BAN GAMBIA FROM CHOGMBy Andre Bagoo Tuesday, November 17 2009
COMMONWEALTH and local human rights groups are calling on Commonwealth leaders, including Prime Minister Patrick Manning, to ban the participation of the President of Gambia Yahya Jammeh at the Heads of Government meeting later this month in light of statements he made threatening to kill persons affiliated with human rights groups in his country.
Trinidad and Tobago’s Caribbean Centre for Human Rights (CCHR), as well as the India-based Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, are calling for action to be taken against Jammeh for statements he made in September on Gambian television.
“I will kill anyone who wants to destabilise this country,” Jammeh was quoted as saying by Freedom Newspaper, a Gambian online newspaper.
“If you think that you can collaborate with so called human rights defenders, and get away with it, you must be living in a dream world. I will kill you, and nothing will come of it. We are not going to condone people posing as human rights defenders of the country. If you are affiliated with any human rights group, be rest assured that your security and personal safety would not be guaranteed by my government. We are ready to kill saboteurs.”
CCHR executive director Diana Mahabir-Wyatt has said the Gambian leader’s violent declaration should not be condoned by this country.
“(Jammeh’s) statement openly repudiates the commitment which this country has always upheld, to adhere to the rule of law and the judicial process,” Mahabir-Wyatt said in a press release issued on behalf of the CCHR, which lists Justice Rajiv Persad as a director.
“It is also a violation of the principles that the Commonwealth stands for and to which Trinidad and Tobago and the Gambia have subscribed by signing the Harare Declaration,” the former independent senator said.
Mahabir-Wyatt revealed that on October 22, the CCHR’s chairman Desmond Allum SC wrote to Prime Minister Patrick Manning, as host of CHOGM, “asking him to withdraw any invitation to the president of the Gambia to attend a meeting in this country unless he withdrew that statement.”
“The CCHR got no response to the letter which was not even acknowledged by the Prime Minister’s office,” Mahabir-Wyatt said. “We have been unable to find out from the CHOGM office which heads of countries will be attending, but declare our opposition to the hosting, in Trinidad and Tobago, of the Gambian president who had openly and publicly declared his intention to kill any one who is or collaborates with human rights defenders.”
Asked yesterday if Jammeh was confirmed for attendance at this month’s meeting, Minister of Trade and Industry Mariano Browne, the head of a Cabinet committee charged with organising the event, said, “I don’t know but I’ll check.”
Browne said any possibility of Jammeh facing sanctions, which would include being banned from the meeting, were for Prime Minister Patrick Manning and the Commonwealth to decide. “That has to be decided by the heads of government and the Commonwealth secretariat,” he said. Manning will take up chairmanship of the Commonwealth later this month.
According to a report at the AfricaNews website yesterday, the New Delhi-based Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) has called for the Gambian leader to be barred from taking part in the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) carded to take place between November 27 and 29 in Port-of-Spain. CHRI is an international human rights watchdog with offices in London, India and Gambia.
In an open letter sent this week to the outgoing Commonwealth chairman Uganda President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, CHRI director Maja Daruwala calls on him to intervene over Jammeh.
“In view of the universal condemnation and concern at the statements of the President of Gambia, CHRI strongly urges you to seek a clear repudiation of his (Jammeh’s) statement and a strong re-affirmation of his commitment to the values of the Commonwealth and in the absence of this to strongly recommend that no invitation be extended to the President of Gambia to attend the upcoming CHOGM in Trinidad.
“In the absence of retraction from the Commonwealth and its member states, the Gambian head of state’s presence will send a clear signal to the international community...that its basic principles will not be rigorously defended by the Heads and therefore we strongly urge the actions suggested above.
“I am sure that as outgoing chair, you will want to leave the Commonwealth much stronger in conviction than ever before and will not want to countenance anything that challenges its fundamental political values, nor agree to welcome at its highest conclaves anyone who has so clearly repudiated them.”
Jammeh, 44, is notorious for presiding over a regime that has seen villagers jailed, gays made subject to state-sanctioned threats that their heads will be chopped off and citizens told that they can cure AIDS by using a special herbal formula devised by their leader.
Jammeh has also been accused of restricting freedom of the press. Harsh new press laws were followed by the unsolved killing of a reporter Deyda Hydara, who had been critical of them, in December 2004. Jammeh has denied that security agents were involved in the killing.
In April 2004, he called on journalists to obey his government “or go to hell”. In June 2005, he stated on radio and television that he has allowed “too much expression” in the country. A British couple resident in Gambia for 12 years was convicted of sedition for writing e-mails critical of the president to friends back home. The Gambian president came to power in 1994 in a coup and was later re-elected.
