May 21, 2009
Witch Hunts and Foul Potions Heighten Fear of Leader in Gambia
By ADAM NOSSITER

JAMBUR, Gambia — This tiny West African nation’s citizens have grown
familiar with the unpredictable exploits of its absolute ruler, who
insists on being called His Excellency President Professor Dr. Al-Haji
Yahya Jammeh: his herbs-and-banana cure for AIDS, his threat to behead
gays, his mandate that only he can drive through the giant arch
commemorating his coup in the moldering capital, Banjul, and his
ubiquitous grinning portrait posted along roadsides.

Not to mention the documented disappearances, torture and imprisonment
of dozens of journalists and political opponents.

But then came a campaign so confounding and strange that the citizens
are still reeling and sickened from it, literally, weeks after it
apparently ended.

The president, it seems, had become concerned about witches in this
country of mango trees, tropical scrub, dirt roads, innumerable police
checkpoints and Atlantic coastline frequented by sun-seeking European
tourists mostly unaware of the activities at nearby Mile 2 State
Central Prison, where many opponents of the regime are taken.

To the accompaniment of drums, and directed by men in red tunics
bedecked with mirrors and cowrie shells, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of
Gambians were taken from their villages and driven by bus to secret
locations. There they were forced to drink a foul-smelling concoction
that made them hallucinate, gave them severe stomach pains, induced
some to try digging a hole in a tiled floor, made others try climbing
up a wall and in some cases killed them, according to the villagers
themselves and Amnesty International.

The objective was to root out witches, evil sorcerers who were harming
the country, the villagers were told. Terrified, dozens of other
people fled into the bush or across the border into Senegal to escape
the dragnet, villagers said, leaving whole regions deserted. Amnesty
estimates that at least six people died after being forced to drink
the potion, whose composition is unknown.

The roundups occurred from late January through March, according to
people here. But even in recent weeks, the same witch doctors in red,
accompanied by others identified as government agents, have circulated
in the dirt-poor countryside — Gambia was ranked 195th of 209
countries by the World Bank in 2007, with a per capita income of $270
a year — demanding that villagers make animal sacrifices, of a red
he-goat and a red rooster, to root out the sorcery supposedly in their
midst.

Gambian government officials did not respond to e-mail messages and
phone calls, and the government has not commented on articles
recounting the anti-witch campaign in the opposition newspaper Foroyaa
(“Freedom,” in the local Mandinka language), according to the paper’s
editor, Sam Sarr. Amnesty International says it received a press
release from the country’s attorney general declaring such
witch-hunting activities “inconceivable.”

Yet the testimonies are numerous, and experts on this former British
colony have little doubt that the witch hunts occurred, and on the
scale described.

The roundups were guided by the president’s “Green Boys,” villagers
say. The Green Boys are Mr. Jammeh’s most militant supporters,
“vigilante die-hards,” said Abdoulaye Saine, a political scientist at
Miami University of Ohio. They dress in green and sometimes paint
their faces green, the color of Mr. Jammeh’s political party, the
Alliance for Patriotic Re-Orientation and Construction. The roundups
were conducted with force, guns in evidence and directed largely at
the elderly, witnesses and local journalists said.

Even in the often brutal context of his 15-year dictatorship, this
year’s roundups stand out, the president’s few open critics in Gambia
say. Since the 1994 coup that brought him to power, at least 27
journalists have fled the country. One was murdered and another has
not been seen since his arrest by the dreaded National Intelligence
Agency. Others have described prolonged torture by electric shock and
the use of knives and lighted cigarettes in Mr. Jammeh’s jails.

But this time, it was not critical journalists or political opponents
who were singled out. “There’s a feeling that if this can happen,
anything can happen,” said the opposition leader Halifah Sallah, the
minority leader in Parliament from 2002 to 2007, who has himself been
arrested four times, most recently for speaking out against the witch
hunts.

“People no longer have the protection of the laws,” Mr. Sallah said.
During the witch hunts, “people were in a state of panic” throughout
Gambia, a country of 1.7 million, he said.

On the teeming streets of Serrekunda, a suburb of Banjul, people
expressed fear. “All of them are opposition, but they are not talking,
because if you are talking, you are going to the police,” said Lalo
Jaiteh, a building contractor, gesturing nervously at a bustling row
of vendors.

The anxiety has persisted. The witchcraft accusation brings shame in a
society where belief in sorcery “was pervasive and still is
pervasive,” according to Lamin Sanneh, a Gambian-born history
professor at Yale University. Beyond that is the trauma of being
uprooted and the illnesses that people say linger from the bitter
potion.

“This stigma will follow us into our grave,” said Dembo Jariatou
Bojang, the village development committee chairman in Jambur, a dusty
town 15 miles from the capital. “We will never forget this.”

He said he was taken, along with about 60 others, after being
assembled in the village square, attracted by the beating of the
drums. Driven by bus to a place they did not recognize, Mr. Jariatou
Bojang was made to drink and bathe in the foul liquid.

“My head is still paining sometimes,” Mr. Jariatou Bojang said.

As he spoke, an elderly man sitting on the floor of the village imam’s
house shook his head uncontrollably from side to side. The men in the
room said the symptom developed after the man, said to be in his 80s,
was forced to drink the liquid.

Omar Bojang, the son of the imam, Karamo Bojang, recalled being told
to undress, and ordered to drink “filthy water from a tin.”

“Once you drink that, you become unconscious, you can’t think,” he said.

Forty miles away in the village of Bintang, Mamadou Kanteh, a
fisherman, recounted the visit of the men in red several weeks ago. “
‘It’s the president who sent us,’ ” Mr. Kanteh recalled their saying.
“ ‘There are witches in the country who are hurting people, and
killing people,’ ” they said.

They demanded the sacrifice of a red goat and a rooster. The imam of
Bintang recalled drawing about $40 from the village treasury to pay
for the animals, which were slaughtered at the graveyard beyond the
town’s unlighted dirt streets.

Back in Serrekunda, pedestrians hastened away when asked about the
president. Mr. Jaiteh, the contractor, ducked inside a darkened shack,
hidden from the street by two towering stacks of tires, to talk about
the government with a friend.

“Human rights is not here right now,” the friend, Yaya Gasam, said in
halting English. “Human rights is ... pop.”

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