RSF says Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh, unpredictable, violent & deranged dictator
By Ebrima G. Sankareh
The Paris-based press freedom watchdog, Reporters Without Borders mostly known by its acronym-RSF, has in an unprecedented press release, characterized Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh’s shameful behaviour as, “unpredictable, violent and deranged dictator.” As the world celebrates World Press Freedom Day, Monday May 3, Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh, has been added to the world’s most notorious, most violent and most vicious leaders who have either killed, disappeared, tortured or jailed journalists. Below is the most withering indictment of the Jammeh regime from the RSF since the gruesome assassination of journalist, Deyda Hydara in December, 2004 and the chilling disappearance of journalist, Chief Ebrima Manneh in 2006:
Yahya Jammeh is violent, lunatic idiot
Reporters without Borders
(http://www.rsf.org)
Press Release
May 3, 2010
GAMBIA - President Yahya Jammeh is one of the forty predators of press freedom
A self-proclaimed healer who says he has found cures to AIDS, obesity and erectile dysfunction, Yahya Jammeh has all the qualities of an unpredictable, violent and deranged dictator. He has vowed to cut off the heads of all homosexuals in order to clean up Gambian society. And he has declared himself ready to kill anyone trying to destabilise the country, above all human rights activists and other trouble-makers. “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,” he threatened in a September 2009 televised address. “We are ready to kill saboteurs.” Some think the dictator is steadily succumbing to paranoia, as the jailing of 10 of his aides for an alleged coup attempt seemed to suggest.
The unsolved murder of Deyda Hydara, AFP correspondent and editor of the tri-weekly The Point, who was shot dead on a street in 2004, continues to fuel tension between the regime and the independent media. The Gambia Press Union dared to address an open letter to the president in 2009 urging him to recognise the government’s involvement in this murder. The response? Six journalists got two-year jail sentences on defamation and sedition charges. And were pardoned after a month in prison, because Jammeh is sometimes capable of leniency. He usually does not bother with charges when locking up journalists. Chief Ebrima Manneh, a reporter for the Daily Observer, was arrested without charge in 2006 and then disappeared. He probably died in prison in 2008.
INTERNATIONAL - Press Freedom Day
Forty predators of press freedom
The list of Predators of Press Freedom, released each year on 3 May, World Press Freedom Day, has 40 names this year – 40 politicians, government officials, religious leaders, militias and criminal organisations that cannot stand the press, treat it as an enemy and directly attack journalists. They are powerful, dangerous, violent and above the law.
Many of them were already on last year’s list. In Latin America, there is no change in the four major sources of threats and violence against journalists: drug traffickers, the Cuban dictatorship, FARC and paramilitary groups. Africa has also seen few changes. But power relationships have been evolving in the Middle East and Asia.
Several predators have been dropped from the list, as in Somalia, where intelligence chief Mohamed Warsame Darwish, the instigator of heavy-handed raids, arbitrary arrests and, in some cases, deliberate shooting on the country’s few remaining journalists, was dismissed in December 2008. In Nigeria, the State Security Service has been reined in while the Nigeria Police Force, led by Ogbonna Onovo, has emerged as the leading source of abuses against the press. The poorly-training police are encouraged to use violence against journalists so that no one is there to witness their operations.
In Iraq, journalists who do their job face real dangers from the conflicts that keep erupting but the situation is slowly improving and the violence is affecting the general population more than journalists in particular. That is why Reporters Without Borders has withdrawn Islamist groups from the ranks of the predators.
But, a little to the south, in the Persian Gulf, Yemeni President Ali Abdulah Saleh has been added to the list. Yemen’s authorities have become much more repressive in the past year, creating a special court for press offences, harassing newspapers and prosecuting a dozen journalists in an attempt to limit coverage of dirty wars being waged in the north and south of the country.
It was hard not to put the Philippines’ private militias top of the list after the local governor’s thugs massacred around 50 people, including 30 journalists, in Maguindanao province on 23 November 2009. The ensuing convoluted judicial proceedings betray a lack of political will to try those responsible, whose political support is too important for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Impunity is prevailing yet again.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar, whose influence extends to Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, has joined the list because the holy war he is waging is also directed at the press. In his war to control media coverage, around 40 attacks were directly targeted at journalists and news media in 2009.
Reporters Without Borders met Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, the list’s other new entrant, in March 2009. No one should be fooled by his confident pretence of tolerance and a benign view of press freedom. Two outspoken critics of Russia’s handling of the “Chechen issue,” Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova, were both gunned down – Politkovskaya in Moscow in October 2006 and Estemirova in Grozny in July 2009. Both these murders had Kadyrov’s prints on them, as have many others that have taken place under the regime of terror he has imposed in Chechnya.
The three national leaders Kim Jong-il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Muammar Gaddafi illustrate the new Reporters Without Borders campaign ad about the Predators of Press Freedom. The ad was conceived by the Saatchi & Saatchi agency and was designed by artists Stephen J Shanabrook and Veronika Georgieva.