily broadcast in the two dominantly spoken languages in the country – Mandinka (Mandingo) and Wollof - Citizen FM in the late 90s and early 2000s made reports in the English language independent media reach a wider audience.
The government was obviously uncomfortable with that.
The owner, a veteran Gambian journalist and former BBC correspondent, Baboucarr Gaye (now late), was in 1998 detained and his station shut down.
Six months later, he was convicted for operating a radio station without a license and was ordered to pay a fine and to forfeit the station's equipment to the government.
A high court judge later overturned that ruling but the decision did very little to revive the radio that had kept hundreds of thousands of Gambians on top of issues, much to the delight of the government.
Teranga FM, the only independent radio station in the country today, took off from where Citizen FM left off. But media analysts say it was ever doomed to fail.
Nonetheless, reactions to its closure over a week ago have been deafening, both in and outside the country.
“Closing the [Teranga FM] radio simply suggests that the government is denying the citizens, a vast majority of whom are illiterate, the right to know. A move which of course explains the position of the government towards the cardinal principles of democracy and the freedoms of the citizenry,” said Gibairu Janneh, Secretary General of the Gambia Press Union.
But this is not the first time the government has ordered Teranga FM off the air.
In 2011 it was forced to suspend broadcasting for one month, and seven months later, agents of the notoriously feared National Intelligence Agency (NIA) ordered that the radio’s daily news review in the two main local languages be suspended.
It is easy for critics to understand why since 1994 Gambia has consistently featured poorly in all global free expression barometers.
The 2011/12 Press Freedom Index ranks the country at 141 out of 179 countries.
Besides the Nigerian terror group Boko Haram, Jammeh is the only West African to feature in Reporters Without Borders (RSF)’s current list of 41 ‘Predators of Freedom of Information’.
In a recent report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Gambia ranked 13th worst in the world in terms of the number of journalists who have fled into exile.
CPJ recorded 17 Gambian journalists as having fled the country between 2001 and 2011.
But a list compiled by a US-based Gambian journalist and arch critic of Jammeh, Mathew K. Jallow, records 36 journalists as living in exile, mainly in neighbouring Senegal, US and the UK.
Others simply found their way into the government’s purported black list after commenting on what the government sees as “dissident” online media.
But journalists are by no means the only “endangered species” in Gambia. It happens that they are constantly in focus only because they dare to question, openly, the government’s policies.
This long period of suppression has drained the Gambian media of its brains. The consequences of that are numerous, but evidently it has also brought to bear issues of standard and ethics.
Jammeh has capitalised on these shortcomings and sometimes uses them to justify his hard-line stance against journalists.
Two striking cases of reference include the bizarre “disappearance” of journalist ‘Chief’ Ebrima Manneh who went missing in 2006 and still remains without a trace.
Two years earlier, in 2004, one of Gambia’s most celebrated veteran journalists and critic of the government, Deyda Hydara, was gunned down in broad day light, by men believed to be state security agents.
These and a series of actions against journalists and the media, which include torture of detained journalists, arson attacks on supposed opposition newspapers and radio stations, the use of draconian media laws to jail journalists, forced many out of the country.
The killing of Hydara and the forced disappearance of Manneh have remained unresolved despite pressure from the international community.
In the case of Manneh, the ECOWAS Community Court ruled against the government after a protracted hearing in a case brought on behalf of the Manneh family by the Ghana-based Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA). Not only has the government refused to respect the ruling, Jammeh and his officials continue to contradict one another as regard his whereabouts.
At one point Jammeh denied knowledge of the arrest or killing of either journalist, and at another moment he would suggest reasons why he believed they might have met their apparent fate.
As recently as last February, the Gambian leader suggested Manneh had died when he said he had no hand in his death.
Questions were asked how he knew of his death.
And as Gambians and press freedom advocates waited for that answer, his police chief added another side to the puzzle when he said he’d received information from Interpol that the supposedly dead journalist was in the US.
In 2009, Jammeh’s “reckless” remarks suggesting slain editor Hydara was killed as a result of his involvement in extramarital affairs drew strong criticism from the Gambia Press Union (GPU). As a result, seven journalists were tried and jailed “for insulting the president”.
They were freed only after mounting international pressure.
