By Lt. Colonel Sheriff Samsudeen Sarr Rtd., Commander Gambia National Army
My decision to write this piece was made out of a compulsive obligation to first commend Mr. Foday Njie of Kansas for his special courage to step forward out of the silent or indifferent masses and cried foul in the face of intellectual dishonesty crafted by our own kind and to secondly share with him a little of the specifics and relevant facts in my diary surrounding some events of the July 22nd coup d’tat. I could assure Mr. Njie that out there among what I referred to as the silent or indifferent masses are thousands of Gambians who had in one way or the other been directly victimized or were live witnesses to Sana Sabally’s insane rampage but chose never to ever say a word about it. When I first challenged Sabally on his contention to blame others for his misfortunes in the very government he had helped to create, I tried to be cautious and rather economical in calling specific names of his victims, leaving that to the prerogative of the affected individuals to come out, if they could, and say “yes I was one of them” or “Yes I was a witness to Sabally doing that”. It is however interesting to only see two Gambian soldiers, Binneh Minteh and Ebrima Chongan doing exactly what I anticipated from many more sufferers as if Sabally’s activities were exclusively confined within the walls of our military barracks and to only those two officers. Mr. Mathew Jallow’s weak attempt to openly hoodwink some gullible readers into recasting Sana Sabally’s legacy as that of a patriotic Gambian leader regardless of what we clearly know about this terrorist, should have been enough an insult to every honest person to break the silence of those who had experienced those dark days in the same way Chongan and Minteh did; or at least bring out more of the likes of Mr. Foday Njie whose demonstrated virtue in standing up to challenge the misrepresented facts win him a special place in my heart.
And because of you Mr. Njie, I will volunteer this much of the coup history with you, particularly what we did and knew as soldiers before the coup; it was far-off from those baseless allegations of senior officers harassing taxi drivers at Denton Bridge for money or abusing our positions. There is a Wollof maxim and perhaps worded differently in other Gambian or African languages but with similar wisdom that in effect warns people to be mindful of rascals who may not tell the truth but in essence could succeed in causing skepticism in the minds of true believers. Those familiar with the GNA before the coup clearly knew that soldiers of the lowest ranks to the highest could not under normal circumstances perform any police duties including of course, traffic control or issuing driver’s licenses.
But with the sense of the rascal and his lethal dishonesty, Mr. Jallow was hell bent in portraying us as corrupt senior officers in violation of the ethics of the military establishment that warranted Sabally to: arrest, torture and murder some of us. I wish he could for once take the courage and go back to Sabally and ask him why he was so crazy and stop trying to defend the indefensible.
Anyway Mr. Njie I want to put it to you that on July 22nd 1994, the GNA was under the total command and control of Nigerian Generals and Colonels who for two years were “satisfactorily” doing everything they were told to do in the contract they had signed with the PPP government. None of us, the Gambian officers had a say on what they wanted to do, why or how; and attempts from us to warn the accessible government authorities over the shortcomings of those titanic Nigerian commanders were discouraged with embarrassing repercussions. With a Nigerian National Security Adviser at the State House, only General Dada, Colonel Owonobi, Colonel Akoji and the other Nigerian colonels could make the government authorities listen to what must be done on national security in the country. We were mere captains who whether you know much about standard military hierarchy or not meant little in the presence of those seasoned heavyweights. It’s therefore amazing that ill-informed castigators inclined to discredit us, the Gambian officers, would often elude the Nigerian factor in the blame game.
Anyway, let me in the simplest way try to put the Nigerian command influence over the GNA in its most basic perspective. They were in charge of telling us what to do on daily basis; they appointed us for the duties we performed even if we were apprehensive about their decisions; they paid us our salaries and allowances; they promoted and demoted us; they decided where we should be trained locally and internationally; they prepared the national security doctrine, the annual training program and supervise all our activities in the way it suited their objectives; in a nut shell, the lifelines of our careers were directly wired to their seats. Why Gambians don’t still want to know about how the young officers snatched the GNA command apparatus from the Nigerians and want to blame some of us for it beats my imagination. It simply leaves me with the conclusion that these people prefer dogmatic certainty to the scholarly impulse of searching for the truth.
But I want to be honest here and add that although the Nigerian command presence was an underlying factor in what brought about the takeover, I could also strongly argue that the unilateral withdrawal of the Senegalese military forces from the Sene-Gambia Confederation Army in September 1989 paved the first advantageous terrain for a successful coup d’tat.
There were two major boomeranging effects to both Senegal and The Gambia for allowing their emotions to override their sense of judgment by naively letting the Confederation end in the unceremonious way it did. For Senegal, it was the rapid escalation of the Cassamance separatist insurgency beyond the manageable level they had kept it under control for six years. But for The Gambia it was the foundation of the PPP government undercut by a security vulnerability that was merely waiting for time-five years exactly-and the right agitators to initiate the operation. I could recall how the GNA Commander at Yundum Barracks shrugged off the unexpected Senegalese withdrawal as if it had meant nothing important to the country’s security problems; but for those who could dot the I’s and cut the T’s the unfortunate ramifications were glaring. It’s however a complex story with details too long for an on-line newspaper.
All I have to say in my conclusion is to urge the silent or indifferent masses, I know you are there, especially those outside The Gambia with the experience and knowledge to start getting involved when controversial topics are discussed but spun by disingenuous elements to confuse the readers or distort the facts.
I must however once again thank Mr. Foday Njie for not just saying it but also demonstrating that you cannot be underestimated as an on-line newspaper reader.