SEVEN JOURNALISTS, including the editors of Gambia’s independent press, are now incarcerated in notorious Mile Two prison, outside Banjul, the country’s capital, awaiting trial for sedition and criminal defamation.
An eighth accused journalist has been granted bail.
The journalists’ case was brought to court on Friday as international pressure mounted on President Yahya Jammeh’s government to drop the charges against the seven men and one woman.
The charges were brought after the Gambia Press Union issued a statement, published by the Point and Foroyaa newspapers, expressing outrage over President Jammeh’s “character assassination” of murdered Point editor, Deyda Hydara. The journalist was gunned down in December 2004. Jammeh’s government denies responsibility, but refuses to mount a credible investigation.
“Gambian journalists are terrified right now,” said Cian Ó Síocháin, who worked as a VSO volunteer from 2007 until March of this year at the Point. “Mile Two is a truly awful place and three of my colleagues are in poor health, especially Pap Seine, who has a heart condition.”
Imprisonment of journalists is nothing new in Gambia, but the extent of the round-up and seriousness of the charges this time define the situation as the most serious attack on press freedom for some years.
In 1995, a year after sweeping to power in a coup, Jammeh began his clampdown, stating that journalists and rights activists “should go six feet under” at a public rally .
Omar Barrow, a radio journalist and Red Cross worker, was killed during a shooting spree by security forces in April 2000.
The clampdown has not always had the desired effect, as the Point expanded to a daily newspaper in 2006 and, despite the latest arrests, production has continued. “Of course we are continuing to publish, at the present,” a Point journalist told The Irish Times. “We have much international support, although people here in Gambia are afraid to protest.”
President Jammeh made world headlines in 2007 when he claimed to have a cure for Aids, and more recently when he rounded up 1,000 people accused of being witches. “A lot of people say the witch-hunt was an excuse for a major crackdown on Gambian journalists and the opposition parties,” said the Point journalist.
International outrage is now at its highest point in years, as the EU, US and African Union have joined in the condemnations of Jammeh’s regime. On July 22nd – 15 years to the day since Jammeh took power – Amnesty International and the National Union of Journalists will take part in a day of action highlighting “the rule of fear in Gambia”. It is unlikely much will be said on the day by the Gambia government’s press officer, because Jammeh dismissed the previous office-holder and took over the role himself.
Reporters Without Borders has said President Jammeh’s “bigotry towards the media” is “unparalleled anywhere in west Africa”. Gambia is ranked 137th out of 173 countries on the organisation’s worldwide press freedom index.
Allen Meagher was an APSO volunteer in Gambia during the mid-to-late 1990s, and is a former member of the Gambia Press Union. He works in Moyross, Limerick, on Changing Ireland magazine.