Casamance: The Hypocrisy of President Jammeh’s Plea

Last Monday President Yahya Jammeh let his office produce and circulate a press release in which he appealed for the Senegalese government and secessionist rebels of the MFDC to cease hostilities and start negotiations without any precondition. Like The Gambia Journal reported on the issue several days ago, Jammeh was not really talking to the Senegalese authorities and not to the rebels either. Both the authorities in Dakar and leaders of the fractious rebel movement know where Jammeh really stands as far the conflict is concerned. Dakar makes no secret of its suspicions of Jammeh’s consistent support for the hardest liners among the rebel factions. Under former President Diouf’s reign Jammeh was able to pose as a peace broker, but President Wade called that bluff and stopped his interference in the peace negotiations soon after being elected President of Senegal.

The negotiations between the two parties stranded in December 2004 not because of a wide gap of difference between the positions of the two parties, but because of disagreements within the rebel movement itself.  

Despite almost two decades of low-intensity armed activity, the rebel MFDC movement is yet to be properly organized. The group went into the negotiations without having talked sufficiently among its own members to build a consensus solid enough to be able to carry out any negotiation with the enemy or any outsider as a matter of fact. The MFDC lacked even the organizational structures recognized by all the members, not to speak of political or ideological unity. The leadership of the late Bishop Diamacoune Senghore was more ritual than real. Having spent most of the eighties and part of the nineties under house arrest, the revered Catholic priest can be considered had little control over the management of MFDC affairs. Attika, MFDC’s armed wing could not be controlled by any bunch of bureaucrats in Ziguinchorr, Dakar or Paris. Their loyalty to the exiled civilian leadership was never more than polite gestures. Recruitment to the ranks of the fighters was based largely on ethnic, clan or family grounds. Over 90% of the MFDC membership is Jola-speaking and there have been hardly any attempt to recruit among other groups living in the Casamance province. It is even doubtful if the secessionist rebels could win in a free and fair plebiscite for secession.

For over twenty years, the rebels have not been able to capture and control even one village that can be called “liberated territory.”  So the MFDC stands very little chance of ever achieving military victory and independence for the southern province. All it has been engaged in is a tactic of hit and run that has often degenerated into armed banditry against innocent civilians. The conflict has arrested the development of the province and deprived it of two decades of developmental opportunities. It has emptied the villages of their inhabitants, sending these as internally displaced or refugees. President Jammeh correctly observed that the conflict in Casamance has almost killed agriculture and further continuation of the violence could only worsen the already bad situation in the region.

But this is a most nauseating hypocrisy on the side of the Gambian leader. Jammeh cannot be secretly backing the rebels with arms, money and sanctuary; helping to hide hard-line rebel leader Salif Sadio and expect his call for cease fire to be taken seriously by the Senegalese government. Evidences tendered in court on cases involving MFDC members charged with various offense in Gambian courts over the last two years have given ample evidence to show on which side Jammeh is on in this conflict.  His men sided with the hard-liner pro-war faction of Salif Sadio against Magne Diem’s pro-peace and pro-negotiation faction. Gambian soldiers fought on the side of Sadio to capture Ismail Magne Diem, who died mysteriously while under the custody of Gambian detaining authorities. Nine of Diem’s men were under secret detention between February 2006 to August 2007 when they were dragged to court, after Senegal’s President Wade had sent a special envoy requesting for their release. The men had several charges slapped against them including spying, which could have only been done for the Senegalese authorities.  

According to the charge sheet tendered in the trial of the nine, the men had been funded and equipped by the Senegalese government and they had taken pictures of State House, president Jammeh’s official residence. This year about twenty more men associated with the Magne Diem faction have been dragged to court on more or less the same charges of terrorism and espionage. No one known to be associated with Salif Sadio, who is against any negotiation with Senegal and who wants a Greater Kaabu union of the three “Bs”, Banjul, Bingona and Bissau, has ever been tried in Gambian courts as far as The Gambia Journal is aware.

Even the formulation of Jammeh’s call for peace goes with a temerity that is dazzling. The call for negotiations without any precondition suggests that he places the elected government of Senegal and the dysfunctional rebel MFDC on equal footing. Such even-handedness is misplaced.

We in The Gambia Journal have consistently called for treating the Casamance question as an issue of regional inequalities to be peacefully resolved instead of one of sovereignty to be fought over. Jammeh knows very well that the MFDC is currently in no position to carry out any meaningful negotiations with the authorities in Dakar. The MFDC must first put its house in order. Jammeh’s call should therefore be directed to Attika, with leaders in Kanilai’s safe haven, than to Dakar.

Peace in Casamance is as important for the Senegalese as it is to Gambians. The current shortages of charcoal and firewood in the Greater Banjul Area because of the fresh upsurge of violence in Casamance is an instructive indication of this. We say it is Jammeh who must clearly disassociate himself from the rebel movement’s pro-war factions and separate the question of regional inequalities from the issue of independence for Casamance. The MFDC has no mandate from the people of Casamance to champion a struggle for independence.