Three survivors of Yahya Jammeh’s fraudulent and destructive HIV and AIDS “treatment programme” have Thursday filed a legal action in the High Court of The Gambia.
Fatou Jatta, Ousman Sowe, and Lamin “Moko” Ceesay are suing the former Gambian president. They are seeking financial damages for harm suffered and a declaration from the High Court that their human rights were violated.
The civil action, which marks the first time Yahya Jammeh is being sued in the Gambian courts for abuses he committed while he led the country, is supported by the international advocacy organization AIDS-Free World in partnership with the Gambian-based Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA). Combeh Gaye of the Gambian law firm Antouman A.B. Gaye & Co. is representing the three claimants.
In 2007, after announcing that he could cure AIDS with a secret herbal concoction, Jammeh conscripted Gambians living with HIV to reside in a state facility under the surveillance of armed guards and to submit to a “treatment” regimen. Many Gambians who entered Jammeh’s programme were members of HIV and AIDS support groups.
Jammeh ordered his “patients” to cease taking antiretroviral drugs, an action that posed grave threats to their health. Instead, he had them drink herbal concoctions that often made them violently ill. He also slathered his concoctions on the patients’ partially nude bodies while chanting prayers. Select sessions were broadcast on Gambian television without the consent of the victims, some of whom hadn’t yet informed friends or family of their HIV status.
Jammeh has no medical training. International health experts roundly condemned his “cure” as quackery.
The program ran from 2007 until 2016, when Jammeh lost a national election. After initially contesting the results of the election, Jammeh fled the country in January 2017. He is now living in exile in Equatorial Guinea.
According to a Gambian newspaper report from January 2016, the director of Jammeh’s treatment programme claimed that “over nine thousand patients” had been treated by the Gambian president, “the majority of whom … were HIV patients.” In April 2018, the same official, Dr. Tamsir Mbowe, vastly revised the figure during his testimony before a commission of inquiry examining his role in the “cure,” claiming just 311 HIV and AIDS patients were treated from 2007 through 2012. The precise number of deaths as a consequence of Jammeh’s criminal mistreatment remains difficult to determine.
“I believe it is my responsibility to hold Jammeh to account,” said Ousman Sowe, who is a former university lecturer. “I knew that one day the real story would be told.”
“My experience in the presidential treatment programme was a horror,” said Fatou Jatta, who was a member of the Santa Yalla Support Society when she was brought into Jammeh’s program. “I could have lost my life.”
Lamin Ceesay was the first person in The Gambia to publicly reveal his HIV status. As such, he feels it is his duty to set the record straight on Jammeh’s negligence. “Jammeh must pay for what he has done to us,” he said.
The Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa noted the historic nature of the filing. “This case will advance human rights protection in the Gambia, particularly with respect to people living with HIV, who are highly stigmatized and marginalized,” said Oludayo Fagbemi, Legal Officer with IHRDA. “We are happy to be supporting the claimants in this case.”
Combeh Gaye, the Banjul-based attorney who is representing the three claimants in the proceedings, said, “The claimants have suffered enough. We are confident that the court will find that Jammeh has caused them undue harm and will reward them appropriately.”
AIDS-Free World’s Legal Research and Policy Associate, Sarah Bosha, called Jammeh’s brutal hoax the most egregious premeditated assault on people living with HIV and AIDS in the history of the global AIDS crisis. “There is no cure for AIDS. When an individual of great power claimed otherwise, human health was jeopardized, lives were cut short, and a deadly epidemic was prolonged—all in the service of the insatiable ego of Yahya Jammeh, one of the great villains of modern times.”
Saramba Kandeh, AIDS-Free World’s Legal and Gender Associate, hopes that Jammeh’s life story will end with a powerful warning. “We believe this legal action will be a signal to the world that regardless of how rich or powerful they may be, malicious leaders who violate human rights can and will be held accountable,” she said.
Since March 2017, AIDS-Free World, IHRDA, and attorney Combeh Gaye have been working together to help survivors of Jammeh’s fraudulent “cure” pursue justice.
Yaya Jammeh, will be extradited the amount of crimes he committed is clearly evidence. He was one of the foolish leader who thought he could rule for billion years.
Babu Soli
Why do you omit the biggest achievement of Yahya Jammeh in your daily praise singing of the despot? Is curing people of aids and asthma as he claimed not an achievement? Yahya Jammeh is a joker and Babu Soli the biggest educated joke to have called Gambia home, for whitewashing the horrible things our people had to endured in the hands of Yahya Jammeh and his accomplishes. A man who enjoyed inflicting pain, suffering, humiliation on the defenseless for 22 long miserable years will never enjoy a quiet and happy retirement. His horrors on the innocence will forever haunt him till eternity.
Fatou Bensouda, who is Gambian should now make her position known concerning jurisdiction in this particular act. The ICC is empowered to prosecute case of crimes against humanity. The targeting of a group for deliberate barbaric act to inflict pain and cause harm is considered a crime against humanity.
BABU SOLO,
“Thinking my way is a task far above your capability”.
