President Sall Must Stop Appeasing Tyranny and Speak Up!
According to a Saturday 4th June publication of the Senegalese newspaper, the “Enquête,”a former member of the Jammeh’s presidential guard, Musa Sarr, narrowly escaped being abducted by agents of the Gambian secrete service to be taken across the border to face torture and eventual killing. The incident was said to have happened in Mbour, a Senegalese coastal city, closed to the capital city of Dakar. The three Gambian agents on Thursday 2nd June 2016 were accompanied by a Senegalese accomplice named Ousmane Diop who presented himself as an officer of the Senegalese Interior Ministry. All these, according to the Senegalese newspaper. According to other sources who communicated to this Kaironews, the men, “most likely were on the verge of drugging Sarr before driving him across the border to the Gambia.” But after Sarr realized this, according to the “Enquête” newspaper, he managed to fling himself through a window of the Mbour apartment and escaped sustaining injuries that made him to be admitted at the Principal Hospital in Dakar to where he was rushed in an ambulance. Musa Sarr later told reporters that that he had no doubt the agent’s had been directed by the blood-thirsty Gambian autocrat, Yahya Jammeh. Saturday’s article displayed a photograph of Sarr.
Two days later the “Enquête” carried another article titled, “ Why Jammeh Wants Me Killed,” in which he explained that he was a cousin of Manlafi Corr, who together with the murdered Daba Marena, were summarily executed shortly after the March 2006 coup attempt. After this murder of the five security officers government issued a press release claiming that the five men had escaped while being transported to the provincial prison of Jang Jangbureh. Sarr said that he, like many other soldiers had believed the official story until it came to be leaked out that the five men were in fact killed by Jammeh’ murder-squad led by one soldier, Sana Manjang. Sarr was quoted saying, “I had believed the official version until the day of members of the murder-squad who executed that order, with Sana Manjang as their head, proudly boasted before me of the execution, without knowing that I was related to one of the victims.”
Musa Sarr became so distressed by this information that he could not be silent about it and had to inform his fellow soldiers about what really happened. He told the paper, “I told this to anyone who would listen in the barracks because many soldiers also believed that they died by accident. There and then I clearly become a threat.” This soon spread around the military camp and he was singled out for physical elimination. The thirty-four year old ex-soldier, now living in exile in Mbour, in Senegal told the paper in an exclusive interview that was published on Monday 6th June. He went on, “..And it is from there that the first attempt to do away with me, which took place in 2010.”
“I was driving a Jeep with two other people aboard when strong light dazzled my eyes. I just heard a big boom! Apparently we hit a tractor, out on the road. Anyway, this is what was reported in the Gambian press.I just know that I was thrown out, and when I saw men in fatigues fussing around the vehicle, I immediately understood that it was the soldiers paid to finish us. The other two occupants were killed by the violence of the shock.”
“I ran up to Faraba Diouloulou in Casamance. It was July 7th, 2010. A week later, I managed to reach Guédiawaye. And since it was necessary to find work, and I’m not a sedentary, I went to the camp Ngekhokh. I worked as a laborer. It is we who have even built the water plant ” Mana ”. On occasion, I happened to drill wells too. Jammeh has repeatedly sent his people to abduct me. But the henchmen had always thought they would find me in Dakar. They did not even suspect that I was in the Thies region and hanging in an apartment in Mbour until last week.
This is not the first time the murderous Gambian dictator was sending his killer-squad across the border into Senegal to abduct dissident Gambians taking refuge in that country, but there is yet to be any open protest by the Senegalese authorities against these gross violation of their territorial integrity and the rights of refugees under their protection.
This was how the late Sulayman Ndow and Hon. Ma Hawa Cham were abducted, taken across the border, tortured and then decapitated. I was sent, by SMS, a video clip of that savage decapitation. The same was said to have happened to the late coup-attempt leader, Ndure Cham. Senegalese president Macky Sall also was wants to portray himself as a Mr. Correct who plays it by the book. But to play it by the book one has to be even handed. You may not allow Gambian dissidents in exile in your country to use it as a base for subversion against another country but you must also protect refugees inside your territory. The right to asylum is as sacred as the right to territorial integrity. It is a fundamental human right. Last week’s attempt to abduct Musa Sarr is both a violation of his rights as well as the violation of Senegal’s national sovereignty. It is time the Senegalese authorities take their Gambian counterparts on this matter and those of Saul Ndow, Hon. Ma Hawa Cham and Gen. Ndure Cham. Before his death, while still under medical treatment the Macky Sall government chased Kukoie Samba Sanyang out of Senegal as a way of appeasing the Jammeh tyranny. To play even they ought to at least make their displeasure known over these three cases. Senegal is a signatory to the Geneva convention on refugees and is thus obliged to protect all refugees. Over a hundred years before the Geneva Convention, in 1868 even the British colonial authorities granted asylum in Bakau to jihadist leader Sait Matty Bah. Decades later they did the same to Bai Ebrima Niass’ elder brother. In the 1920s the French colonial authorities in Dakar gave asylum to Gambian nationalist leader Edward Francis Small. If even the European colonialist could respect that right even before Geneva why must an enlightened leader like President Macky Sall do otherwise? History has taught that tyrants can’t be appeased. The more one tries the more tickled is their appetite for mischief.