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(Banjul, March 12, 2021) – A testimony before The Gambia’s Truth Commission implicating then-President Yahya Jammeh in the 2005 summary execution of around 59 West African migrants should be followed to criminal liability, said Human Rights Watch and TRIAL International today.
From February 24 to March 11, 2021, witnesses told the Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) that migrants to Europe from Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, from Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo, plus their Gambian contact, were detained by Jammeh’s high lieutenants in the security services before being assassinated by the “Junglers”, a paramilitary unit notorious who took his orders directly from Jammeh.
“Well-placed witnesses implicated Yahya Jammeh in the murder of citizens of nine West African countries,” said Reed Brody, senior lawyer at Human Rights Watch. “All of these countries should support a criminal investigation and, if warranted, the prosecution of Jammeh and others who bear the greatest responsibility for the slaughter of migrants and other serious crimes committed by his government.”
Witnesses, including the former Chief of Defense Staff and former senior officers of The Gambia’s National Intelligence Agency (NIA), said then-police chief Ousman Sonko – who is currently under investigation in Switzerland for crimes against humanity – informed Jammeh during a national investigation. ceremony on July 22, 2005, that a large group was apprehended on a beach near Barra, in front of Banjul, the capital.
After allegedly speaking to Jammeh, Sonko ordered officers to transport the migrants, suspected of being mercenaries, to the naval headquarters in Banjul. All the heads of the Gambian security services – police, army, navy, NIA and national guard – then converged on naval headquarters, as did several Junglers, who beat and kicked the migrants and, said one officer, “treated them like animals. “
Several officers said it was already clear that the men and the two women were migrants and not mercenaries, as they were not carrying any weapons or anything suspicious. The migrants were then distributed to various detention centers around Banjul.
The exposed bodies of the first group of eight migrants were found the next morning, July 23, 2005, near “Ghana Town”, a colony of Ghanaian descendants in Brufut, just outside Banjul. Pa Amady Jallow, then the crime management coordinator, said the bodies showed signs of abuse, with broken skulls, oozing blood and brains. Jallow said that when he reported this information to Police Chief Sonko, he was not interested and hung up the phone three times before Sonko’s deputy informed Jallow that he was immediately transferred to the duties of the circulation.
Jallow told the commission his offense was “to attempt to investigate a heinous and barbaric crime committed … on behalf … of the president.” Jallow also said he was told years later by another police officer that nine more Nigerians were buried in a mass grave near where Jallow saw the bodies on display. The commission said it intended to research this site.
Ismaila Jagne, the community leader of Ghana Town, said two Ghanaians who took refuge there on July 23 explained that they were carried nearby, along with eight others, by soldiers in black uniforms (as carried by the Junglers) but that they were able to escape. while the others were taken in pairs. Jagne brought the two Ghanaians to Brufut police for their safety. When Jagne returned to bring food for the men, officers told him the two men had been abducted. An August 2005 Ghanaian delegation led by then Foreign Minister and current President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo reported that Brufut records showed the men were transferred to headquarters on July 24. of the police. The two men, identified as Bright Antwi and John Kweku, are among the missing.
Days later, the remaining migrants, around 40 to 45 people, were taken in vehicles and executed in Senegal, just across the border from Jammeh’s hometown of Kanilai. In a July 2019 Truth Commission session focused on Junglers, three former Junglers, all active members of the Gambian National Army, said they and 12 other Junglers they listed had committed these murders on Jammeh’s orders. One of the officers, Omar Jallow, recalled that the chief of the operation had told the men that “the order of… Jammeh is that they must all be executed”.
Junglers and other witnesses said the Junglers were under Jammeh’s direct control, listed a series of assassinations carried out by the Junglers on Jammeh’s orders, and said, in the words of a former Jungler, Alieu Jeng, that the Junglers “have never operated on anything that is their own orders or will, all orders come from the top [Jammeh]. “
Former Home Secretary Baboucarr Jatta accepted the assertion by senior TRRC lawyer Essa Faal that the killings were a “state-ordered execution by State House soldiers [Jammeh’s residence]And said he believed the soldiers were acting under Jammeh’s orders.
The exact number of migrants killed is still not clear. Gibril Ngorr Secka, director of operations at the NIA, presented the commission with a list of 51 migrants identified by the police at a post, including nationals of Ghana (39), Sierra Leone (3), Côte d ‘Ivoire (2) and Senegal. (2), Togo (2), Liberia (1), Nigeria (1) and Congo (1). While that number omits some previously identified migrants, as well as about eight other Nigerians who were reportedly arrested and killed, it is the first official list of migrants to be seen.
