Folks,
Freedom of Expression is Forbidden
Here
By
Foday
Samateh
“Six armed men wearing masks came to
the printing works at 2:00 a.m., fired shots into the air, and ordered the
employees to lie on the ground. One of them then set fire to the new press…completely
destroying it.” The police didn’t
investigate the crime much less arrest the suspects, to one’s
surprise.
The incident above sums up Alagi Yorro
Jallow’s
Delayed Democracy: How Press Freedom Collapsed
in The Gambia. The author was a winner of
prestigious awards for excellence in journalism, and earned the unenviable
distinction of being arrested over a dozen times for his hard-nosed reporting.
He was in the main a co-proprietor and the managing editor of the Independent
newspaper, and fought with Deyda Hydara against draconian media laws in the
country. Forced by death threats into exile in the United States, he studied at
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, became a research fellow at
the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, and is currently a Fulbright
scholar teaching at a Bangkok university in Thailand.
Jallow’s
book addresses freedom of expression as the cardinal of all freedoms for both
journalism and the nation, and gives a comprehensive account of Yahya Jammeh’s
despotic response to the idea as well as its application. It also provides a
historical overview of media in The Gambia dating back to pre-colonial times,
and a running commentary on the troubled story of press freedom in Africa. The
colonial laws about the press, Jallow points outs, were decidedly repressive.
The British Crown didn’t want the
legitimacy of its rule challenged, and so handed down harsh libel, sedition,
and other restrictive laws from London to deny their subjects the freedoms and
rights to write and speak against colonialism in favor of self-rule.
Independence was supposed to change all that, except that it didn’t
it. Jawara and his ministers, like governments everywhere, weren’t
receptive to the media casting them in a bad light. So they left the oppressive
laws in the books and added some of their own.
Jallow’s
verdict on Jawara’s thirty years in
power is magisterial and unforgiving. The most crucial aspects of democracy, he
underscores, were instituted over time and not faithfully. Corruption,
impunity, and abuse of the national interest and assets couldn’t
be checked, because the system had become too entrenched to dismantle, and it
disenfranchised those who should have been empowered to reign it in. The crony
state became “too massive, too intimidating, and too
powerful,” and therefore
rendered the Constitution, the first and final word on the rule of law,
dormant. The Parliament had been too enchanted with power to discharge its
responsibilities. The fledgeling private media, the only institution outside
the direct control of the corrupt and corrupting system, had been shoved aside.
A system where the ruling party controlled all the levers of power for
self-perpetuation rather than carrying out the nation’s
business was bound to produce undesirable elements like Yahya Jammeh as its
inheritor.
The coup that brought Yahya Jammeh to
power in 1994 coincided with the establishment of several private media
outlets. The country’s first daily, the Daily
Observer, hit the newsstands about only two years earlier. The Point,
a biweekly at the time, was just about three years old. And more papers would
come out since, including the New Citizen and the Independent.
The lack of journalistic scrutiny Jawara had largely enjoyed wouldn’t
be true for the man who seized power on the claim to eradicate “rampant
corruption” and
institutionalize “accountability,
transparency and probity.” He
would perceive in the media nothing but mortal enemies. His very first decree
suspended the 1970 Constitution, and invalidated every other law that stood contrary
to any of his decrees, even the ones that were yet to be conceived and written,
leaving the rights and freedoms of every Gambian at the mercy of his diktats.
So much for a self-imposed liberator!
We hardly knew his name when it became
clear that the usurper had a chronic condition of speaking from both sides of
his mouth. The man who claimed to welcome criticisms of his junta’s
wrongs would turn out to be as intolerant and vindictive of dissent as any
despot that ever wielded power in Africa. He issued Decree No. 4 outlawing all
political parties, political assembly, political associations, political
expressions, political newspapers, and political anything free people in free
countries take for granted. Then he prosecuted Halifa Sallah and Sidia Jatta
for publishing Foroyaa as an organ of a political party even though the
paper fulfilled every criteria required for a newspaper under the law.
