Astounding, mind-numbing international drug bust puts Gambia on spotlight

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By Mathew K Jallow, Associate Editor

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The humidity and the sweltering heat of early June was enough to numb one’s brain. But, above the skies of Kombo Brikama, agile swallows and clumsy vultures flew ceaselessly back and forth, and in anticipatory enthusiasm, circled overhead in search of prey below. And in the distance, the city of Brikama, the administrative capital of Kombo Brikama, and the San Francisco of The Gambia, renowned for its history as a progressive, revolutionary town, it was business as usual. The not-so-new open market and car park area was crowded, and store fronts were populated by fraternities of loud, idle men patronizing China’s lucrative green-tea market and Cuba’s sugar industry. And in the narrow streets and alley ways, sly and sleek street vendors aggressively hawked their wares to the scattering of tourists who dared brave the circumstances, against the warning of their tour operators. Amidst this chaos and bustle, this social amnesia, and political complacency, the city of Brikama was alive with strange optimism, yet it was not ready for the rude and raw awakening about to consume it, stain its image, and frame its good name in a negative light in perpetuity. Perhaps, no one in Brikara was ready for the nuclear-active news that was about to circumnavigate the globe from its backyard; a village few knew about, much less ever visited. It was trouble in Bonto; and big trouble for a part of Brikama Kombo’s little corner of paradise. Now, Bonto will go down in history as the innocent village with the big menace; and a name that, henceforth, will be synonymous with the world’s deadliest scourges; trafificking of cocaine drugs.

In the small, sleepy farming community of Bonto village, ten miles south of the regional capital Brikama, villagers walked gingerly in all directions towards the patches of farm land that help sustain their families, oblivious of what was about to hit their quite community. And in one desperate instance, as if in a movie, drug agents, military, and security forces descended on Bonto, to invade it space and agitate it villagers into a situation they neither knew anything about, nor understood. As usual, the day began uneventfully, but in one instance, Bonto lost its innocence to become notorious in the drug world as the site of one of the largest drug busts in history. And in the process, The Gambia cemented its reputation as a hub for the transshipment of cocaine drugs, but also as a contributor in the destruction of lives in the U.S and Europe, where drugs fuel violence, destroy the fabric of society, and severely paralyze the productive bases of nations where the menace is endemic. The qualification of Bonto village as an illicit drug haven did not arise by the villagers’ doing, yet it has become its undoing and its misery, for which all Gambians will atone to the rest of the world. As villagers of Bonto, as residents of Kombo Brikara administrative area, and as Gambians, we bear no culpability for the moral maligning and social disfiguration of Bonto village’s reverent image, but we now share guilt and the shame that our country has actively participated in the distribution and sales of the drugs that are ruining lives and societies all around the world.

Bonto village, tucked away amidst the quite solitude of the Kombo Brikama savanna, has made history for all the wrong reasons. But, it is the political implications; the nexus between Yahya Jammeh and his regime, and global drug trade and distribution, involving the South America's notorious drug syndicates that is compelling and demanding the international attention it deserves. The long cozy relationship between Yahya Jammeh and the murky and dangerous world of weapons and drug trafficking, has been known and reported extensively by Gambia’s overseas on-line media for years. But, the sheer amount of drugs recovered from Bonto village, defies the imagination. Rarely, if ever, had drugs with a street value of $1bn. been discovered in the U.S.’s forty year drug war history. This heart-stopping volume and its street value, far exceeds Gambia's $782 million annual GDP in 2009. But, the perseverance of Gambia’s on-line media reportage on the issues of drugs in our country, drug consumption by Gambian youth, and their distribution around the world, has captured the insidious nature of the global drug trade and pervasive social degradation Yahya Jammeh has enabled, encouraged, profited from, and protected over all these years. But, as is customary, Jammeh’s scapegoats, identified by investigations orchestrated by him, will be scarified for the inordinate behavior fostered by his decade long drug dealing. But, the obscene and jaw dropping amount of cocaine that was recovered in Bonto last week, is a small part of the drugs that have transited to other parts of the world from The Gambia over the past decade. And until last week, Yahya Jammeh had been the drug kingpin conniving with Guinea Bissau’s notorious drug lords, Air Force Chief of Staff, Ibrahim Papa Camara, and Navy Chief of Staff, Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, both of who helped bring a huge shipment of cocaine to Guinea from Venezuela in 2008. Navy Chief of Staff Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, was forced into political exile following a coup attempt in Guinea-Bissau, and took refuge in The Gambia under the protection of his accomplice in the drug trade, Yahya Jammeh, until his recent return to Guinea-Bissau in a canoe, disguised as a fisherman. In the same vein, a ship laden with cocaine, but marked “Fertilizer” for the Dept. of Agriculture, Gambia, was apprehended in the high seas between Mauritania and Senegal. The totallity of what is happening in Guinea-Bissau, in terms of the Transatlantic drug trade, prompted The U.S Treasury Department to ban American citizens from doing business there. Will The Gambia be next? The Bonto debacle has brought The Gambia close to the edge of being pronounced a pariah nation not only by the west, but by the United Nations. And if this happens, it is because we deserve it. For Yahya Jammeh has made sure of that.