By Lt. Colonel Samsudeen Sarr
On it’s Monday 6th. August issue, The Point Newspaper carried a lead on the visit to The Gambia of Prince Yormie Johnson; Rebel Warlord turned Senior Senator of Nimba County, Liberia. Johnson who was on a business tour to lure potential investors into Liberia flatly lied to The Point Newspaper when he told the paper’s Momodou Justice Darboe at Johnson’s hotel room at the Kairaba Beach Hotel that: “I could recall meeting the Gambian leader in Liberia when he led a contingent of soldiers and officers from Gambia to help keep and build the peace in Liberia in the early 90’s. So I thank God to be alive today and to be a Senator in my country and also my brother, Alhaji Dr. Yahya, to be the leader of this great country today. I brought along a letter for him and hope it would be delivered to him by…he enthused.”
The Gambia Echo’s Editor- in- Chief caught this lie and conscious of the distortion we contacted Lt. Colonel Samsudeen Sarr to verify if in fact, Yahya Jammeh has ever been to Liberia. Below is the Colonel’s riveting testimony.
Lt. Col. Sheriff Samsudeen Sarr
I was tempted into commenting on the subject of Prince Yormie Johnson’s recent visit to The Gambia and the erroneous statements he had officially uttered there because of their related relevance to a chapter in my book-Coup D’etat By The Gambia National Army. Ironically, while his fellow warlord and co-conspirator Charles Taylor now sits in an international criminal jail in The Hague for crimes against their own people, Prince has emerged from the gutters of hell as a Liberian Senior Senator in Nimba County.
Sam Sarr's Book on left side of photo
If the Liberian people could ignore the fact that this monster had a direct hand in the planning and systematic destruction of their country in a manner unprecedented in recent history, then African leaders must not be that naïve to forget that it was the same Prince Johnson who in September 1990 stormed the ECOMOG headquarters in Monrovia and brutally supervised the massacre of over eighty guards escorting Samuel Doe to meet General Quinoa, the Ghanaian Contingent Commander. Incidentally, Doe was at the headquarters on the Contingent Commander’s invitation that many historians have now conclusively evaluated as a setup that unfairly lured the Liberian President into that death trap.
Doe's piece by piece gruesome execution by Johnson
Then after capturing and taking Doe away, leaving ECOMOG to clean the mess of his bloody trail, the rebel leader of the so-called Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) ruthlessly shot a video of his gang of maniacs cutting the man into pieces while he pleaded for mercy. In other words, Prince Johnson had shown the whole world that he could flout Covenants of international law against torture especially on defenseless foes captured in the theatre of battle. If legal human rights gurus, in or outside Liberia, are obsessed with punishing notorious international criminals such as Taylor, however long the period of pursuing them may take, then I am afraid neglecting the case of Prince Johnson or forgiving this demon wouldn’t help their crusade in the future. The Liberian Senator by all evidence associated with his brutal past doubtlessly; qualify him for an adjacent or opposite cell in The Hague right where Taylor is today paying for his crimes.
Ex-President of Liberia faces justice for crimes committed
It reminds me of the case of Kukoi Samba Sanyang and the 1996 Farafenni attack that clearly showed that he organized and used his blind followers into badly executing that operation. However, years later when Kukoi surfaced in The Gambia, the Jammeh government gave him a VIP treatment disregarding every role he had played in the attack that killed eight young Gambian soldiers. But when Ablie Sonko the de facto number two man of the mercenary organization made the mistake of coming back to The Gambia, the government arrested him for the same crime and slammed him with charges aimed at lynching him sooner or later. The story of that controversial attack was also exhaustively covered in my book. Kukoi, I believe, should have been the sole person held responsible for that attack.
Anyway, on Prince Johnson’s topic, the man was a principal actor in the Liberian carnage that cost its people 200,000 lives and displaced over 2,000,000 in a population of 6,000,000. And around the time Doe was tortured to death, Johnson was documented to have personally executed a Liberian relief worker he had accused of profiteering from rice sales, calling him a “traitor”. It is further documented in that incident that after shooting the man and he crumpled on the ground, he briefly lifted his head and asked “Why, Why?” before the butcher finished him off with a bullet in the head.
My lingering dilemma therefore is how such a devil could avoid the radar of international criminal hunters and eventually end up being elevated to the position of Senior Senator in the very country he had helped in destroying back into a stone-age era. The Liberians must have been suffering from a strange ailment to let this guy back into their social and political panorama.
That may be left alone to the Liberians to ponder, but for Africa and specifically The Gambia in this case, it is an absolute shame to welcome Prince Johnson at home where even as a statesman his character highlights more flaws than righteousness.
I don’t think it was a mere mistaken identity when he was quoted in the Point Newspaper-local Gambian paper-praising President Yaya Jammeh who was never in Liberia at the time on reference, for the great role Jammeh played in the ECOMOG peacekeeping around 1990. Jammeh as a matter of fact, like Singhateh and Sabally had never taken part in ECOMOG and I believe Prince Johnson was perfectly aware of that. At the time in question, the following Gambian officers were the warriors in the trenches whose recollection of the nasty role of Prince Johnson would not have favored the man’s presence in The Gambia: Col. Modou Gaye, Major Maba Jobe, Major Omar Faye, Captain James Johnson, Captain Dennis Coker, Captain Pa Modou Ann, Captain Modou Bojang and Captain Ebrima Sora Kambi. None of these men by character or looks resembled anything comparable to President Yaya Jammeh. And to think that a whole State Senator could go on an international tour and not knowing the very basic of the people he was going to meet told a lot about what the Liberian Senator is.
Perhaps, being the conman he had been known for, he thought sweet-talking his way through lies and deceit as a diplomatic strategy for global acceptance was his best chance of legitimizing his illegal legacy.
The Point reporter however made it clear that Jammeh really never met Prince Johnson but accepted a letter delivered by the former warlord. What an embarrassment it would have been if the two had met with Johnson’s inaccurate profile of the Gambian President.
Was Johnson going to apologize for talking about someone else he had seen in Liberia seventeen years ago entirely different from Jammeh? Or on the same argument, was Jammeh going to tell the warlord that the person he was talking about was not him but some other Gambian military officer?
In whatever way we may wish to guess a reaction on that hypothetical scenario, the fact remains as a state duty to correct the misinformation right there and then before Johnson left back for Liberia. Otherwise the Jammeh government would be guilty of trying to steal a ride of pride that he was not entitled to but the deserving owners, THE GAMBIAN ECOMOG WARRIORS. In sum, President Yahya Jammeh never went to Liberia throughout the crisis and for anyone to suggest that Jammeh is a Liberian war veteran he needs some help.
Editor’s Note: As journalists, commentators and writers we are duty-bound to report accurately and verify statements that may distort our history books. It is a tragic anachronism on the part of Senator Johnson to advertently or otherwise credit Yahya Jammeh as a war hero when the man has never even competed in the shooting trophies that were held in The Gambia. The only war Yahya Jammeh has ever been to is the ravaging war against his own people, the Gambians: killing journalists, school children, lawyers, and his own comrades in the army. Please for God sake tell our children the truth!