The TRRC’s testimony also described the persistent efforts of the Jammeh government to cover up the crime, first to thwart Ghana’s attempt to learn the truth. Former Foreign Minister Lamin Kaba Bajo agreed that a letter he sent to his Ghanaian counterpart Nana Akufo-Addo in December 2005, calling the story of the sole survivor of the Martin Kyere massacre “fabrication” and saying that the migrants had probably “escaped to Senegal”. Was a ‘rooster and bull story’. Bajo said that at the time he had no knowledge of the veracity of the contents of the letter which had been taken from an Interior Ministry report. He said it was “impossible” that such a fabrication could have happened without Jammeh’s knowledge.
The cover-up shifted into high gear ahead of a 2008 United Nations and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) fact-finding mission when the government appointed a “task force” that included several cabinet ministers to deal with investigators.
Former Chief of Defense Staff Assan Sarr, who was also at Navy Headquarters, said that when a UN / ECOWAS investigative team arrived in 2008, the police chief of the At the time, Ensa Bajie, in the presence of the then coordinator of crime management, told him: Yankuba Sonko, the current Minister of the Interior of The Gambia, not to “jeopardize or tarnish the ‘image of this country… and in case they call us, we should be aware of what we are saying or doing ”.
A Barra policeman, Babucarr Bah, said Yankuba Sonko told him, ‘Make sure you don’t say anything’ to investigators and that on Sonko’s instructions, ‘we took them to bars, gave them food. ‘alcohol and women’. Sonko denied this allegation in his own testimony. Bah also said that around December 2005, Ousman Sonko, the former police chief, told him to falsify the July 22, 2005 diary entry from the Barra police station where the migrants were initially arrested and that the diary entries were then completely rewritten. Copies of the diary with the July 22 entry removed were presented to the truth commission.
TRRC’s testimony corroborates the findings of a 2018 report by Human Rights Watch and TRIAL International, which interviewed 30 former Gambian officials, including many witnesses for the commission.
“Now that the information we have gathered has been corroborated, it is all the more important that Jammeh be called upon to face up to his responsibilities,” said Emeline Escafit of TRIAL International. “The time has come for justice for the victims and their families.”
The recent testimony casts further doubt on the UN / ECOWAS report which would have concluded that the Gambian government was not “directly or indirectly complicit” in the deaths and enforced disappearances. He blamed the “rogue” elements of the Gambian security services “acting on their own” for the massacre. However, the UN / ECOWAS report was never made public, despite repeated requests from victims and five UN human rights experts.
Among the victims who testified before the truth commission in the current session was Martin Kyere of Ghana, the only known survivor of the killings along the Gambia-Senegal border, who jumped into the forest from a moving truck carrying oil. other detained migrants; Adama Conteh, widow of Gambian victim Lamin Tunkara; and Kehinde Enagameh of Nigeria, whose brother, Paul Omozemoje Enagameh, was among those killed, according to a Nigerian investigation.
Eric Nana Yaw Ansah Owusu, also from Ghana, said he was arrested along with the migrants but held separately for 11 months. Owusu alleged that immediately after his arrest, a Gambian policeman applied electricity to his genitals, seeking to confess that the group were mercenaries.
Since the hearings began in January 2019, the Gambian truth commission has also heard testimony that Jammeh participated in the rape and sexual assault of women brought to him, forced Gambians living with HIV to give up their medication and put himself under his personal responsibility, and was responsible for ordering the assassination and torture of political opponents and “witch hunts” in which hundreds of women were arbitrarily detained. Jammeh has lived in exile in Equatorial Guinea since leaving The Gambia in January 2017.
The commission is responsible for “identifying and recommending prosecutions against those who bear the greatest responsibility for human rights violations and abuses”. He is expected to submit his report in July. The Gambian government will then decide how to respond to the recommendations.
For a graphic illustrating the basic facts of the massacre, please visit:
https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/supporting_resources/gambia_massacre_truth_56_migrants.pdf
For a graphic illustrating attempts to investigate the massacre, please visit:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/21/gambia-no-justice-2005-massacre-migrants
To watch the Human Rights Watch video “Former Gambian president linked to 2005 massacre, “please visit:
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