(JollofNews) – Gambians who experienced the horrors, the realities and the struggles of our people to regain our freedom and democratic institutions during Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship are morally obliged to tell the truths to expose the saddest and scariest human rights and economic crimes of his regime.
Nothing can change history. Nothing can change the truth. Yahya Jammeh is no hero. He is not a great man, not a human man. He is a machine; a money machine; stripped by his overwhelming passion of greed of every quality which makes a man unworthy of a citizen. He has not made good. He cannot make good. It is not him. He has nothing the aspiring world needs.
On the contrary, that for which he does stand is a menace, to our free development not only or chiefly, our free
development in human rights, but vastly more important, our free development in citizenship and morals.
There is no darker period in our recent history than the dictatorship era of Yahya Jammeh. There is hardly any Gambian family that was left untouched by death and grief during the Yahya’s dictatorship. To this day, we carry with us stories of men killed in incommunicado, women raped in detention centers, and children left orphaned by countless human rights violations across the country and all throughout the tenure of Yahya Jammeh.
Today, the man who set the wheels of dictatorship in motion is in exile in Equatorial Guinea as a farmer. This is a man who buried us in debt and left us mourning our dead as he stole from the country’s coffers and pillaged our nation for more than 20 years.
Our history is replete with stories of how dictatorship has changed the lives of our people. To deny that these atrocities happened and to forget the suffering it has caused is to betray our history as people who fought for freedom from the dark days of dictatorship. Yahya Jammeh is inconsolable and unforgivable.
To be continued.
By Alagi Yorro Jallow
The author is founder and former managing editor of The Independent, the Gambia’s only private newspaper before it was banned by the government in 2005. He was a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, a 2007 Nieman fellow and is the author of Delayed Democracy: How Press Freedom Collapsed in Gambia published in 2013.
This is more like the Yorro we have come to know and respect; Some Gambian’s have great difficulty in facing the God’s Honest truth about the last 22 years.
Reminiscent of the enemies of The Jews in denial of the holocaust, in the Nazi death camps. Six million murdered with no exception for age, gender or faith. Children torn from there Mothers
Wives torn from there Husbands, Mercy unforgiving.
“I was just taking orders” was never an excuse for those who killed. We hung them anyway.
Healing will take time as will reconciliation of the whole nation. As the new Government search’s tirelessly for innocent bodies in lonely unmarked muddy graves. We must come to terms with the shocking and terrible history carried out by Gambian’s upon defenceless Brothers and Sisters;
We must never forget, but also we must be determined to carry on with the delayed economic and social progress that is every Gambian’s right.
God keep safe all those who never made it through the storm to see this day’s warming sun.
With Respect.
We will remember them/
After all these atrocities committed by Jammeh on Gambians, we still have his enablers roaming the streets of the Gambia. That makes one wonder should we keep on blaming Jammeh or should we start uprooting his supporters or accomplice in these gruesome acts inflicted on fellow Gambians for far too long. Any Gambian who worked closely with Jammeh or even opened his mouth to support Jammeh, should be condemned and even brought to justice. The media should start flushing out all enablers like Isatou Njie Saidy, Bala Jahumpa, Yankuba colley and many others. It is only then the Gambia would be considered as liberated. These people have no conscience and if anything are worst than Jammeh himself. I still wonder how could they even roam the streets after seeing the atrocities been revealed