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As Alhaji Jahateh fights for his Life; Samba Sowe retells ordeal with President Jammeh’s witch hunters

By EBRIMA G. SANKAREH Editor-In-Chief

Gambian President Jammeh in classic display of quackery

Alhaji Jahateh, 70, one of the witch-hunters’ first victims at Barra village in The Gambia’s North Bank Region, 7 sea-miles off the capital, Banjul is according to unassailable family sources, “fighting for his life.” This follows intense pummeling, torture and beatings by armed military men, presidential guards and the most feared green boys who accused Jahateh of possessing evil powers with the potential to wreak havoc on The Gambia. Jahateh was among the first batch of 83 villagers randomly arrested by President Jammeh’s witch doctors on Friday, February 6 and then whisked to Kololi village where they were forced to drink hallucinogenic concoctions to allegedly rid them of their evil intentions. This trail of terror meted to Jahateh and several local dignitaries have led to one dead at Barra. Reveals an angry family member, “the old man has been treated like a slave, stripped naked before his peers, pummeled, kicked and cursed by young military boys and then thrown behind a military truck like a criminal.” Once at Kololi Jahateh and colleagues were forced to drink potions and no sooner had they taken the contents than they started vomiting, defecating on themselves and then fell unconscious talking nonsense. According to family sources, ever since Alhaji Jahateh’s release from his captors, the successful businessman has been in bed fighting for his life. “I am going to die,” his distraught family quotes him as continuously reminding them. Today, he cannot use the restroom without assistance following a reported kidney problem he suffered after the lethal doses of the potions. Until his arrest, Alhaji Jahateh was an enterprising businessman who raised a good family. He is the father to police Superintendent Baba Jahateh and policewoman Ma Jahateh. He was honoured as one of the Village Elders by President Jammeh’s ruling APRC party and like most other victims among them Alhaji Tabora Manneh, erstwhile District Chief, Jahateh had used his resources and money in promoting President Jammeh’s candidature in the last elections.

About 20 miles off Barra in The Gambia’s Western Region, Samba Chargi Sowe, 57, retells his harrowing ordeal after he too was arrested and ferried to President Jammeh’s birthplace, Kanilai. Samba affectionately called Batchi, hails from Sare Demba village in the Niamina West Constituency-a Mile from Sare Gainako village the birthplace of our Associate Editor, Mathew K. Jallow. For the past two years Batchi has lived in the Cassamance as a cattle herdsman. On March 9, Samba had left the Cassamance and was headed to Wellingara, Tabokoto in the Western Region about 14miles from Banjul. Arriving at Sintet in the early morning hours to take a taxi, Samba was abducted by armed military men, accompanied by scary men dressed in red regalia with shovels, pickaxes and bows and arrows who told him that he was a witch and President Jammeh had requested that he be cleansed of evil. Together with hundreds of villagers, he was stripped naked and thrown behind a military truck while others were forced to board a bus enroute to Kanilai. Arriving at Kanilai in what is described as a scary and chaotic scene, men and women were forced to take hallucinogenic potions and minutes after the doses, hundreds began shouting, falling on the ground and yelling for help. Elderly men and women began to defecate on themselves and others began to urinate on their pants like infants. Later in the day, they were paraded to the village courtyard and forced to make confessions. Each victim was told to reveal how many human beings he had eaten using supernatural powers and then repent and ask for forgiveness from President Jammeh.Every captive told the witch doctors “I ate my mom and dad and I am asking President Jammeh to forgive me.” Samba and colleagues were detained at Kanilai from Monday March 9 to Thursday March 12, 2009 in a scene he aptly calls “hellish.” Once released Samba headed to Wellingara where he arrived terribly sick. Hours later he complained that he could not urinate. He was immediately rushed to the Brikama Health Center where he too was diagnosed with kidney complications and placed on straight catheterization. Today the 57-year-old innocent herdsman is on a regime of prescribed medications and his family in prayers for his painful recuperation. Talking to our surrogate reporter, Samba simply said, “why would the President instruct armed soldiers to arrest and humiliate innocent people like me? All my life I have been working hard to feed my family and I can tell you that I have never even killed a hen let alone eat human beings.”

The lamentable stories of Alhaji Jahateh and Samba Chargi Sowe are a glaring reflection of the agonizing trauma that President Yahya Jammeh’s rogue regime unleashes on poor innocent Gambians ever since he seized power on July 22, 1994. Hundreds have been tortured, hundreds have been liquidated, hundreds have disappeared, hundreds continue to languish in jails and unknown detention camps, thousands have fled into exile and hundreds continue to flee in the wake of the marauding witch hunters, yet the world remains silent as if The Gambia is not among the United Nations. The African Union headed by Mamar Ghaddafi is busy fighting for an African Union President while the ECOWAS is busy condemning coups and coup makers as Africans continue to be killed and tortured by rogue presidents who portent the very coups they condemn. Any political scientist or world leader who believes that The Gambia cannot slip into chaos as Liberia and Sierra Leone did must be a lunatic idiot who needs serious psychiatric evaluations as President Jammeh. The ferocity of President Jammeh’s callousness and the unprovoked brutal barbarity of his green boys is emblematic of a state on the brink of collapse and unless good men and women quickly step in to arrest this unbridled madness, thousands of Gambian refugees will start entering Senegal as several hundred villagers have since begun their trek. Today, as went to press, several hundred people in the peripheral villages across our southern border are poised to take off like their brethren have been fleeing wars and civil unrests across the continent and the African Union and ECOWAS known damn well that Yahya Jammeh is a brutal dictator who like Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, Emperor Bokassa, Idi Amin, Lansana Conte’ have no business ruling their peoples.

Lamentably, until Halifa Sallah’s high profile arrest and Amnesty International’s report, the world media had feigned total ignorance of the plight of the Gambian people. Contrary to Amnesty’s report, the scale of the arrest, torture and gruesomeness of Yahya Jammeh’s witch hunters is way beyond 1000 villagers. Before Sintet, the criminals had invaded Barra and Essau in the North Bank in early February and Jambur, Brufut, Makumbaya and Gunjur Berending in the Western region in a worrisome trail of terror and destruction. President Jammeh is a criminal who, like Sudanese President Bashir should be indicted and taken to The Hague. If ever a man deserves trial he is Yahya Abdul Azziz Jamus Junkung Jammeh the man who kills his fellow citizens and goes to bed laughing over it. This then, is our sorrowful situation!