And for a man who professed that he
didn’t
hate the press, he would never let up foaming and frothing at the mouth against
the media. Just mere months in power, Jallow reminds us, Yahya Jammeh railed at
the press thus: “The enemies of
African progress, the illegitimate sons of this country disguise themselves in
the form of journalists, in the form of freedom fighters, in the form of human
rights activists, but they are all illegitimate sons of Africa…You
can send them into the streets begging when you don’t buy their newspapers…Don’t allow the mosquito to suck your
blood…They
talk about Human Rights, an issue they don’t even understand. And I will tell you
what Human Rights stand for…a fallacy that is
nonexistent anywhere in this world; it is a Western machination to manipulate
Africa…If
you want to be a donkey, we will treat you like a double donkey. If you want to
be a human being, we will treat you like a human being. There is no compromise!”
He barely finished making that dire
warning when he deported the Liberian refugee Kenneth Best, the proprietor and
editor of the Daily Observer, back to the war-torn country,
purportedly for immigration violations. The private media houses, Jallow
recalls, were “subjected to frequent visits by tax
inspectors, custom and immigration authority, and the National Intelligence
Agency (NIA), all looking for illegal immigrants. At one time, immigration
personnel were regularly stationed at the gate of the Daily Observer,
checking the credentials of anyone entering or leaving. As a result, many
non-Gambian journalists were deported or simply left the country.”
In the early part of 1996, the
election year to civilian rule, Yahya Jammeh
arrested the editors and publishers of all four private newspapers on
the spurious claim that they violated the colonial-era Newspaper Act of 1944 by
not submitting the publishing information of their papers on annual basis. The
information in question could always be found printed in the back pages of
every edition of the respective newspapers. The eight editors and publishers of
the Daily Observer, Foroyaa, the New Citizen,
and the Point pleaded not guilty and were released on a bond of one
thousand (1,000) dalasi each. When the despot didn’t
have the case he had hoped, he promulgated new decrees to intimidate the media.
The colonial-era Newspaper Act of
1944, which stipulated the terms of registration, printing and publication of
private newspapers, remained almost unchanged until the coup. Having already
toughened the conditions, he upped the ante with Decree No. 70 by increasing
the penalty for non-compliance with the requirements for the bond under the Act
from a fine of one thousand (1,000) dalasis to one hundred thousand (100,000)
dalasi. Twelve days later, he issued Decree No. 71 to revoke all existing bonds
and prohibit the publication of all private newspapers until they posted new
bonds of one hundred thousand (100,000) dalasi within two weeks.
Despite turning himself into a
civilian ruler through a very dubious election process, Yahya Jammeh’s
abhorrence for the media has never mollified. The harassment and intimidation
escalated in the form of arrests, interrogations, detentions, deportations, and torture to
scare journalists away from publishing articles he considered
“inaccurate”
or
“sensitive”
to national security. He vowed on one of numerous occasions that, “Anybody
bent on disturbing the peace and stability of the nation would be buried six
feet deep.”
The clampdown wasn’t
confined to the newspapers. Take, for instance, the case of Citizen FM Radio
founded in 1996 by the veteran journalist Baboucarr Gaye. It became the most
popular station in the country for being the only private radio that generated
its own news, and for airing major stories in the newspapers in both English
and the local languages. Yahya Jammeh might not so much mind that few educated
people were reading the private newspapers, Jallow observes, but when those
papers were translated on air into the local languages to the general public,
the station was bound to stir his fury.
After the proprietor defied his
demands to end the program, Mr. Gaye and his staff became frequent targets of
arrests and harassments by the National Intelligence Agency. Then, a group of
armed soldiers stormed the station and shut it down under the pretext that Mr.
Gaye hadn’t paid his operational license fee for
that year. He was, lo and behold, charged under the colonial-era Telegraph Act
of 1913 for operating a radio station without license. At the end of the
protected misdemeanor trial, he was fined three hundred (300) dalasi and
ordered to forfeit his broadcasting equipment to the state. Mr. Gaye appealed
the ruling.
His victory in the High Court would
prove to be temporary. On the night of the 2001 presidential election, the
station hosted a live coverage with a team of reporters filing in results from
various counting centers, in defiance of the Interior Minister’s
warning to the media not to broadcast or publish any results ahead of the
official declaration by the Chairman of the electoral commission. The minister
ordered the police to take the station off the air. Mr. Gaye was back on the
air again but not for long. The National Intelligence Agency arrested and
detained him, and sent his staff home on the claim of some tax arrears. Even
after he settled all outstanding taxes, the station was never allowed to resume
broadcasting.