You see what flimsy thoughts you’ve got! LOL. Who is Babu Soli? You don’t know, have never seen me and yet you so foolishly underrate Babu’s capability. Tell me how much you know and I’ll tell you how little you know.
Go and read the Hadith about Musa and Qadr. I’ll advise you to be humble with what you think you “know”.
You live to LIE SOLO. I bet you. When did you raise your voice about the brutal killing and mass burial of our innocent citizens in 1981? Don’t you know that the explanation given to invade the Gambia by the Senegalese forces was a LIE? Why won’t you try to unearth the truth about that gruesome episode in our history? Don’t emphasize your honourability to me, because you are not.
The 1981 episode saw the most heartless act of brutality on our people. And its aftermath were even worst with mass arrests of innocent farmers, caging, sexual abuses and tortures by the invading Senegalese forces. Go back to history and find out. Or you are just a BIASED and HEARTLESS fellow.
Of course lots of Gambians did raised a voice against the culpability of a heavy-handed, half-brain, half-educated and a loudmouthed dumbo who thinks he knows something. He was an inferiorly complexed type who thinks a democratic process was up for grabs and so, a grab on that democratic process was going to uplift his social, moral and financial statuses. The creature, in the early morning of Thursday, July 30, with his band of accomplices, have indulged in the cold blooded shooting and murder of some innocent young police officers in order to break their way into the country’s security services’ only only armoury. The creature and his band looted automatic rifles and ammo then stashed their loots in the back of land rover pickups. They rolled along lanes in neighbourhoods in the GBA dashing the lethal weapons in the hands of innocent youths as young as 17yrs. Most of those youths have killed a colleague with a misfire of the weapon given to them, settle a personal score with the weapon or bloodily looted with it. There were already enough dead bodies, dying youths and men, wailing mothers and families even before the world outside even knew what was going on in the Gambia. The creature I’m talking about here is Kukoi.
That’s all history and its there for historians to probe, study and narrate. Meanwhile, there’s this “little” matter of a deceitful and bogus claim of HIV/AIDS treatment before the High Court. What have you to say about it, bro Babu Soli?
Babu Soli
If you are a truthful religious scholar as you tend to brag about Hadith this and Hadith that, why not throw some truthful light into Jammeh’s treatment sessions of aid sufferers on national television. Can he honestly cure aids, or that is just one of his lies and manipulations used to boost his killer ego?
These victims must not forget to attach the so called Dr Tamsir Mbow, who is said to be a qualified medical practitioner who participated in “Professor ” Jammeh’s bogus treatment. He is the real culprit, and should be barred by the Gambia Medical Council from practising medicine in the Gambia.
He is even alleged to have assisted Jammeh’s murder of the death row prisoners by administering lethal injection to the prisoners, or giving them sedative to avoid commotion during their gruesome murder.
Don’t mind Babu Soli and his rants about events of 1981, which he does not understand, because every reasonable person present during those events know Gambia was saved from disintegration and catastrophe.
Babu SOLO,
I’m not a religious scholar but a devout religious practitioner. I read the Holy Qu’ran, The Hadith, follow my daily prayers and fast, try as much as possible to put all my faith in The Almighty Allah (SWT). PERIOD.
I was advising you to keep the “much” you know to yourself least you are shown the “little” you know, by someone. Be humble with your knowledge, that’s all.
Those who sued President Jammeh for bogus treatment are dishonest, trying to get money the easy way with their corrupt lawyer, as most of our Gambian lawyers are corrupt, selfish and insincerely to clients. Starting from Ousainou Darbo who owes the Gambian people over D450,000 for tax evasion.
Like any other doctor, maybe our learned Dr Isatou Sarr could better affirm that, there could be failures/errors in diagnostic/treament periods. That does not at most disqualify a doctor from the professional acumen already acquired.
We were told that most of President Jammeh’s patients were later sent for final diagnosis to clinics in Senegal. Those clinics never refuted the positive results of his treatments. So, who is TELLING LIES here?
Soli Babu or whatever your name is,
Don’t tell LIES here. Who doesn’t know anything about the 1981 Kukoi Samba Sanyang rebellion? I have never supported Kukoi which most on-line readers fail to discern from my numerous postings since 2005. Neither did I support the sending of foreign invading troops to quell an internal rebellion. They came to maim, invade, destroy, kill, rob, torture, sexually abuse our women with the ulterior intention of annexing our tiny country. The last obejective failed anyway but all others succeeded.
My point is, while Ex-President Jawara believed in his love for his country, while he believed there were loyal forces subverting the intentions of the rebels, what was his desire in signing a truce with Ex-President Diouf to kill our people “until there is no soul left” according to his own words over Radio Senegal?
It’s a LIE that the country was disintegrating. The aftermath of the rebellion brought more disintegration as Senegal pushed her agenda to colonize us. Jawara lavishly spent our meagre resources, paid millions of dalasis for the upkeep of the invading forces and left the country in bankruptcy , food shortage and hardship.