Hey Yero:
I try to include the links to the articles I send to the list whenever
I remember to do so. Here's the link to this one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world/africa/21gambia.html?ref=world

Thanks, always.

-Laye

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 10:09 AM, A Jallow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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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