Another private radio station was
given a taste of the despot’s treatment. Radio
One FM used to host a popular program called “Sunday
News Hour” with a panel of
journalists to discuss the issues of the day. One night in 2001, a group of
masked arsonists came to burn it down. The proprietor, George Christensen,
happened to be present and fought them off at great personal risk. Though he
saved his station from getting set ablaze, he sustained burned injuries during
the scuffle and had to be admitted to the hospital. And few months prior, Alieu
Bah, a journalist at the station, had received a threatening letter to quit
before he would be visited with dire consequences. When he defied the threat,
his house was torched, and he and his wife and child narrowly escaped the fire,
but not without injuries. The police as usual promised thorough investigation,
but never apprehended anyone.
Yahya Jammeh ramped up the legal
hurdles to further curtail freedom of expression and the press. At his
prodding, his lapdog National Assembly passed a Media Commission bill that
would make Stalin blushed. The 1997 Constitution mandated “the
establishment of a National Media Commission to establish a code of conduct for
the media of mass communication and information and to ensure the impartiality,
independence and professionalism of the media which is necessary in a
democratic society.” This
is one of the many flaws in the Constitution on the part of its framers. No
government should ever be given an ounce more of power than necessary to keep
the people safe and free. Governments are notorious for using any powers at their disposal, and even more
so for abusing those powers to strengthen their own hold on power.
To state the obvious, it’s
not the responsibility of governments to ensure the “impartiality,
independence and professionalism”
of
the private media. When they are entrusted to do so, you get the kind of Media
Commission Act the likes of Yahya Jammeh could only dream of enforcing. Far
from being modeled on the US Federal Communications Commission, which it must
be noted isn’t a body to protect press freedom but
rather to regulate the media, the National Media Commission was empowered to
decree a code of conduct for the private media, set standards for quality and
content, and issue rulings on complaints against journalists and media
organizations. The Commission was given further powers to basically supplant
the courts. Private media organizations
as well as individual journalists
would be required to register with the Commission for annual licenses, and the
Commission would have extrajudicial authority to revoke those licenses, impose
fines, issue arrest warrants
for journalists, and even send
them to prison.
If the media organizations and
journalists failed to obtain the annual license, they must be penalized with
severe fines or be suspended: three months for media organizations, and nine
months for journalists. The Commission also reserved the power to put
journalists behind bars for contempt for up to six months. If the regime or any of its bureaucratic
branches so much as alleged in a complaint that a journalist or media
organization published an official information without authorization or in
contravention of the colonial-era Official Secrets Act of 1922, the Commission
must compel the journalist or media organization to disclose the source of that
information. If the journalist or media organization refused to do so, the
Commission must fine, suspend or revoke the license of the journalist or the
media organization, imprison the journalist, or impose any combination of these
punitive measures.
Rightly considering the Act an
autocratic encroachment on their constitutional freedoms, the media staged
protests for the National Assembly to repeal the Act, and filed lawsuits for
the Courts to strike it down as unconstitutional. The Gambia Press Union and
two managing editors, Deyda Hydara of the Point and (the author) Alagi
Yorro Jallow of the Independent, were joined by the president of the
Press Union Demba A. Jawo and The Gambia News and Report
publisher Suwaebou Conateh as the plaintiffs.
About that time, Yahya Jammeh had an
interview with the now pro-regime Daily Observer and referred to
the media as a “dead and rotten
horse.”
He
accused them of trying to appeal to the international community by reporting
lies about him and criticizing his regime. He further lashed out at them for
giving more coverage to his opposition, even though he and his officials made a
second nature out of declining interview requests, and denying access to
official information. When asked in another interview if he had any plans to
pay a visit to the private media houses, the despot didn’t
disappoint with a characteristic scoff: “You
do not need to go to the toilet to know that it stinks.”
While the lawsuit against the Media
Commission Act was winding through the
Supreme Court, Yahya Jammeh doubled down on his acerbic screeds and doomsday
warnings against the media. Then in October 2003, the Independent office
was attacked by four men who climbed over the perimeter wall, hit the security
guard unconscious with an iron bar, and set the newsroom on fire. In January
2004, the paper’s managing
director, Alagi Yorro Jallow, received a letter from the “Green
Boys,”
Yahya
Jammeh’s
paramilitary-style vigilantes, threatening to kill him and destroy the paper
for its coverage of the trial of Baba Jobe, who, ironically, as the despot’s
confidant and surrogate, had been instrumental in the formation of the
semi-official brigade of bandits. These were grave threats, especially after Baba
Jobe’s
lawyer, Ousman Sillah, was shot in the head in an apparent attempted murder for
no other plausible motive than the most obvious: the lawyer might have learned
too much from his client about the despot’s
criminal chicaneries. In May, Yahya Jammeh warned journalists to “either
register with the Commission or go to hell…In
fact, the deadline [for registration] should not have been extended. But you
give the fool a long rope to hang himself.”
