Dear All,

The article below is reproduced/culled from today's edition of The Sunday Times of London.

Regards,
Ebrima


Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6797697.ece















From The Sunday Times









August 16, 2009 

Yahya Jammeh's state witch-hunters kidnap villagers in western GambiaBy Dan McDougall Banjul, Gambia
DRESSED in ankle-length vermilion robes, adorned with hundreds of tiny cracked 
mirrors, the witch-hunters had first been spotted by watchmen, through the 
flames of their campfires, emerging from the bush in the dead of night. 



Aroky Bajung, a mother of six, was one of the first sleeping villagers to 
wake. She caught fleeting glimpses of ceremonial gowns glinting in the 
moonlight as the tall strangers flitted between houses like ghosts. She 
grabbed her children and cowered under her bed, praying for morning to come. 



By daybreak the fitful dreams of the villagers of Jambur in western Gambia had 
become a terrifying reality as they woke to the sound of screams and a 
spidery trail of blood and animal entrails. Before them, flanked by 
mysterious red-cloaked strangers, stood the notorious Green Boys, Gambia’s 
feared private militia. 



“We have work to do here,” the soldiers shouted. “The president’s work.”


 

Within two hours the soldiers had seized more than 100 people. Simultaneously 
across Gambia another 1,200 suspected witches, both men and women, were 
rounded up. Shaking with fear, they were taken to secret government 
detention centres. 



Here their nightmare really began. In the name of Yahya Jammeh, Gambia’s 
dictator, they had been singled out for exorcism. Accused of being witches, 
they were blamed for the death of the president’s beloved aunt. By nightfall 
at least six had died after they were forced to drink a mysterious potion. 
Those who survived the foul concoction spent the following days racked with 
pain. Some claimed to have bled from their eyeballs. 



An Amnesty International report noted that Jammeh, 44, has presided over a 
dramatic deterioration in human rights. Last week he sacked his ambassador 
to Washington a day before she was due to meet Amnesty officials to discuss 
human rights abuses. 



Until now the villagers of Jambur and 20 other small communities have been too 
terrified to speak out against their president and his witch-hunt. 



“I remember the scarlet flashes, the glinting of their robes. My children wake 
up crying, asking me when the men are coming back to take them,” said 
Bajung, 35. She believes she was seized because she had tried to help an 
elderly neighbour. 



She added: “Here we are taught to worship the elderly. The witch doctors were 
smearing them with paste and shouting spells at them. When I tried to stop 
them I was bundled onto an army bus.”



Within an hour she and 100 others from Jambur were taken for a mass exorcism. 
They were forced to strip and drink the concoction that made them 
hallucinate and gave them severe pains. “People were vomiting blood and 
having fits. It was terrifying,” she said. 



During the witch-hunts, which were orchestrated by the Green Boys, Jammeh’s 
most militant supporters, thousands fled over the Senegal border. Others 
were shot in the head. 



In the tiny village of Makumbaya, Hawa Jallow and Kaody Soee, the first and 
second wives of Mamadou Bah Fulla, 60, said the murder of their husband by 
the Green Boys had left their family destitute. Jallow said: “The Green Boys 
said they had come for the witches who had killed the president’s aunt. 



They said the president had heard in a dream that witches had come to kill her 
and now they must pay the price.”



After a few days other villagers began to return but there was no sign of 
their husband. 



“We went to the nearest barracks to ask where he was, but nobody knew,” added 
Jallow. “A week later we found out he was dead. A doctor who looked at some 
of the other victims said they had kidney problems from drinking the potion.”



The witch-hunts are only a small part of the deadly and bizarre behaviour of 
Gambia’s president. In a recent speech in Banjul, the capital, he repeated 
his belief that all journalists should be killed. Recently he jailed six of 
Gambia’s most prominent journalists for two years. 



Earlier this year Jammeh held a mass demonstration of his homemade cure for 
Aids. He invited thousands of local victims of the disease to abandon 
western anti-retroviral drugs and line up at the gates of his palace to try 
his herbs and banana remedy. A doctor who criticised the call to abandon the 
medication was jailed. 



Superstition and mysticism go hand in hand under Jammeh’s erratic rule. He 
regularly threatens to behead homosexuals and drive them out of the country. 
He also declared that only he can drive through the giant arch built to 
commemorate his 1994 coup. 



He has won three elections since seizing power. The first, in 1996, was 
dismissed as “unfair” by observers and the second, in 2001, was won with 53% 
of the vote after a campaign marred by bloodshed. He won two-thirds of votes 
cast in 2006 but opposition leaders complained of intimidation. 



Back in Jambur, Karomo Bojang, an imam, is one of 40 Muslims taken in the 
witch-hunts. “Why did they use witch doctors to force me and my neighbours 
to drink some unworldly potion?,” he asked. 



“We are living among madness. Our lives are in the hands of a lunatic.”



	


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