Why Is ECOWAS Silent About Jammeh’s Brutality And Repression?

imagesWe vividly recall how Samuel Doe drove Liberia into civil war with his corrupt economic actions and, worse, the indiscriminate killings by his death squads marauding everywhere, exterminating innocent men, women and children. Even after the Lutheran Church massacre on July 29, 1990, when over 600 people seeking refuge there were hacked to death, masterminded by Doe himself, ECOWAS said and did nothing. Nothing until a Liberian journalist who during a brief exile with his family in Accra, Ghana, called his friend, British Ambassador in Banjul, Alec Ibbot, and asked, “Ambassador, have you heard the news?”

Yes, Kenneth. Dreadful, isn’t it?”

The journalist then appealed to him to contact his Western diplomatic colleagues and go and see President Dawda K. Jawara and tell him to SAY something and DO something. For at that point, July 30, not a single African leader had said a word about the Lutheran church massacre in Monrovia.

Ambassador Ibbot and his Western diplomatic colleagues immediately contacted Foreign Minister Omar Sey, who relayed their request to the President. Jawara was then Chair of the six-member ECOWAS Mediation Committee—The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Togo. He immediately convened an urgent meeting of the Committee on August 6-7, 1990. It was during that meeting that the decision was made to send ECOMOG, an ECOWAS peace-keeping contingent, to Liberia.

Liberia Observer

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One Comment

  1. Take solace dear Mr. Editor for what goes around comes around. There is not a single honorable and fair minded Senegambian and civilize beings who are not disgusted about Yaya Jammeh’s heartless and unwarranted killings. Something is brewing and can come from any quarter and that ACTION will take Jammeh in the dustbin of history of the Gambia.
    As the popular saying goes “that which hurts the eye, the eye will not see”
    As alert as Jammeh is, what is coming will take him by SURPRISE.
    Sir Dawda was a human being who knew Allah who gives live is the ONLY one who deserves to take life. Yaya Jammeh knows he cannot bring anything to live but prefers to be a bloody hypocrite that kills life that he did not create.
    How dreadful the day Allah ask him why he destroyed that sacred soul which he has not created and take pleasure in ending it.? That day Jammeh will know he is NOTHING and Allah is EVERYTHING.