Again, these were not empty threats.
As it turned out, 2004 would be the most consequential year for the media in
The Gambia. In April, the Independent was attacked again by masked
assailants who held up the night crew at gun point and set the new printing
press on fire. In July, the despot was on television denouncing journalists for
being “bent
on character assassination of people,”
and
claiming that his regime had “provided too much
freedom of expression and media rights.”
He
gave the journalists an ultimatum to abide by his terms or leave the country.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the next
day he put them on notice anew with a familiar refrain:
“I
know there are opposition journalists among you but whoever misquotes me I will
deal with you.” That same month, Demba A. Jawo, the
president of the Press Union, got an anonymous threatening fax to cease and
desist from writing critical materials about the regime. On the heels of that
incident, arsonists set on fire the house of BBC stringer Ebrima Sillah, who
barely escaped with his life.
When the Supreme Court was set to rule
the Media Commission Act unconstitutional, Yahya Jammeh repealed his own
draconian law through the National Assembly. No, the despot didn’t
just discover his inner libertarian streak; he was only shifting gears. That
same day, the National Assembly passed the Newspaper (Amendment) Act of 2004.
During the military rule, Decrees No. 70 & 71 increased the bond under the
colonial-era Newspaper Act of 1944 from one thousand (1000) dalasi to one
hundred thousand (100,000) dalasi. This Amendment raised that sum to five
hundred thousand (500,000) dalasi for anyone who wished to exercise their
constitutional right to operate a newspaper. The National Assembly passed also
the Criminal Code (Amendment) Act of 2004 to further restrict free speech. It
categorized for the first time the publication of a “false”
statement
as a criminal offense. A first-time offender must serve six months minimum in
prison without the option of a fine, and a second-time offender must do three
years. The maximum fine under Decrees No. 70 & 71 was
fifty-thousand (50,000) dalasi. Under the amended law, fifty-thousand (50,000)
became the minimum fine and two hundred and fifty-thousand (250,000) the
maximum.
Then came the most fateful event of
the fateful year on the night of December 16, 2004, when Deyda Hydara, the
managing editor of the Point, doyen of the press and fierce critic of
the despot, was gunned down while he was driving from work. The assassination
was a shocking game changer for the press as well as the entire nation. If
Deyda could be murdered in cold blood, no one felt safe anymore. Six months
after the shooting, the regime published a report of their “investigation”
blaming
the victim for the heinous crime. In a dastardly attempt to assassinate Deyda’s
character as well, they slandered him as a “serial
womanizer,” whose immoral
lifestyle provoked his own death.
For Jallow, Deyda’s
assassination compelled him into a soul-searching about carrying on being a
journalist in The Gambia. He had been arrested over a dozen times in six years.
Once for reporting a prison hunger strike, and the other for writing about the
despot buying a five-star hotel. During one of the arrests for refusing to
disclose the source of his news story, he was stripped naked, and locked up
incommunicado in a mosquito-infested and urine-stanched cell for forty-eight
hours without access to a lawyer or family members. He contracted pneumonia and
malaria as a result. The regime had challenged the legality of his newspaper
and even questioned his citizenship as a Gambian along with his co-proprietor
Baba Galleh Jallow. They had to endure the indignity of providing the necessary
documents to immigration officials to prove that they were lawful citizens,
lest they be deported from their own country to a foreign one. And yes, he had
received more than his fair share of death threats.
But those past ordeals paled in
comparison to the impact the shooting of Deyda had on him. It didn’t
help that reliable sources within the Army and other branches of the regime had
warned him that he was a target for assassination. One source confided in him
that he would have also been shot like Deyda had he been in the country, and
not attending a media conference in the United States. Out of fear of losing
him, his family insisted that there was only one choice to make. He was
inclined to go back to being the managing director and publisher of the Independent
to deny the regime a win over truth and openness, but the threats and the
mounting pressures forced him to remain in the US.
Despite the international outrage
about Deyda’s assassination, the despot’s
intolerance for the press continued to increase with time. The Criminal Code
Act was again amended in 2005 purposely to target the press and further
suppress it from exercising its role to report the news and inform the public.
The fine for “false publication”
became
a minimum of fifty-thousand (50,000) dalasi and a maximum of two hundred and
fifty-thousand (250,000) dalasi. And defaulting on the fine would result in one
year minimum in prison. The colonial-era laws on defamation, libel and sedition
under the Criminal Code Act were also amended to mete out similarly
disproportionate sentences. Other laws that were amended as well included the
Official Secrets Act of 1922 enacted by the British to punish unauthorized
disclosure of official documents. The fine for leaking such documents was
increased from one thousand (1000) dalasi to two hundred and fifty (250,000)
dalasi, and the jail term from six months to 15 years to life.
A number of journalists have been
charged under this Act. A case in point was Lamin Fatty of the Independent.
He erroneously included the name of a former minister in a report of alleged
coup plotters who had been arrested in 2006. In spite of the paper’s
profuse apology to the former minister, the regime arrested Fatty and held him
incommunicado for two months. He was then charged under the Criminal Code for
publishing “false news.”
After
a protracted trial due to frequent and frivolous adjournments, he was “found”
guilty
as charged and ordered to pay the minimum fine of fifty-thousand (50,000)
dalasi or serve a year in prison. He was driven to prison, and was only
released after the Press Union came up with the money.
Another victim of the Criminal Code in
its application to the press was Fatou Jaw Manneh. She traveled from the United
States to pay her respects to her father when the despot’s
secret police abducted her at the airport. After holding her for a week, they
charged her with sedition and giving false information to endanger national
security for criticizing the regime on the internet. She was also “found”
guilty
and ordered to pay the maximum fine of two hundred and fifty-thousand (250,000)
dalasi or spend four years in prison. Thanks to her family and friends, and the
Press Union, she was able to avoid prison. And another outrageous violation and
violence against press freedom was the disappearance and presumed murder of
Chief Ebrima Manneh, a reporter with the pro-regime Daily Observer,
after his secret arrest by the regime.
While Jallow was settling in the US,
his paper continued to face harassments back in The Gambia. In March 2006, the
police burst in, arrested the staff and sealed of the office without giving so
much as a reason. After brief questioning, two editors and a reporter were held
incommunicado, and the rest of the staff were sent home. Three weeks later, the
two editors, Musa Saidykhan and Madi Ceesay, were released without charges. The
regime informed the paper that the ban had been lifted and it could resume
publication. But when the staff returned to work, the police prevented them
from entering the office. The Independent had since been closed down
with security forces stationed at the building.
When the despot was asked at a press
conference about allegations that his regime was responsible for the
assassination of Deyda Hydara, he responded: “I
do not believe in killing people. I believe in locking you up for the rest of
your life. Then maybe, at some point, we will say, ‘Oh
he is too old to be fed by the state,’ and we release him and let him become
destitute. Then everyone will learn a lesson from him.”
Responding
to questions about his routine arrests of journalists and unjustified closing
down of the Independent, he asserted: “Let
me tell you one thing. The whole world can go to hell. If I want to ban any
newspaper, I will, with good reasons. This is Africa and this is the Gambia, a
country where we have very strong African moral values. If you write, ‘Yahya
Jammeh is a thief,’ you should be
ready to prove it in a court of law. If that constitutes lack of press freedom,
I don’t care.”
In 2009, he arrested six journalists
after they issued a statement denouncing him for being dismissive once again of
the assassination of Deyda Hydara, and his failure to conduct a thorough
investigation to bring the killers to justice. The six journalists were “found”
guilty
on six counts, including defamation and seditious publication. They were
sentenced to four years imprisonment and fined two hundred and fifty-thousand
(250,000) dalasi. After loud chorus of international outcry, the despot decided
to “pardon”
them.
That same year, Mr. Abdul Hamid Adiamoh of Today newspaper was also
arrested on charges of sedition for publishing a photo of a boy scavenging
through a pile of trash.
The incessant measures against the
press has made Yahya Jammeh infamous in all the circles that stand for press
freedom. The Committee to Protect Journalists
put The Gambia on its list of the ten worst violators of press freedom.
The International Freedom of Expression Exchange considered The Gambia one of
Africa’s
worst places to be a journalist. The Ghana-based Media Foundation for West
Africa compiled a sixty-three-page dossier on the despot’s
abuses of press freedom. And Jallow lists about forty journalists who had gone
into exile out of fear for their lives or security, and gives a rundown of over
120 instances the regime violated press freedom through arrests, detentions,
prosecutions, assaults, torture, deportations, arson attacks, exorbitant fines,
imprisonments, newspaper and radio station closures, and murder. These figures
would be too bleak for any country, especially a tiny one like The Gambia.
By Jallow’s
assessment, Yahya Jammeh’s iniquitous record
on press freedom rivaled the likes of North Korea, where rigid state-controlled
“television
and radio news broadcasts are dominated by flattering reports of the activities
of the leader…along with patriotic stories
emphasizing national unity.” The
Gambia’s
political culture, he writes, has taken the turn for the worse with the coup,
due to Yahya Jammeh’s strongman
mentality that remained hardened even after he shed his military uniform for
flowing gowns to assume the appearance of a civilian leader. The change from
military ruler to an elected head of state was distinction in style only,
without any difference in substance. His attitude toward governance, his
mindset about his role and duty, and his total disregard for the rule of law or
the constitutional rights and freedoms of the people remain “encased”
in
the thinking of a power-crazed, absolute authoritarian.
Under the despot’s
rule, Jallow expounds, dissent is just another word for sabotage, and public
debate must therefore be stifled. All must obey him as the leader, and none
must complain about his commands. Popular participation and democratic
pluralism are seditious conspiracies. “This
is why political plurality is currently alien to the new culture that has
emerged from a nation that had the true potential to march on to greater things—by
embracing democracy and freedom of the fourth estate as tools for development,
stronger stability, and a sense of purpose, but instead denied themselves the
opportunities of advancing in a new world, in a new Africa, by waylaying and
delaying all that was good and possible.”
Deyda Hydara’s
assassination, Jallow points out numerous times, brought a climate of fear in
the country that, understandably, forced many journalists into exile or made
them much more cautious to exercise self-censorship, but which regrettably led
to fewer voices to be critical of the regime. Families of journalists and
private media workers, even the families of those who operate the printing
presses, pressured their loved ones to refrain from open criticism of the
regime and to look for other employments. Any association with the private
media has become a dangerous thing.
In that crude and odious sense, the
despot might as well bellow and crow that his mission had been accomplished.
Silencing the media, Jallow indicates, is a strategic means to a far more
consequential end. To ensure that opinions are not aired, questions are not
asked, and other ideas do not compete with the despot’s,
the channels of mass communication must be shut down. “Killing
the messenger will certainly ensure that the message is not delivered. The
overall objective of the exercise to silence the media is to prohibit free
speech by dismantling the amplifiers of its very basic apparatus.”
After the suppression of free speech, the emasculation of the military, and the
coercion of the civil service into a partisan puppet, the despot has emerged as
the state; and the state, the despot. He fulfilled what Jallow calls hegemonic
disposition to power.
The main body of the book started as
an academic research in fulfillment of Jallow’s
Masters Degree at Harvard. He conducted further research on it as a fellow at
the National Endowment for Democracy. Then he worked on it again when he
decided to publish it. I should have mentioned from the beginning that he
located his theme, and constructed his arguments and analyses on the
Enlightenment and Empiricist thinking on the definition and function of freedom
of expression. And since the research was academic, the writing conformed to the convention, including the use of a
measured, dispassionate voice. To hazard a guess, that mode of presentation
influenced the choosing of the title, “Delayed
Democracy.” A less
mild-mannered writer might find it more apt to call the reality conveyed in the
book, “Aborted
Democracy.”
The supplementary part of the book is
where we fully encounter Jallow on his own terms. Not the Harvard student or a
Washington think tank fellow, but the man and the writer at liberty from
academic strictures. Whether he was writing an op-ed piece in the Independent
and other platforms, addressing a conference in
Nairobi, Edinburgh, New York City, Boston or accepting an award for courageous
journalists in Toronto, we get acquainted with the measure of his mind and the
depth of his thoughts on the theory and reality of freedom of expression in The
Gambia and Africa as a whole. We see the hopeful idealist, the desperate
pragmatic and the stubborn advocate at various moments, and sometimes all at
once. There’s a moving loftiness even in his grim
lament in the Independent in 2003: “Today,
the principal weapon is not arbitrary detentions and violent physical attacks
on journalists and their press houses. More and more the courts have been
coerced into providing the gags and handcuffs.”
He is at his most philosophical in his
writings and speeches when he ponders thus: “Is
it possible to act courageously as a journalist in The Gambia today? It is true
that our experiences—with the murder of
our brave friend, Deyda Hydara, the torching of the Independent newspaper’s printing press, the imprisonment and
torture and threats that reach us and do not abate—have
taught us that there are limits to what we and our family members are able to
endure, especially when we are not able to do the work we know is ours to do.
As years of intimidation build, stress finds less and less relief, as every
possible effort is made to push on and report and publish is exhausted.
Nevertheless, when time and time again those efforts are foiled by government
intervention, with personal safety threatened, the courage to seek another way,
from another place, can become the force of change.”
I must push back on the thrust of his
2004 article “No Longer a Beacon of Hope,”
a
criticism of the United States about the jailing of the former New York
Times reporter Judith Miller for refusing to name her source in a
federal leak investigation concerning classified information. He bolsters his
contention by quoting a statement of African Editors Forum saluting Miller:
“Her
courage is a source of inspiration to many editors and journalists in Africa
and around the world who live through autocratic rule and suppression of free
speech daily…That she is now sitting in jail in
what is supposed to be the pinnacle of democracy in the world is both ironic
and a testimony to the fact that the struggle for the defense of the right of
journalists to do their work freely is universal and knows no boundaries.”
To be fair, the headlines at the time
could be very misleading to easily lend a cringing parallel to the persecution
journalists in the Third World too often experience. But a closer look at the
situation in the context of the byzantine system of American democracy, we can
understand why Miller is hardly anyone’s
poster girl for press freedom. She wasn’t
sent to jail by the White House to force her to betray a source that exposed
the Administration. An Independent Prosecutor investigating the White House for
leaking the identity of an undercover CIA agent, a federal crime, for political
vendetta, put her behind bars. As it turned out, Vice President Dick Cheney’s
Office had used Miller to sell the Iraq War to the American public as if the New
York Times had been conducting its own independent, journalistic
investigations about the justifications for military action against Saddam
Hussein. The US certainly has press freedom problems. But Miller demonstrated
no courage of conviction, and she should never have been viewed as a source of
inspiration for African editors and journalists or any other for that matter.
We need no further evidence when the New York Times cut
her loose.
Besides that instance, Jallow is very
much at home with moral and philosophical truths. When Yahya Jammeh is long
gone and remembered only for his sick fulminations, deranged narcissism, and
countless crimes, The Gambia will orbit along the axis of freedom of expression
Jallow and like-minds ideate. His speeches and writings bring three things to
mind. The opening paragraphs share strong resemblance to the emotional reach
and rhetorical sweep of the oratory of a certain lanky Illinois lawyer serving
in the most powerful and prestigious public office. His appeals to the
international community to help hasten the arrival of democracy in The Gambia
ring with the humiliation of a disillusioned patriot Desmond Tutu confessed to
feeling like every Black South African in foreign countries until the day they
voted Mandela for President. His opting for exile in the face of death threats
isn’t
incomparable to Voltaire — a
pioneering proponent of freedom of expression in the Enlightenment era —
choosing
exile in England over indefinite incarnation in the Bastille in his native
France.
All three elements fused into a
coherence whole nowhere more so than at a media conference in Kenya: “The
brutal murder of Deyda Hydara… marked
yet another… descent into inhumanity and misrule…The
editor of the Point… spoke the truth,
and wrote the truth. He was not afraid to confront injustice, misgovernment, or
criminality. He has paid the ultimate price for his professionalism and
integrity…His death at the hands of murderers
acting with impunity is a scourge in our land and marks a new phase in terror
tactics and repression…It demonstrates the
intractable view of [the despot] that all journalists are criminal illiterates
who would be best ‘buried six feet
deep’…It
exposes the rotten heart of [the regime] in my beautiful country…If
a man like Deyda can be murdered for his proper execution of his profession,
then no one can sleep peacefully in his or her bed; nobody will be spared.”
The hopeful idealist, the desperate
pragmatic, and the stubborn advocate once more merge into a unified voice at
the end of the main section of the book to summon us to the breach for freedom
of expression. The fight is necessary as much as aspired for any hope of
freedom to which people as individuals and nations are entitled.
PS: The Book —
Delayed
Democracy: How Freedom of Expression Collapsed
in The Gambia is available in Hardcover, Paperback and
Kindle Editions at Amazon.com, and in other places like Google books and
Authorhouse.
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